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Thanks to Iqbal Ali, Ana Kerkovic, Slobodan Manić, Craig Sullivan, David Swinstead, and Dewi Williams for joining us. Want to get in on the action and talk with other cool CRO people? Then you should probably…
This Week's Roundtable Topic
How to Do UI Revamps Safely
Session 285: February 20, 2026
- How do you balance conversion gains with user trust during a UI revamp?
- Full redesigns are reckless without experimentation.
- How should engineering manage rollback risk during UI revamps?
One Sentence Takeaway
I’m a busy person; give me the TL:DR
AI and CRO shortcuts promise speed but risk trust, ethics, and long-term value without skilled human judgment.
The Notes
What we discussed this week
- AI is compressing build cycles without removing the need for expertise
- Prototyping speed has accelerated dramatically while debugging still consumes significant effort
- AI tools lower barriers most effectively for people with foundational technical knowledge
- Disposable builds can be appropriate when the goal is learning rather than longevity
- Production systems demand entirely different standards than prototypes or internal tools
- Rebuild risk increases when models rely on outdated frameworks or dependencies
- Specialists are shifting from tool operators to system designers
- Owning decision quality matters more than owning the testing platform
- Building scalable guardrails becomes critical as more people ship experiments
- AI fills capability gaps for T-shaped practitioners expanding into adjacent skills
- Experiment leaders increasingly act as connective tissue across teams
- Protecting standards grows more important as barriers to shipping decrease
- Stakeholder ideas often hide deeper strategic problems
- Surface solutions frequently mask unarticulated trust or brand concerns
- Asking why repeatedly uncovers the real constraint behind requests
- Stakeholder friction might be steelmanning rather than resistance
- Understanding KPIs, bonuses, and incentives clarifies stakeholder motivations
- Soft skills remain the highest leverage capability in experimentation
- Relationship depth reduces transactional tension in hard conversations
- Pushback earns respect when grounded in logic and delivery constraints
- Trust compounds slowly through repeated honest interactions
- Quick and dirty testing requires disciplined guardrails
- Painted door experiments can validate interest before heavy engineering investment
- Low robustness is acceptable when paired with a revisit commitment for winners
- Measuring interaction depth prevents misleading conclusions from vanity clicks
- Carousels illustrate the gap between theory and practice
- Visibility cues like partial cutoffs dramatically increase interaction
- Tiny pagination dots rarely attract attention in real usage
- Timing must balance readability against attention drift
- Desktop and mobile patterns require distinct interaction treatments
- Carousels typically serve political alignment internally but are ignored by users
- AI-assisted development changes learning loops for non-developers
- Building small apps accelerates product intuition through iteration
- Debugging exposes knowledge gaps faster than passive tutorials
- Reviewing generated code builds architectural understanding over time
- Black-box usage prevents skill development and increases long-term risk
- Migration pressure signals growth rather than failure in early-stage products
The Quotes
Standout quips from this week
“AI is really good for plugging the gaps. So if you are T shaped, you can become more egg shaped.”
“Your work is only as good as the connections that you make across the company.”
“The fact based stuff alone doesn't persuade without an emotional component.”
Book Club
Relevant reads recommended this week
The No Asshole Rule
The definitive guide to working with -- and surviving -- bullies, creeps, jerks, tyrants, tormentors, despots, backstabbers, egomaniacs, and all the other assholes who do their best to destroy you at work.
How to Win an Argument
All of us are faced countless times with the challenge of persuading others, whether we're trying to win a trivial argument with a friend or convince our coworkers about an important decision. Instead of relying on untrained instinct―and often floundering or failing as a result―we’d win more arguments if we learned the timeless art of verbal persuasion, rhetoric.
Gap Selling
People don't buy from people they like. No! Your buyer doesn't care about you or your product or service. It's not your job to overcome objections, it's your buyer's. Closing isn't a skill of good salespeople; it's the skill of weak salespeople. Price isn't the main reason salespeople lose the sale. Gap Selling shreds traditional and closely held sales beliefs that have been hurting salespeople for decades.
Connect
The ability to create strong relationships with others is crucial to living a full life and becoming more effective at work. Yet many of us find ourselves struggling to build solid personal and professional connections or unable to handle challenges that inevitably arise when we grow closer to others.
CRO Link Digest
Useful and thought-provoking content shared this week
No Links this week, sorry!
Off-Topic Sidebars
Experimentation isn’t the only thing we talk about at the CRO Roundtable. There’s often a healthy dose of discussion on shared interests, personal passions, and hobbies.
No Off-Topic Sidebars this week, sorry!
Sidebar Shareables
Amusing sidebar content shared this week
No Sidebar Shareables this week, sorry!