Experimentation In Practice Series #1: Benefits of Experimentation for Product Development
As product managers, we get thousands of different great ideas from our stakeholders or users that need implementing, but realistically we can only complete 2 or 3 per month due to resource constraints. We have to ask ourselves: which 3 do we build? How polished does it have to be? And how much time should we spend iterating on an idea versus moving onto something new? There’s a high opportunity cost because whichever 3 ideas we choose to work on come at the expense of the others.
Fortunately, we have more information than ever at our disposal to understand how user uses our product; user click events on Web/Mobile/Connected-TV app and the ability to aggregate those information into meaning metrics i.e. weekly conversion rate. With data-tracking and monitoring capability, we can now conduct experiments to evaluate the impact of new product ideas based on strict scientific rigour and use it to guide important business decision.
What is Experimentation?
Thus, I define experimentation as the process of hypothesising, estimation, measuring and evaluation of product ideas base on scientific rigour.
