Statsig and a New Era of Product Development

Today, we are incredibly excited to announce our partnership with Vijaye Raji and the team at Statsig. We believe Statsig will become a foundational platform for the way modern teams ship software.

The Art & Science of Product

Many disciplines start as art and evolve into some blend of art and science over time.

Decades ago, marketing was dominated by brand advertising and Madison Avenue creative on billboards and TV. Today, performance marketers drive the industry with personalized creative and precise measurements of CAC and LTV.

Sales was once defined by schmoozing and steak dinners. The rise of Sales Ops has brought forecasting, measurement and a scientific precision to the profession.

Today, Product is still in the early days of transitioning from art to science. Platforms like Amplitude have made it easy to holistically instrument your product and understand how your product is driving your business goals. But many questions remain hard to answer.

E.g., in most companies, if you wanted to know who the most productive sales rep was in Q2, it would be trivial to find out. If you wanted to know the best marketing channel and campaign in Q2, it would be similarly easy to answer.

What if you wanted to know the most impactful product feature you launched in Q2? How would you find that answer?

For most product teams, answering that question would be hard (if not impossible). The team might have been somewhat scientific — they may have tried a few different variants and be confident that they picked the best colors for their buttons. But it would be nearly impossible to know the absolute impact of that change on the core business metrics (user growth, engagement, retention) and whether that change was the most impactful one.

Statsig

Enter Statsig. Statsig is a platform that helps blend the art and science of product development by letting product teams quickly and continuously measure the impact of product changes as they ship them.

The base of the system is Feature Gates, which enables developers to encapsulate any feature in a basic on/off switch.

Pulse is a tool that then automatically computes the impact of each of these features on every business metric that you care about. This moves you from maximizing button clicks to measuring the impact of each change on user growth, engagement and ultimately revenue.

Experiments+ enables you to experiment with multiple variants while perfecting your new feature. Autotune then helps you figure out the optimal configuration of your experiments for whatever business goal you have. Holdouts enables you to group a set of features together (e.g., the collective output of a given team) to measure the aggregate impact of all of these changes.

Individually, each of these tools is powerful. Collectively, they are transformational to product development.

Why? Because once you can quantify the impact of any product change on every business metric you care about, you empower any designer, engineer or PM to ship product improvements in a massively decentralized way.

If someone has an idea to improve the product, they can just test their idea and — if it is positive with no downsides — they can just ship it.

In the context of investing, my partner Doug Leone likes to say “one hundred smart people are better than one smart person.”

We think the same is true of product development — in an ideal org, any designer or engineer should be able to find their own way to make the product a little bit better each day. By unleashing everyone’s creativity, product velocity and innovation can radically accelerate.

Team

The Statsig team knows this better than almost anyone else. As an engineer extraordinaire at Facebook, Vijaye and his team were the driving force behind many new products, including Mobile App Install Ads, Audience Network, Marketplace, FB Gaming and more. One of their secrets? Speed and constant iteration (largely powered by Statsig’s predecessors).

True to form, the Statsig team has moved incredibly quickly. The company is less than six months old and has already shipped a full product development stack (Feature Gates, Pulse, Experiments+ and more).

We are thrilled to work with the team and look forward to a new era of data-driven product development. To learn more, check out statsig.com.