The org chart isn’t what it used to be. As hierarchies flatten and teams are stretched thin, the traditional mentorship model (where wisdom flows from senior to junior) is shifting.

Maybe you find yourself as the most senior person in your function, surrounded by brilliant colleagues who work in completely different disciplines. Or maybe you’re managing a team while still figuring out your own career trajectory. The old playbook of “find a mentor who’s two levels above you” doesn’t apply when there are only three levels total.

We spoke with three product professionals navigating these workplace realities to gain a deeper understanding of what mentorship looks like today. From their perspective, mentorship isn’t disappearing. It just takes a little creativity to find these days.

Their stories show that finding mentorship requires intention and a willingness to look beyond your immediate team. And those who crack the code on developing in a community with a mentor, despite flat, resource-constrained environments, see higher job satisfaction and better retention.

A great mentor understands your why

If you’re lucky enough to have a manager with expertise in your discipline, managers can be a great source of mentorship, but according to Brittany Lang, UX Research Manager and proud mentor, growing talent can be an overlooked aspect of management. “ I think a lot of times there’s just not a lot of energy put into growing people,” says Brittany. “It’s extra effort, but it’s important if you wanna keep people.”

For Brittany, her approach to growing people starts with understanding their “why.”

“It's the most important thing to do as a research leader—to understand who my people are and what they want out of this job.”

Understanding her team members’ driving purpose helps her keep her team motivated to cross the finish line.

“If I'm asking them to do something and I can't give them an explanation of why or how it connects to those goals they have and their ‘why,’ then I'm losing them—and they're losing out. It's a lose-lose, and it should be a win-win situation.”

Beyond understanding their why, Brittany ensures that each team member has had opportunities to grow by keeping track of what they've accomplished and what they still need to do. It’s a part of how she keeps her team motivated. And the way she sees it, when her team is intrinsically motivated to do the work, it’s mutually beneficial to the company and the employee. “That's the dream,” she says.

Manager ≠ mentor

Not everyone is so lucky to have a manager like Brittany.

Sumita Paulson, UX Designer & Strategist, who has been both a mentor and a mentee throughout her 15-year career, says not all managers are mentors. “In a period of 15 years, I’ve only had two real mentors,” says Sumita.

Sumita notes that while it might be your manager's job to make sure you have work, “they don’t always make it their job to make sure it’s rewarding and tee you up for your next big success.” Whether due to the time pressures of their role or the lack of organizational structure to support it, managers don’t always see it as their job to tend to their employees’ careers.

“It’s not often that you find someone who aligns with your goals and wants to help you get there. A mentor is someone who is first amenable to and interested in helping you grow, then takes a proactive role.”

Sumita has found that managers who have taken a proactive approach understanding her goals and interests are the ones who created fertile ground for a mentor-mentee relationship. “Being interested in you as a person is the key thing.”

To spot a potential mentor, Sumita advises paying attention to who shows earnest interest in your goals.

“If they’re asking broader and more intentional questions beyond the job, that’s a sign that they want to get a better sense of who someone is as a person and what is interesting to them. They are starting to invest in your story.”

Mentorship can come from anywhere

Managers sometimes demonstrate a willingness to mentor. But where should you look for mentorship if your organization is relatively flat?

At one startup, Data Analyst and UX Researcher Anton Krotov was the sole research expert among a team of experts, without a research manager. “I was working with people outside of my field completely. So I was a senior person, and there was nobody else with a more senior expertise to ask advice from.”

Anton found himself as the sole researcher among a team of extremely talented and senior colleagues whom he needed to confidently serve—developers, product managers, designers, etc. That’s when he embarked on finding mentors outside of his company.

He leveraged outside mentors to help him upskill on new methodologies related to his role and to understand the ethical considerations of working with children.

“When I started to work with educational products oriented for very early school-aged kids, like primary school kids, I needed to do some in-person research, like focus groups. But I came with experience mostly in usability studies with adult people who articulate their wants and needs very differently. So what I needed to do was to find an anthropologist-slash-psychologist who was working with kids and could really explain to me how to do that right.”

Key to that relationship's success was working with a mentor who gave him homework, which Anton explained “could expand their value beyond our 30-minute time slot.” The value went beyond education and included accountability and reflection.

“That real value person-to-person mentorship gives to you is reinforcement. You come back to your mentor, bringing the results of your first try, second try, and you discuss that. That is the most valuable tool in upskilling.

