Out of the many high bandwidth conversations at the conference and in the weeks following the event, one stands out: Statsig founder and CEO Vijaye Raji joined another ex-Facebook builder, Sean Taylor, in a podcast conversation with hosts Tristan and Julia of dbt Labs’ The Analytics Engineering Podcast.
This episode, appropriately titled “Minimum Viable Experimentation,” covers a lot of ground in just 45 minutes. Avoiding any spoilers, the takeaways that I’m still thinking about as I type this are centered around the following main ideas:
Distributed decision-making and increased trust across teams are just a few of the business outcomes increased by experimentation that highly scalable organizations strive to achieve.
It’s hard enough to get good data scientists, so once you have a strong team, the right tooling empowers them to focus on strategic decision-making and experimentation instead of tedious (and turnover-inducing) number crunching.
Which metrics matter the most to your business will intrinsically reveal themselves
In addition to the themes above, just a few of the standout quotes from each podcast participant include:
“Build products really fast and experiment all the time.”- Vijaye
“Folks who haven’t existed in that environment…it’s a little bit hard to imagine all the things that have to be working right in order to get this [experimentation] flywheel moving.” - Tristan
“You also have to have a culture of being okay to shut down work that you’ve spent several months building and the numbers aren’t showing the numbers you’re hoping for…that’s a big cultural acceptance for a company” - Julia
“A very small number of experiments are successful. Maybe one in ten or one in six….you always learn something from an experiment; even the failed ones.” - Sean
If you’re like me and typically listen to podcasts at 1.25x or 1.5x speed, take my advice and play this conversation at normal 1x; there are so many hard-hitting points to ponder and this episode absolutely flies by. Check it out 👇
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