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
"Marketing can help you distribute invitations for research because they have broader access to customers that you might not have."
Noel LambCultivating Business Partnerships to Grow Research Ops
March 21, 2022
"The waggle dance communicates direction and distance to new food sources with remarkable precision."
Mariesa LenzWhat Beekeeping Taught me about Product Teams
October 29, 2025
"You end up with something which I call Franken design because it’s kind of a mix and match of many different things, but it’s anything but a real design system."
George Abraham Stefan IvanovDesign Systems To-Go: Introducing a Starter Design System, and Indigo.Design Overview (Part 1)
September 30, 2021
"Design Ops is going to have to deal with Product Ops, and figuring out that relationship will be a big deal."
Dave Malouf Meredith Black Farid SabitovThe Past, Present, and Future of DesignOps: a 2-part DesignOps Community Call (Part 1)
February 17, 2022
"Research is there to save you time, not to take up time."
Mike DavidsonFireside Chat
March 11, 2022
"Real estate transactions are among the top five life events in terms of emotional significance for people."
Greg PetroffThe Compass Mission
March 10, 2021
"Conjoint analysis reveals how consumers make choices by examining trade-offs they are willing to make."
Ricardo MartinsUnlocking the power of advanced quantitative methods
March 12, 2025
"Bringing our government Partners in early as collaborators and making a clear case for the value of research is one way that we build trust with our stakeholders."
Lisa Spitz Nikki BrandBuilding Trust Through Equitable Research Practices
November 18, 2022
"Over perfection is less effective than showing progress and building rapport with stakeholders."
Carol MassaDesigning Health: Integrating Service Design, Technology, and Strategy to Transform Patient and Clinician Experiences
December 3, 2024
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
Why is it acceptable to prioritize empathy over methodological rigor in certain research contexts?
How do research operations teams manage the tension between consolidating tools and needing specialized capabilities?
What strategies help manage vision creation in organizations that are top-down and frequently reactive?