I haven't found anything yet that would've beaten mentorship in terms of result, return on investment, confidence, and the feedback of my colleagues who saw me now more capable than before.”

Making mentorship work—in any org structure

Whether you're a manager looking to develop your team or an individual contributor seeking growth, mentorship might mean finding creative places to establish and develop relationships.

Mentorship doesn't have to look like the traditional model. It can be cross-functional, external, or even peer-to-peer. What matters is the intentionality behind the relationship and the commitment to growth on both sides.

Developing talent isn't just about individual growth; it's about organizational resilience. As Brittany noted, when team members are intrinsically motivated and growing in their roles, everyone wins.

The post What Mentorship Looks Like In Today’s Flat, Lean, And Growing Orgs appeared first on The Good.

Whether you are promoting in-house, looking at external candidates, or wondering about outsourcing to a firm, here are the best (and worst) signs of a successful optimization team lead.

The ideal optimization team lead

I’ll preface by saying something obvious: every skill set can be a strength in one scenario and a weakness in another. Keeping aesthetics as the north star may make an excellent designer or marketing leader, while it could be completely detrimental for an SEO specialist.

Similarly, what makes a great optimization team lead may not make a great HR manager or sales executive. When deciding who should head up your optimization program, the goal is to focus on the strengths and pitfalls of project sponsors, specifically.

In our experience, the best optimization team leads have a blend of skills that set them apart:

• Experimental mindset: Openness to incremental gains and willingness to take calculated risks for substantial growth.
• Eye for design: Ability to provide valuable feedback and advocate for brand standards without getting bogged down in nitpicky details.
• Customer-centric: Eagerness to understand and cater to the needs of customers, driving long-term success.
• High-risk tolerance: Pushes the boundaries and doesn’t follow all of the rules. Likes to see things shaken up and changed and is willing to take risks to see gains.
• Authority: Has a level of trust and authority from higher-ups and team members at the organization. Doesn’t rule by committee but rather can take feedback and make decisions.
• Collaborative: Good cross-team knowledge. Understands the design queue, the dev queue, etc., and can help manage or prioritize projects. Can motivate other teams to get people on board and know how to delegate or find contributors when necessary.
• Business acumen: Capacity to align optimization efforts with overarching goals and adapt priorities dynamically.
• Effective communication: Ensures alignment within the team and keeps stakeholders informed and engaged. They are timely and get the information to the people who need it.

A program leader orchestrates efforts, balances priorities, and drives results. They are the glue connecting various stakeholders, from designers to developers to CMOs.

Many roles that may appear to be the obvious choice for the optimization team lead struggle when it comes to making the switch. If you are leaning towards a designer, dev, or CMO/CEO to lead your optimization program, each has a unique set of predictable strengths and weaknesses.

Let’s take a look at their strengths and pitfalls, and I encourage you to keep these in mind as you decide who is going to head up your experimentation efforts.

What to consider when entertaining a designer as an optimization team lead

Designers bring a keen eye for aesthetics and user experience to the table. However, some nuances make it difficult for a designer-turned-lead to succeed in optimization program management.

Best brand advocates: Designers are some of the best brand advocates. They understand the importance of keeping your digital experience cohesive.

Understand design impact: They also know first-hand the profound impact design can have on revenue goals, so they’re likely to champion changes while creating a sleek and beautiful digital experience.

Open to big changes: Designers are often more open than other team members to big changes. They see high-leverage opportunities and are always looking for the best iteration of website or app elements.

Designers can get hung up on minutia and cost time in favor of fidelity

Designers leading an optimization program risk prioritizing fidelity over speed, allowing perfectionism to bog them down.

Apprehension toward mid-fidelity: There is an element of experimentation that requires shipping ideas for initial feedback before they are completely buttoned up. Mid-fidelity prototypes can be an incredible resource for learning about your audience and validating website or app changes, and designers are often hesitant to leverage the tool.

Difficulty prioritizing usability: They can prioritize branding over usability and the user experience, giving more weight to aesthetics when one of the most important pieces of an optimization puzzle is staying user-centered.

All of this culminates, and we often see designers forgetting the forest for the trees, overlooking the bigger picture, and getting bogged down in the details. Also known as “bikeshedding” this can present as a bias towards focusing on minor issues and neglecting important issues.

