Experimentation Works
The Surprising Power of Business Experiments
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3.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
Don't fly blind. See how the power of experiments works for you.
When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind.
That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book. It guides you through best practices in business experimentation, illustrates how these practices work at leading companies, and answers some fundamental questions: What makes a good experiment? How do you test in online and brick-and-mortar businesses? In B2B and B2C? How do you build an experimentation culture? Also, best practice means running many experiments. Indeed, some hugely successful companies, such as Amazon, Booking.com, and Microsoft, run tens of thousands of controlled experiments annually, engaging millions of users. Thomke shows us how these and many other organizations prove that experimentation provides significant competitive advantage.
How can managers create this capability at their own companies? Essential is developing an experimentation organization that prizes the science of testing and puts the discipline of experimentation at the center of its innovation process. While it once took companies years to develop the tools for such large-scale experiments, advances in technology have put these tools at the fingertips of almost any business professional. By combining the power of software and the rigor of controlled experiments, today's managers can make better decisions, create magical customer experiences, and generate big financial returns.
Experimentation Works is your guidebook to a truly new way of thinking and innovating.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The secret to business success is to test everything, writes Harvard Business School professor Thomke (Experimentation Matters) in this helpful look at using fresh information, not old assumptions, to drive the development of new products and services. Managers often lack the data to make strategic decisions, he finds, so they fall back on personal experience, emotions, and intuition and, as one of Thomke's interviewees tells him, "we see evidence every day that people are terrible at guessing." Companies that employ rigorous experimentation and make good use of the results, on the other hand, gain a competitive edge, illustrated by such examples as 3M, Booking.com, and Amazon. Thomke finds numerous Jeff Bezos quotes on the subject, including on why "failure and invention are inseparable twins," and gives significant space to explaining how organizations can build experimentation into workflow and foster a culture that nurtures it. He also breaks down what makes for worthwhile experiments (such as whether a testable hypothesis is involved), and how to use those experiments to make better informed decisions. This is a thorough, encouraging guide for leaders looking for ways to encourage their teams to fail early and often in the service of ultimate success. Correction: An earlier version of this review mistakenly referred to this book as the author's first.
