Rosenverse
Get Your Whole Team Testing to Design for Impact

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s 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

Wednesday, July 24, 2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Share the love for this talk
Get Your Whole Team Testing to Design for Impact
Speakers: Erin Weigel
Link:

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?"

Ask the Rosenbot
Rachel Posman
A Closer Look at Team Ops and Product Ops (Two Sides of the DesignOps Coin)
2020 • DesignOps Community
Lukas Moro
“Feels Like Paper!”: Interfacing AI through Paper
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
George Aye
Designing a New Social Contract
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Dana Bishop
2022: The Year UX Demonstrates its Business Impact
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Emily Lessard
RFPs Without Tears: Writing Inclusive RFPS that Don't Scare Away Talent
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Vincent Brathwaite
Opener: Past, Present, and Future—Closing the Racial Divide in Design Teams
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Theresa Neil
Designing for Wellness: Specializing in Healthcare
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Courtney Maya George
Scale Your Organization and Grow Your Designers
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Joshua Graves
We Need To Talk: Managing Ludicrous Requests at Work (Part 3 of 3)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Bud Caddell
DesignOps Community Sensing Session
2021 • DesignOps Community
Aletheia Delivre
New Shapes and Emerging Identities for Design Ops
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Craig Brookes
"Just Make it Look Good" and Other Ways We're Misunderstood
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Karen McGrane
AI for Information Architects: Are the robots coming for our jobs?
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Maverick Chan
From Doodle to Demo: AI as Our Storytelling Partner
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Deanna Washington
Connecting the Ops: Plenary Panel and Closing Circle
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Bria Alexander
State of DesignOps Panel
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold

More Videos

Nova Wehman-Brown

"What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so."

Nova Wehman-Brown

We've Never Done This Before

June 4, 2019

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW

"AI is both absolutely necessary and completely terrifying for science."

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW Llewyn Paine Nishanshi Shukla David Womack

AI: Passionate defenses and reasoned critique [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

September 18, 2024

Marissa Cui

"Carbon removal is necessary to hit climate goals because reducing emissions alone won’t be enough."

Marissa Cui Rachel He Michael Leggett Manos Saratsis

Climate Design Product Showcase

March 13, 2024

Eric Shumake

"The integration of AI into clinical workflows is creating urgent demand for sharper UX thinking, not less."

Eric Shumake

Diagnosis UX: Building Influence in Healthcare Design

April 9, 2026

Megan Blocker

"Establish yourself as a trusted expert advisor whose work drives meaningful positive change."

Megan Blocker

Getting to the “So What?”: How Management Consulting Practices Can Transform Your Approach to Research

March 26, 2024

Jorge Arango

"Politics and ego conflicts are inevitable and separate challenges that seriously impact merger integration."

Jorge Arango

Meeting of the Waters: Designing for Successful Inorganic Growth

August 12, 2021

Paul Pangaro, PhD

"The cybernetic feedback loop is sensing, comparing to a goal, and acting to correct course."

Paul Pangaro, PhD

Systems Disciplines: Table Stakes for 21st Century Organizations

June 6, 2023

Jon Fukuda

"Each team should talk about their core values like integrity, accountability, and respect to work together with the same mindset."

Jon Fukuda Amy Evans Ignacio Martinez Joe Meersman

The Big Question about Innovation: A Panel Discussion

September 25, 2024

Frank Duran

"When you put in that effort, you’re going to get the advocacy not only from your team but within the organization."

Frank Duran

Partnership Playbook: Lessons Learned in Effective Partnership

January 8, 2024