How to prepare designers for the role of optimization lead

For designers to be in the lead, they need to remember that optimization is about testing in sometimes less-than-perfect fidelity to get proof of concept. Once they are bought into the quick-and-dirty nature of rapid prototyping and have gotten over the expectation that everything should be pixel-perfect before it’s shared, they’ll make a great team lead.

What developers bring to the optimization lead role

Developers are the backbone of technical implementation, but their leadership capabilities vary. Generally, we are of the opinion that it is crucial to involve devs in the optimization program, but the skills that make a great developer can limit the capabilities of an optimization program.

Efficiency aficionados: Devs are great at finding efficiencies and keeping your digital product up and running. They know production schedules which prevents optimization efforts from breaking parts of the digital experience, and they can help coordinate the timing of changes.

Expand testing capabilities: They often also expand the capabilities of the testing portion of an optimization program specifically because they can quickly do things like:

• Troubleshoot
• Implement new pages for a split test
• Add a product tag for testing

Understand development schedule: Developers have intimate knowledge of the product schedule and technical constraints of their platform. While this allows for seamless coordination within regular sprint schedules, it can impart unnecessary limitations onto optimization teams.

Developers can advocate for the “fastest way to execution” too readily

Prioritize efficiency over innovation: In general, developers are too focused on current capabilities. Their superpower is that they look for the most efficient way to solve a problem, not what is going to look and perform the best. This leads to missed opportunities for innovation.

Quick to ship: Devs are also measured based on how much they ship, so the test-and-learn approach is not second nature to them. They might see a test in the queue that they know they can ship easily and jump to make it happen quickly rather than waiting for measurement and feedback.

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How developers can succeed as optimization leaders

Developers who head up optimization teams can succeed by understanding and aligning with the goals of optimization.

Careful optimization saves development time. It mitigates the risk of launching treatments that negatively impact user goals and revenue. So developers should learn to see optimization as a tool for efficiency rather than an unnecessary additional step.

What to think about when considering CMOs and CEOs as optimization team leads

High-ranking executives bring authority and strategic vision to the table but may face challenges in grasping the nuances of optimization.

Authority over resources: One of the most incredible powers of CMOs or CEOs is their authority and control. They can facilitate resource allocation and prioritization, making quick decisions without needing the approval of someone who isn’t in the room.

This leads to faster execution and more impactful optimization practices. If the CEO or CMO is bought into the power of experimentation, you are much more likely to see improvements to your digital experience.

Delegation experts: Executives skillfully delegate tasks, ensuring everyone works efficiently toward the same goal. They keep things organized and aligned toward overarching company goals.

Be wary of CMOs and CEOs as team leads when time is a precious resource

All of that being said, CMOs or CEOs are better off supporting an optimization program than leading it.

Distracted by other priorities: C-suites have heavy workloads. This makes it easy for them to prioritize new strategic projects over the digital customer experience. We’ve seen it time and time again: C-suites initially embrace the big-picture thinking of an optimization process. However, their enthusiasm wanes when it’s time to provide tactical support.

How to succeed as a C-suite in an optimization role

The best way to head up an optimization practice is to elevate and delegate. Stay aware of bigger-picture activities, but be honest with how much time you can commit. Either set aside a few hours a week to align with your team and progress the optimization program, or delegate day-to-day project communications to someone you trust.

Keeping stakeholders aligned: Who else should be involved?

It’s important to keep in mind that while certain roles will face unique challenges as an optimization team lead, there are plenty of disciplines that can (and should) be involved in the experimentation program. After all, you can have a stake in optimization without leading the project.

An optimization program includes a review of your entire website or digital experience. This helps you identify the key team members who should contribute to the process. Providing the right support helps align everyone on optimization priorities and expose any testing constraints and requirements.

Here are some key team members to keep involved in the project:

• Stakeholders who know the template, designs, and upcoming changes for your website or digital product. This could include ecommerce, marketing manager, or product managers. They should have the resources to share relevant details to keep in mind as your optimization program or testing begins.
• Stakeholders who manage the website properties, know historical content, and/or make decisions behind the scenes. This could include the CEO, developers, or product designers.
• Any stakeholders who can speak to KPIs that they want to address with the optimization program.

Involving the right team members contributes valuable insights and expertise, ensuring a holistic optimization approach.

A great optimization team lead improves your digital experience

Finding an exceptional optimization team lead isn’t just about skills. It’s about identifying the person with the right blend of skills, traits, and attitudes to align with the organization’s goals and values.

