Experimentation is intentional
| May 31, 2012 | Posted by Stuart Gunter under Uncategorized |
I found Seth Godin’s post today about experimentation very interesting. He very clearly spells out the difference between hiding from your failure by calling it an experiment, and intentionally experimenting where ‘failure’ is an acceptable outcome. Experimenting with something that doesn’t work is still a successful outcome – you’ve learned a valuable lesson from the experiment and your application can improve as a result of this. Experimentation must be intentional, otherwise it’s not experimentation – it’s just an accident or outright failure. As Seth says: “You don’t get to call it an experiment after it fails.”
The reason why this is particularly interesting to me right now is because the team at Betfair have recently built an excellent multivariate testing framework within our new Site Platform. This will be used to run experiments on our new sports betting site as we work harder to deliver what our customers want and what works best.
This is one of the major advantages of operating a web application, or at least one that you have a high degree of control over. It enables you to experiment, learn, and improve. This is an extremely powerful weapon in your competitive advantage arsenal… if you’re able to wield it appropriately.