A/B Testing: The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks Into Customers

CHAPTER9

The A/B Testing Dream Team

Bringing Everyone Together

A/B testing is by its nature collaborative and interdisciplinary, straddling traditional departmental lines: marketing, product management, engineering, and design. As a result, the adoption and long-term success of testing requires thinking about how it will fit into your company, not just philosophically and culturally, but organizationally. In this chapter we'll explore several different approaches and look at how different organizations have worked testing into their organizations.

The Centralized Team

At every place Adidas's Scott Zakrajsek has worked, the testing team has started as a team of one or two.

At Staples I was the only person and we basically had to hire up from there, so we hired a front-end web-developer who was just for testing. We hired a creative designer who was just for testing; we hired an additional two analysts.

I think your key players are someone with a good project management background to manage the pipeline. Someone with attention to detail to be the coordinator and make sure you have all the right creative assets. You need a web-analytics person to read the results and do post-test segmentation. That said, smaller companies can do it well with teams of one person. The “beg-borrow-steal” method works well, too.

Zakrajsek currently runs the global analytics and optimization team for Adidas. His team handles all A/B testing responsibilities companywide, including executing tests and ...