Experiments: Let them go, let them goooo, don't hold back your team anymoooore!

How to hand off experiments to your team.

Did I write this while watching Into The Unknown: Making of Frozen 2? Yes. It was inspiring, okay?!

Typically a growth manager owns all experiments. At Jobber, we've distributed ownership to each team member. An experiment owner is accountable for the documentation, communication, execution, and analysis of an experiment.

"The point is that management did not oversee the experiments: employees came up with the ideas, designed the tests, and ran them—all in addition to their normal responsibilities." - Experimentation Works

For this to work, I enable the team with as much accurate data as I can, as often as I can. We look at a real-time view of what's going on now and then make sense of it, together.

Experiments can be anywhere within the funnel. This requires quickly shifting mindsets into new data sets, processes, and workflows. To help focus, I look to assign drivers to specific areas of experimentation. Here, a member owns the sequential testing within an area while concurrently supporting other areas of experimentation that are driven by other team members.

Drivers plan out their experiments and time them appropriately based on volume and potential overlaps with other experiments. We seek to run experiments concurrently while each area has experiments sequentially building off of each other based on each new learning.

Each designer and engineer has PM responsibilities mixed in with their ability to execute the skillsets they were originally hired for. They need to be insanely passionate individuals (I'm lucky!) for this approach to work. Many believe this would slow us down when in reality, we are able to cover more ground with each member being able to analyze and plan experiments simultaneously. For us, it is the perfect blend of chaos and organization that extracts the mindset needed to succeed on a growth team.