On-demand experimentation support

Why invest in experimentation support? Because experimentation isn’t only for product development. It’s a general strategic capability that can be used across the whole organisation.

Here are three examples from my article about why experimenting well matters, and how to do it better:

1. Experimenting with sales strategy: An enterprise software sales team was facing satisfactory but declining year-on-year sales for a legacy software product. They designed a set of fast-to-run, inexpensive experiments to test different customer pre-qualification methods and initial sales pitches for this product. Based on those experiments, they identified a previously-overlooked customer demographic and built a new set of sales materials tailored to their priorities. Result: ~20% increase in closed deal dollar amount for the legacy software product.
   
2. Experimenting with hiring process: An AI startup working in a novel application space was having trouble hiring staff to join its R&D team because the application space was poorly understood. They designed a way for potential hires to experiment with being at the startup without signing a full-time employment contract (by using a fast-to-execute standard consultancy agreement), and a series of experiments to test different audiences in which to advertise their job availabilities. Result: Applicant pool size increased by ~200% within 2 months of starting these experiments; 18 months after the experiments, 40% of the full-time R&D staff converted from the experiment.
   
3. Experimenting with new product development: A packaged ready-to-eat food subscription company used a low-volume fast-turnaround test kitchen to rapidly test different recipe formulations and price points with a large number of clients in the target customer demographic. Result: Reformulated recipes to increase customer satisfaction and willingness-to-pay by ~15%, while reducing unit production cost by ~30% at scale.

Done well, experimentation can accelerate adaptation and innovation, fix problems, and reduce downside exposure.

Unfortunately, most organisations don’t know how to experiment well.

Their teams don’t know how to ask good questions, frame problems effectively, design valuable experiments, and refactor them to be cheaper, faster, and more effective to run. I’ve written a short article explaining why experimentation is a powerful general strategic capability, and why organisations need to close the experimentation capability gap.

This capability gap is both a challenge and an opportunity. I help organisations close this capability gap through packages of on-demand advice to support their teams in better experimentation.

   Services included
   How to engage

Services included:

1. Strategic question formulation: Helping your team identify and articulate the most critical business uncertainties as clear, actionable questions. I’ll work with your team to translate vague concerns or opportunities into precise questions that identify strategic uncertainties. This may include reviewing strategic priorities and identifying knowledge gaps. This foundational work ensures that subsequent experiments address what actually matters to your organisation’s success.
2. Problem framing: Helping your team build on good questions to develop well-structured problem statements that enable targeted experimentation. We’ll work together to transform broad strategic questions into specific, testable problems, identify underlying assumptions that require validation, and establish clear success criteria. This crucial step bridges the gap between strategic uncertainties and concrete experiments that can deliver operationalisable insights.
3. Experiment design: Supporting your team in designing experiments that directly address well-framed problems and which provide meaningful insight regardless of outcome. I’ll help your team develop experiment structures, hypothesis statements, testing methodologies, and measurement approaches that avoid common research pitfalls. The key here is designing experiments that are operationally feasible while ensuring that they yield valuable learnings regardless of outcome. This helps your team move from problem statements to practical experimental designs.
4. Experiment refactoring: Supporting your team in redesigning experiments to increase their speed and reduce their cost/downside potential, while preserving their learning value. This critical — but often overlooked — step, breaks experiments down and makes them easier, faster, cheaper, and more effective to run.
5. Operationalisation of experimental insight: Supporting your team in analysing experimental results for deep insight, and developing pragmatic initiatives that operationalise those insights with minimal disruption.
   
6. Experimentation culture: Supporting your team in establishing processes that capture, synthesise, and share experimental capability across your organisation. This helps build the internal scaffolding needed to make experimentation a sustainable cross-organisational capability rather than a siloed one-off initiative.

How we engage:

1. Get in touch with me to set up a 60-minute introductory meeting. I’ll want you to tell me about what kinds of challenges you’re facing so I can figure out whether I can help.
2. After that meeting, if you’d like to try this on-demand experimentation support, we’ll enter into a standard service agreement with a symmetrical mutual NDA. This will cover a fixed number of hours to be used within a fixed period (initially 3 months).
3. Members of your organisation will be able to use these hours to work through specific experimentation questions or projects.
4. If the support doesn’t prove useful, let me know and you’ll get your money back.