No signature required. It’s the CRO Roundtable Roundup!
Thanks to Iqbal Ali, Matt Beischel, Collin Crowell, Jamie Levrant, Slobodan Manić, Shiva Manjunath, Surjit Panda, Craig Sullivan, and David Swinstead for joining us. Want to get in on the action and talk with other cool CRO people? Then you should probably…
One Sentence Takeaway
I’m a busy person; give me the TL:DR
Strong experimentation requires careful governance, validation, and context-specific analysis rather than overreliance on tools or surface metrics.
The Notes
What we discussed this week
- The growing influence of AI on experimentation practices
- Replacing visual editors with AI prompts for creating test variants
- Quality assurance becomes more critical when anyone can launch changes
- Democratization creates opportunity but risks misuse by untrained roles
- Controlled validation is the safeguard against sloppy outputs
- Agencies pivoting toward QA as demand for pure test building declines
- The tradeoff between making tools easier and preserving statistical rigor
- Dashboards simplified to the point of hiding useful context
- Problems with statistical signals being presented in ways that encourage premature conclusions
- Vendors dismiss serious issues like inflated SRMs without offering fixes
- Proposals for tool modes that scale from beginner to expert users
- Statsig acquired by OpenAI
- Unease about customer data flowing into a new parent company
- Doubts about whether the product direction will still align with testing needs
- Organizational dynamics disrupting experimentation efforts
- Miscommunication on targets wastes entire days of meetings
- Executives producing RFPs with features divorced from actual needs
- Analysts and PMs working to take back control of experimentation priorities
- Reality checks on the gap between executive expectations and operational limits
- Enterprise scale demands more granularity than smaller shops
- Standardize dashboards to maintain consistent outputs across teams
- Recurring challenges in test design and analysis
- 5% MDE treated as a default benchmark despite lack of context
- Bug fixes presented as wins instead of basic housekeeping
- Monitoring does not equal peeking
- Strip metrics down to what matters for each experiment stage
- Building automated alerts to catch failing experiments before major damage occurs
Hey all you cool GRO People!
GRO Talks Live returns to the winter 2025 Experimentation Elite conference with a heaping helping of in-person roundtable sessions, and we want to see you there!
The Quotes
Standout quips from this week
Book Club
Relevant reads recommended this week
No books this week, sorry!
CRO Link Digest
Useful and thought-provoking content shared this week
- ProductLab Conf > – A community for product leaders, founders, and teams. We meet IRL.
- Statsig – Experimentation and feature management platform that helps teams run, monitor, and analyze product experiments
- MDE calculator – Test calculator for performing pre- and post-test analysis by Speero
- These are the ONLY things your testing tool should tell you – Medium article by Craig Sullivan
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.
- Drinking coffee
Sidebar Shareables
Amusing sidebar content shared this week
- Pact Coffee – delicious, hand-selected speciality coffee, roasted just days before it’s delivered to your door