The Wall Street Journal Is Expanding Its Experimentation Capabilities — and We’re Hiring!
Should we make stuff or test stuff?
Increasingly, as we have moved into a more iterative model of product and content development, it’s the latter. To accelerate this process, we are hiring for 13 new roles in our Experimentation team (see below for details).
We are thinking about our projects differently — looking for opportunities to test hypotheses in front of our audience, launching in phases so we embed audience feedback into each phase of development of any new experience, and measuring performance objectively with the knowledge that many new features will fail.
At the heart of this is a focus on testing, experimentation and learning from “failure.”
To date, we’ve run many experiments “on the side” with vendors and partners, which helped us prove the value of this approach. Now, we’re integrating the “test and learn” mentality within our product development teams and empowering them to run more tests on their own.
It’s an exciting step forward as we help WSJ and Dow Jones focus on the MACU — our members, audiences, customers and users.
“Experimentation is the most powerful and customer-centric product development strategy ever created,” said Peter Gray, our VP of Experimentation. “You can interpret analytics to develop theories about how you could better serve your customer, but experimentation reduces risk by capturing real-world results from a small portion of the audience before pulling the trigger.”
We are excited to make this investment and to make experimentation the standard way WSJ evolves its products.
Doing so will help us fulfill our goals of having people from all disciplines in product development actively involved in helping drive our direction, because the data and feedback we need to make decisions will be coming increasingly from our experiments and users themselves.
Join the DXS team — a diverse group of product, engineering, design, content and community professionals — and help us drive this transformation.
The 13 new jobs are:
Program Director, Product Experimentation
Senior Engineer, Experimentation (8 roles)