When businesses prioritize qualities like design acumen, experimental mindset, customer focus, and business savvy, they cultivate leaders. These leaders drive results and foster a culture of innovation and collaboration.

The post What Makes a Good Optimization Team Lead? appeared first on The Good.

There is an aspect of “old age” ecommerce thinking that is particularly troublesome to me.

Many brands I meet treat their ecommerce site as a marketing channel and put it under a marketer’s jurisdiction.

You may wonder, “What’s so problematic about this?”

It’s problematic because marketers tend to approach a website from a brand perspective. They have goals, priorities, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that are brand-centric.

In reality, an ecommerce site’s job is to convert visitors into customers and leads. The website needs customer-centric goals because it’s there to serve the customer’s needs. So why don’t ecommerce team structures fall under the sales department?

In this article, I’m diving into why you should consider rearranging your organizational structure so that marketing and ecommerce managers can excel in their corresponding roles.

The POV Shift: Moving Ecommerce Team Structure From Marketing To Sales

When a marketer is in charge of an ecommerce site, business goals are prioritized over customer goals.

For example, when marketers write product descriptions, they often sell the lifestyle or overall brand vision of the company but not how the particular product meets the visitor’s individual needs.

Think “our classic logo polo” (self-serving) versus “our polo is made of soft organic cotton that is machine washable” (shares a few compelling reasons to buy).

When you extrapolate this brand-centric approach to every other part of an ecommerce site, the result is an underperforming channel that values style over substance.

So what’s a better option?

Consider what would happen if ecommerce sites and the ecommerce team structure fell under the sales department instead.

The user experience would be completely different (and, I’d argue, for the better!). Whereas marketing focuses on generating awareness, interest, and desire, sales focuses on conversions—getting out of the way once the visitor is ready to buy. This aligns much more closely with what your online business should be doing.

From many years of working with ecommerce brands, both large and small, I’ve noticed the most successful brands acknowledge this split and actually do put their ecommerce site under a more sales-focused role.

In many cases, this means a brand has at least the following roles:

• A marketing manager responsible for creating interest and recognition and driving good visitors to the website.
• An ecommerce manager who is responsible for what happens when the visitor arrives. This role operates more like sales than marketing.

These separate but collaborative roles work together (like in the circular image above) to effectively get a visitor to the site and then get out of their way once they’re there.

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What Is The Difference Between An Ecommerce Manager And A Marketing Manager?

At first glance, these roles sound pretty similar. But done well, they have a different set of responsibilities and KPIs:

Although brands differ on some role specifics, such as who creates the copy for each page on the website, the consensus is that the website is the ecommerce manager’s domain.

Jeremy Horowitz, previously ecommerce manager at LuMee (a Case-Mate brand and distributor of phone cases) and now partner at Messenger Mastermind, says, “As the ecom manager, I was much more focused on the sales side of things…CRO, promotional calendar, website/tech stack management.” He notes the website was the ecommerce manager’s jurisdiction, though marketing played a heavy role in copy.

At Kuru Footwear, a growing brand, the website is also under an ecommerce manager.

They have various channel managers on the marketing side, but former CMO Sean McGinnis says when it comes to the website, “every design choice and every optimization is [the ecommerce manager’s] call.” As a result, site uptime, speed, and site conversion rate are the ecommerce manager’s responsibility as well.

Both of these brands—as well as some of the most successful brands The Good works with—recognize that yes, a marketing manager plays a critical role in driving the target audience to the site and amping up their interest before they get there.

But once the visitor arrives, a handoff occurs. The visitor has crossed a boundary line, so to speak, and entered into the ecommerce manager’s realm.

Other Reasons An Ecommerce Site Should Be The Ecommerce Manager’s Domain

Even for small, emerging brands with limited resources, hiring a dedicated ecommerce role for the house team whose job is to connect marketing needs with user needs, user research, and website optimization will result in a more focused website experience.

Expecting a marketing manager to pull off a successful marketing strategy and a successful conversion rate strategy is an enormous, unrealistic ask.

You wouldn’t expect an ecommerce expert to know the ins and outs of executing a successful marketing strategy. So why assume a marketer could do the same in an ecommerce role?

Marketers who are expected to do both will either pick one out of necessity or stretch themselves too thin across both domains (i.e., do both poorly).

At The Good, we see this conflict in reporting metrics, where marketing managers turn canaries into KPIs.

