Understanding Experimentation Platforms

Foreword: Why Do Great Companies Experiment?

Do you drive with your eyes closed? Of course you don’t.

Likewise, you wouldn’t want to launch products blindly without experimenting. Experimentation, as the gold standard to measure new product initiatives, has become an indispensable component of product development cycles in the online world. The ability to automatically collect user interaction data online has given companies an unprecedented opportunity to run many experiments at the same time, allowing them to iterate rapidly, fail fast, and pivot.

Experimentation does more than how you innovate, grow, and evolve products; more important, it is how you drive user happiness, build strong businesses, and make talent more productive.

Creating User/Customer-Centric Products

For a user-facing product to be successful, it needs to be user centric. With every product you work on, you need to question whether it is of value to your users. You can use various channels to hear from your users—surveys, interviews, and so on—but experimentation is the only way to gather feedback from users at scale and to ensure that you launch only the features that improve their experience. You should use experiments to not just measure what users’ reactions are to your feature, but to learn the why behind their behavior, allowing you to build a better hypothesis and better products in the future.

Business Strategic

A company needs strong strategies to take products to the next level. Experimentation ...