Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.
Log in Create free account100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.
Get Your Whole Team Testing to Design for Impact
Summary
Experimentation can be intimidating to non-data science folk. But Erin wants to get everyone excited about A/B testing. In this talk, Erin shares the Conversion Design process. It centers A/B testing as a way to gather high-quality evidence to make highly informed decisions to improve your digital product. She also introduces the Good Experimental Design toolkit. These easy-to-follow templates usher teams through the logic needed to design trustworthy experiments that you can learn from.
Key Insights
-
•
Conversion design combines design, science, and business to intentionally create measurable improvements, not just arbitrary changes.
-
•
Ronald Fisher’s 1919 work exposed how poor experimental design led to decades of unreliable scientific data.
-
•
Conversion originates from the Latin word meaning to transform or change, which is broader than just sales or profit.
-
•
Traditional linear product development processes miss the complex, iterative nature of real-world systems.
-
•
Systems thinking offers a more accurate way to understand and manage design experiments within interconnected environments.
-
•
A rigorous conversion design process includes seven phases: understand, hypothesize, prioritize, create, test, analyze, and decide.
-
•
Experiments grounded in well-documented hypotheses based on research have higher success rates than guesses.
-
•
Randomized 50/50 AB testing is the gold standard for isolating the true effect of design changes by evenly distributing confounds.
-
•
Experimentation buckets—product foundations, content/motivation, accessibility/usability, and bug fixes—help prioritize work effectively.
-
•
Ethical considerations and guardrail metrics are crucial to ensure changes benefit all stakeholders sustainably and without manipulation.
Notable Quotes
"Conversion means change, not just sales or profit."
"Design is the rendering of intent — bringing ideas into form that solve the problem."
"Decades worth of agricultural experimental data was garbage because of poor experimental design."
"Most product teams stay on the bottom rungs of evidence, relying on opinions or observational data instead of randomized trials."
"You can never purely test an idea, only the implementation of the idea."
"Randomization is magic — it evenly distributes confounds so the observed effect is caused by your change."
"Not all changes create value; some do nothing or even make things worse."
"You have to think critically about how a change impacts all stakeholders, not just the main business metric."
"Ethics evolve faster than laws; just because something is legal doesn’t make it ethical."
"If an experiment I design made the front page news tomorrow, how would I feel about it?"
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"When something of massive consequence happens that no one predicted, it usually means we have failed to point our imagination in the right direction."
Ilana LipsettAnticipating Risk, Regulating Tech: A Playbook for Ethical Technology Governance
December 10, 2021
"OKRs can sometimes suck the oxygen out of the room if they focus only on bottom-line results, missing process and experience."
Bria Alexander Benson Low Natalya Pemberton Stephanie GoldthorpeOKRs—Helpful or Harmful?
January 20, 2022
"We need to figure out how to assess design projects and designers better because employers need to make choices, but design resists simple scoring."
Nathan Shedroff Hugh Dubberly Thomas J. McLeishHow Will Design be Taught When the Schools Shut Down?
May 8, 2026
"My superpower is to connect the dots between people, places, ideas, and opportunities."
Dante GuintuHow to Crush the Talent Crunch
September 8, 2022
"We have eight million prototyping tools but not many tools that help us spend more time in the problem space."
Andrea GallagherThe Problem Space
May 16, 2019
"Our field was not born five years ago; we've been through these growth pains before."
Tala Tayebi Kelly Goto Jared SpoolVoice and influence in an age of noise
March 10, 2026
"The biggest security risk is human behavior, like plugging a USB stick into a copier, not nefarious hackers."
Greg PetroffEverything is About to Change: Software as Material
June 8, 2016
"The mayor wanted to shrink the neighborly bonds that the city was known for by investing in a 2030 living Monument of collaboration and community."
Sarah GallimoreInspire Progress with Artifacts from the Future
November 18, 2022
"The organization’s website structure often mirrors its internal organizational structure and decision-making."
Sheryl Cababa Alexis OhThinking in systems to address climate with Sheryl Cababa
June 12, 2024