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Product experimentation best practices
Product experimentation best practices

Expert tips on running growth experiments

Updated over a week ago

It can be easy to neglect the business design of your product experiments when you’re primarily focused on designing a good experiment. But it’s important to remember that growth teams are expected to deliver on both fronts, even though sometimes you have to go through a period of focusing on one before making strides in the other.

🌱 Growth teams' main outputs

  1. Answers to important questions about your company’s specific levers for growth

  2. Impact to the company and business, based on those answers

So what should you do when your output is concentrated in answering the important questions, but you’re not yet meeting the second goal of driving a measurable impact on the business?

Time and time again, we’ve found that the growth-specific muscle of making something understandable to a specific audience is also useful when dealing with internal stakeholders.

Read on for some easy tactics to help you continually tell a convincing story to stakeholders about the foundation of understanding that your experiments are building.

📸 Take a “before” shot

You’ll experiment a lot on certain parts of the product like onboarding and invites, and 12 months in… you'll realize that you don’t remember what your product looked like at the beginning. It's possible to get some screens from projects like the Wayback Machine, but now is the time to start taking good “before” screenshots. It’s especially helpful to post these shots in the description field for any project that’s focused on visible changes to that area of the product.

📊 Link to your metrics

After integrating with your data warehouse, pull in your topline metrics like WAU/MAU, ARR, and the activation rate. When you create a new project, include a section on impacted metrics and type a hash sign (#) and the name of your metric, like #WAU/MAU. Now your readers will be able to see at a glance which levers you’re pinpointing, in order to learn how relevant or powerful they are.

Whenever you link to metrics (or insights and other projects, for that matter), you provide a breadcrumb trail for your teammates, helping them understand the context and connections between all of the growth work. If a metric has been mentioned in projects or insights, the "Mentioned in" section at the end of the metric's detailed view will show a list of these places, with links for quick viewing.

🌵 Look for growth team collisions

Using the timeline, you can always see a live roadmap of what your team is planning, and your colleagues can see it, too. This helps you avoid testing at the same time on shared product surfaces — a common woe of fast-moving teams.

🌏 Look for cross-company collisions

Meaningfully expand your view of the business by adding events from the go-to-marketing team to the timeline, too. Seek out the shared (or shareable) calendars of your PR, marketing, and sales colleagues to find out when big events like partner announcements and sponsored conferences are happening. Add those events to the timeline as footnotes.

Note that these are inputs the executives at your company care about, too. Understanding how the actions of folks outside of your growth org impact your metrics is exactly the kind of 30,000 foot view that executives will promote you for creating.

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