The Canary Theory

Starting in the early 1900s, miners took caged canaries down into the shafts. Canaries are more sensitive to gases like carbon monoxide (deadly in high doses) than humans. If a canary suddenly seemed ill (or worse, died), miners knew it was high time to hightail it back to open air.

In reporting, modern-day canaries are metrics that indicate some larger, dangerous issue is at work. Take “time on page” or “time on-site.” If you’re testing different landing pages and visitors are bouncing after nine seconds, you may have a terrible top-of-page experience. Alternatively, this metric can be a clue to a larger mystery.

In one instance, the team at The Good noticed visitors were somehow arriving on the cart page from every kind of channel.

But this was supposedly impossible; you can’t get to the cart through paid search. The team found that visitors spent a lot of time on-site doing research. Then they moved offsite to find missing information or a coupon code.

By the time the visitor returned, their session had timed out. It also appeared as if they just arrived on the cart page.

Time on page is useful as a canary. But marketing often treats this and similar metrics, such as pageviews, as KPIs.

This isn’t throwaway data, but it doesn’t reveal nearly as much as return on ad spend (ROAS), average order value (AOV), conversion rate (CR). Other essential ecommerce metrics that reveal a good deal more about how the customer is experiencing the site.

Get Your Ecommerce Site Out Of The Hands Of The Marketing Team

It’s time to rethink your ecommerce team structure and priorities of ecommerce management.

I know for some brands, I am proposing a critical shift in managing your team and ecommerce sites. But, I am confident that it will help you achieve your ultimate goal of converting more site visitors.

Brands need to recognize the distinct responsibilities of marketing managers in driving traffic and interest. At the same time, understand ecommerce managers’ role in optimizing the website for seamless transactions. This way, they can create a more efficient and effective online presence.

Ecommerce sites should have a dedicated team (or team member) that reports to the sales department rather than marketing. This shift aligns the website’s purpose with conversion-focused goals, ensuring that the user experience caters to customers who are ready to make a purchase.

The post Your Ecommerce Team Should Be Part Of Your Sales Department appeared first on The Good.

As a B Corp committed to inclusivity, we understand that there may be unwritten rules and expectations that are not always clear to newcomers.

To bridge this gap and create a supportive environment, we have compiled a guide of minimum expectations for interns to practice professionalism in the workplace.

Following these guidelines establishes a strong foundation for success and fosters a positive working environment for yourself and your colleagues.

Tips for Interns in the Workplace

1. Be punctual

One of the most important aspects of professionalism is being on time. Even in a virtual setting, arriving promptly to work and meetings shows respect for others’ time and demonstrates your dedication. Plan your schedule accordingly, accounting for potential delays, and strive to be punctual in all your professional commitments.

2. Communicate

Meet your deadlines, and if you can’t, communicate why and suggest an alternative plan. Clear and open communication is key to maintaining strong working relationships.

Additionally, always keep your colleagues and supervisors informed if you have last-minute conflicts or emergencies, and send a quick heads-up when you have a minute or two to spare. A short message such as “Hey – I have an emergency, will send an update when I can” is better than no message at all.

3. Practice virtual meetings etiquette

In the age of remote work and virtual meetings, practicing proper etiquette is crucial. When joining a meeting, introduce yourself if necessary, and be mindful of muting yourself when not speaking to minimize background noise. Active participation, attentiveness, and respectful engagement during virtual meetings contribute to a professional and inclusive work environment.

4. Proofread and double-check your work

Before sharing any work, be it emails, reports, or presentations, take the time to proofread and double-check for errors. Presenting accurate and well-crafted work shows you take yourself, and the business, seriously. It also demonstrates respect for others’ time.

5. CC the right people

When sending emails, pay careful attention to the recipients. Be cautious to “reply” versus “reply all” to avoid unnecessary email clutter. Ensure that the relevant individuals are included in the conversation.

6. Be an active listener

Actively listen and take note of advice and guidance provided by your colleagues and supervisors. By demonstrating attentiveness and incorporating feedback into your work, you show that you value their expertise and are committed to personal and professional growth.

7. Notify hosts when unable to attend a meeting

If circumstances prevent you from attending a scheduled meeting, promptly notify the meeting host. This simple act of courtesy ensures they can adjust the agenda or make alternate arrangements if necessary. Respect for others’ time is a key characteristic of professionalism.

