Coordinating with teams to design and implement experiments

Overview

Adopting an experimental mindset is crucial for rapid learning and innovation. Without it, teams may waste time and resources developing features or products that don't contribute meaningfully to business goals.

Result

Our Product Ops Assistant will collaborate with your team to foster an experimental approach. This includes guiding them in designing and implementing the most appropriate experiments to answer critical questions, enabling quick learning and adaptation to avoid costly mistakes.

Share playbook

Process

Identify opportunities for experimentation

Product Ops Assistant & Product Leader

‍Meet to explore roadmap items that could benefit from experimentation. Identify key team members who will play a role in designing and implementing these experiments.

Define the question

‍Product Ops Assistant

‍Assemble the relevant team members to clearly define the problem or question at hand. Consider the following:

How does this problem align with business goals?
What metrics could be impacted by solving this problem?
How will answering this question advance our objectives?

Decide on the appropriate experiment

‍Product Ops Assistant

‍Collaborate with the team to select the most suitable type of experiment. For instance, are you aiming to:

Validate an idea?
Optimize an existing feature or user flow?
Identify Problem Solution Fit?
Test Product Market Fit?

The determined focus will dictate the experiment type (e.g., A/B testing, Multivariate testing, User testing, Campaign testing, Referral experiments, Fake feature tests).

Design your experiment

‍Product Ops Assistant

‍Coordinate so that the team can design an appropriate experiment. The team should:

Identify the Riskiest Assumption: Define what assumption poses the highest risk to the success of the experiment.
Formulate the Hypothesis: Develop a clear, testable statement. Use formats like "If/Then" or "We believe that... because …"
Define your experimental setup: some text
- Identify independent and dependent variables.
- Determine what will be measured and how it will validate or invalidate the hypothesis.
- Establish the experiment's duration.
- Define how the data will be collected and analyzed.

Assign roles for executing the experiment and create a detailed execution plan.‍

‍Product Ops Assistant & Product Leader

‍Meet to review and refine the plan. Send the finalized plan out to everyone on the team.

Providing the team with an experiment canvas can be an excellent way to help them collaborate on these steps.

Implement the experiment

‍Product Ops Assistant

‍Ensure the team is prepared to execute the plan. Complete any assigned tasks and verify that data collection methods are correctly set up.

Avoid premature conclusions. Wait until the experiment's predetermined duration has elapsed or until the data is statistically significant before analyzing results.

Review and share results

‍Product Ops Assistant

‍After receiving the experiment results, it is crucial to keep the momentum going by reviewing them with the team and deciding on next steps. For more details, refer to our "Facilitating Post-Experiment Discussion Sessions" playbook. Additionally, consider sharing the results with others in the organization who may have an interest in the experiment and its outcomes. For guidance on this, consult our "Communicating About Experiments to Teams and Stakeholders" playbook.