8. Bring solutions, not just problems

While it is important to seek guidance when faced with challenges, strive to bring potential solutions along with the problems you encounter. By presenting your manager or colleagues with alternative ideas or approaches, you demonstrate your proactive mindset and problem-solving abilities.

9. Ask questions… but also leverage available resources

Never hesitate to ask questions when you need clarification or guidance. Embrace a growth mindset and recognize that seeking help is a sign of strength, not weakness. Additionally, utilize available resources such as search engines and online tutorials to enhance your skills and knowledge. Be resourceful and take ownership of your learning and development.

10. Respect your colleagues

Respecting your colleagues is fundamental to fostering a positive work environment. Strive to maintain a collegiate atmosphere where professionalism and camaraderie coexist. One way to do this is to be intentional about learning names and roles. Other examples include being mindful of boundaries, avoiding oversharing personal information, and treating others with kindness and respect.

11. Respect the time of others

Recognize that your colleagues’ time is valuable. Approach every interaction with the mindset that their time is precious. Be concise and considerate when requesting assistance or engaging in discussions. Efficient communication helps to maintain productivity and cultivates a culture of professionalism.

12. Manage up

Keeping your manager informed of your progress, projects, and achievements is essential for effective collaboration. Regularly share updates, seek feedback, and communicate wins. Proactively managing your relationship with your manager strengthens trust and demonstrates your commitment to your role.

Keep These Tips In Mind To Set Yourself Up for Success

By adhering to these minimum expectations for professionalism in the workplace, you will establish yourself as a dedicated and valuable team member.

Embrace inclusivity, communicate effectively, meet deadlines, and demonstrate respect for your colleagues. If you’re ever in doubt about what to do, use our core values as a starting point.

Remember that professionalism is an ongoing journey, and by embodying these principles, you will thrive in your internship and set yourself up for future success.

The post Professionalism in the Workplace: Tips for Interns appeared first on The Good.

• A culture of experimentation begins with a willingness to ask the right questions and stay humble about the answers – data will drive your decision-making, not opinions. 
• This mindset shift happens with a thoughtful step-by-step process where your company needs to get comfortable with failure and empower employees at all levels. 
• It’s not an easy shift, but the results in digital experience optimization, customer happiness, and employee engagement speak for themselves.

In our years of experience, we continually find that companies that pursue a culture of experimentation often have the best experience with digital experience optimization.

We’ve observed time and time again that those who experiment the most are able to innovate the best. Regardless of whether each experiment is successful, each lesson is helpful because it can provide insight.

That’s because experimentation isn’t something you can do a few times a year, or when a new product launches, or when you redesign your website. You need to run wide-ranging, frequent experiments to find the most beneficial changes for your business.

And to do that, you need a culture where experimentation thrives at all levels and in all departments. For most companies, this requires a complete mindset shift, not just a few A/B tests here and there.

Take The Telegraph, for example. They’ve been delivering news and insights in the UK for over 160 years, and they were the first British paper to have an online version. But they needed to grow their subscriber base – and to hit their ambitious targets, lots of experiments were required to determine what worked for them.

Through rapid testing and a custom Digital Experience Optimization Program, we were able to experiment with many variables in the subscriber journey and implement effective changes that move the needle for their business. Once the data is in, it’s hard for leaders to argue with the results and stymie changes, and experimentation begins to become part of the organizational DNA.

The Telegraph isn’t the only company that has used experimentation to climb to the top of their industry. Amazon constantly forays into new markets, often with disastrous results (Amazon Fire phone, anyone?). Nevertheless, Amazon still has achieved dominance through their successful products.

Bottom line: Wherever you find growing innovative companies, you usually find companies that are willing to experiment.

Here’s why this matters to you: digital experience optimization hinges on experimentation. You can’t sell your products unless you can get people to buy. And you can’t get people to buy unless you know what works and what doesn’t. And you can’t know that without strategic experimentation.

Mindset Shifts For A Culture Of Experimentation

How can you begin to create a culture of experimentation? By shifting your company’s mindset (no small task, but one that’s well worth the effort).

Aim to incorporate these three key phrases and you’ll notice the change, along with the benefits experimentation brings.

• “I don’t know, but let me find out.” Staying humble is essential, especially for leaders, because you need to admit what you don’t know in order to run successful experiments and implement your findings.
• “You can’t always win, but you can always learn.” Looking for the value in learning will help you accept the failures that often come along with experiments. You won’t uncover a magic bullet every time, but you’ll almost always learn something valuable you can use in the future.
• “Don’t assume something is right just because you think it is.” Unlearning intuitive design is critical. Avoid assuming you know what customers think or want, and shift to testing before making data-backed decisions.

Ultimately, a culture of experimentation is essential to the success of your conversion rate and your company as a whole.

So how can you emulate The Telegraph, Amazon, and other innovative companies? How can you create a culture of experimentation in your own company?

Here are six steps in creating an organizational culture of experimentation. By implementing these steps, you’ll create an environment where testing, tinkering, optimizing, and even failing is integral to your DNA. When these are in place, you are primed to significantly increase your ecommerce sales.

Step-by-Step How to Build A Culture of Experimentation

Step 1: Get Comfortable With Failure

If you and your employees aren’t comfortable with failure, you won’t be able to create a culture of experimentation. As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon notes, experimentation inevitably leads to many failures and the occasional home run.

The home runs are worth the failures, but that doesn’t make the failures hurt any less.

Former Marketing Executive and Tech Advisor for Porch, Joanna Lord, described how they celebrated failure in the company:

“And every time you break the site, whoever breaks the site the worst gets Mr. Sparkles for a week. You put him on your desk and it’s like this badge of honor that you like did something so bold that you literally messed up the site badly.

And you know what I love? You see my CEO walk around the room and he’s high-fiving the Mr. Sparkles owner. And people are like, “What did you do? What did you do to get Mr. Sparkles?

But the reality is we’ve made it a positive thing. We’ve made it a badge of honor. You are living out the Porch-y way in being bold. What can you do in your culture to make it fun and acceptable? And almost, you know, become famous for it.”

The first step in creating organizational culture that embraces experimentation is making failure part of who you are. You’re going to launch products that just don’t work. You’re going to create new sections of your site where the conversion rate is abysmal. That’s not the end. Those things can be fixed.

If you want your employees to be comfortable with experimentation, they also need to be comfortable with failure.

Step 2: Start With Small Bets

You never want to experiment to the point where your company will succeed or fail based on a single experiment. Rather, consistently take small bets that will allow you to get a sense of what works and what doesn’t.

This small bets methodology has been crucial to Amazon’s success. Over the years, they’ve tested out various products and methods to see what resonates with customers and sellers.

The company crushed it with Amazon Prime and the Kindle… and totally flopped with Amazon Destinations (hotel booking), Endless.com (a high end fashion site), and countless others.

However, none of these failures dealt a significant blow to the company, and the successes generated exponential profits.

When you begin implementing small bets in your company, you’ll discover what works, then be able to double down on your successes.

Step 3: A/B Test Everything

One of the easiest ways to start making small bets is to A/B test everything, from your web pages to your email subject lines.

A/B testing gives you a huge advantage in that you can measure everything. You can see which buy button customers prefer, which emails generate the most clicks, and which pages customers spend the most time on.

You can measure these things down to fractions of percentage points, and then implement the ones that create the biggest results.

It’s one thing to have a gut feeling that something will work – it’s another thing altogether to see the data, which often proves gut feelings wrong.

Don’t rely on what you think will work. Take small bets by A/B testing everything, then let the data guide your decisions.

Step 4: Collaborate and Hypothesize

One of the most effective ways to generate ideas which can then be tested is to implement regular brainstorming sessions to design new tests. This ties in closely to taking small bets and then A/B testing them.

In order to find good ideas, you need to generate a large volume of ideas. You can’t effectively make small bets and A/B test unless you have a pool of ideas to choose from. Some of these ideas will be bad, but that’s precisely the point. You usually have to wade through the garbage heap in order to find the gold nugget.

So, for example, let’s say that you’re trying to determine why sales have fallen in the past month. You may hypothesize that your sales emails have been consistently less effective and drive fewer conversions than in the past.

But until you test that hypothesis, you won’t know if it’s true. So you dig into your data and examine the trends over the past six months. Then you create new emails and test those conversion rates against the older ones.

If your hypothesis is true, you’ve found at least part of the answer. If it’s false, create a new hypothesis and go through the same testing process.

Step 5: Appreciate The Effort

Initially, your employees will probably feel uncomfortable experimenting, especially if it hasn’t been part of the culture. Their first failures will be difficult, and they’ll be tempted to throw in the towel.

In order to combat this natural instinct, it’s essential that you highlight and publicly appreciate their efforts, even if they result in failure.

Praise employee experiments in your experiment brainstorming sessions. Personally encourage those taking small bets and risking failure. Even consider gamifying things, so that employees receive some sort of reward for their experiments and ideas.

If an employee takes a risk on a particular product to see if it drives more sales, applaud their gumption, even if it didn’t convert more.

Your employees will follow your lead. If they see you encouraging and celebrating effort, they’ll be more likely to dive in headlong.

Step 6: Maintain An Innovation Mindset

One of the biggest hindrances to creating a culture of experimentation is the institutionalization of things. Methods and policies crystallize, and you eventually begin doing things because “that’s always the way we’ve done it.” This inevitably leads to stagnation.

Startups are constantly changing, always adapting to what their customers want and trying to discover the best way of doing things. In fact, some of the greatest startups (think Uber, Warby Parker, etc.) have succeeded precisely because they challenged the status quo.

If you want to create a culture of experimentation in your company, you must seek to maintain a startup mentality. This means you need to be willing to consider ideas that are different and don’t line up with standard operating procedures. You can’t shut something down simply because you’ve never done it that way.

Make room for new, even radical ideas. These are the kinds of nuggets that often lead to the biggest successes.

Additionally, you need to maintain the constant testing mentality. You can always drive more sales and increase your conversion rates. Don’t fall into a stagnant rut and get comfortable. Constantly test new things – new designs, new copy, new email formats. You never know when you’ll strike a gold mine.

Results When You Adopt A Culture Of Experimentation

Once you’ve done the hard work of implementing these steps, you’ll find the results are well worth the effort.

The Telegraph team learned more than just what works on their CTA pages during through their experimental culture – they also gained deeper insights into the perspective of their customers.

Their conversion rate increased because of these insights gleaned from experiments, and so did the quality of their conversions.

Creating a culture of experimentation also means that you conduct more experiments, and so find more innovative solutions.

Booking.com has a culture that is unusually dedicated to experimentation, and about 10% of their experiments yield positive results – but since they run such a high volume of experiments, the total number of improvements is quite significant.

And you may find that long-standing debates between teams or team members are definitively resolved with data. After going around and around in circles on a decision because of strong differing opinions, your experiments can yield clear answers because you put your best ideas in front of your users – and now you know exactly what they think.

Smarter decision-making in less time is the end result.

A true culture of experimentation results in greater autonomy for employees as well, which can increase engagement. Instead of going along with decisions from their leaders that they don’t agree with, employees have the power to ask questions and find answers themselves – that’s powerful.

Will you step outside of your comfort zone with a culture of experimentation?

Creating a culture of experimentation will make you uncomfortable. It will force you out of your company ruts and on to uncharted paths. There will be times when you fall on your face. And it means your organization’s decisions need to be driven less by ego and more by data, which isn’t always an easy transition for leadership.

But you can’t achieve great things if your goal is to avoid rocking the boat. Successful disruption occurs at the intersection of curiosity and risk. Amazon, Google, and others have succeeded precisely because they were willing to fail. They know that big wins emerge from the ashes of failure.

Will you embrace risk or will you stay comfortable?

For help developing and fostering a culture of experimentation, contact The Good. We love helping companies like yours optimize your digital experience with tactics like rapid testing, A/B testing, and ensuring you’re asking the right questions and making data-driven decisions.

The post How To Inspire A Culture Of Experimentation [Step-By-Step] appeared first on The Good.

So why do we assume that in creative work, we will immediately have the best idea or deliver unbelievable results? 

Ask a room full of business people how many see themselves as creative and you are likely to receive some blank stares or commentary about how bad they are at drawing. 

As an ecommerce UX designer, this perspective is damaging. But still, I sometimes find myself getting caught up in the idea that you either have creativity or you don’t. 

The reality is, it’s a muscle you have to exercise and strengthen just like any other. 

I recently read Creative Confidence by IDEO founders Tom and David Kelley which outlined how to help companies and individuals boost creativity in their work. The book is broken down into eight chapters, including a section with exercises designed to get people out of their comfort zones and into a space of innovation. 

Below are my five biggest takeaways from the book for aspiring ecommerce UX designers, and insights on how we live out these ideas and boost creativity in our own work at The Good. 

1. Apply a Growth Mindset to Your Work

How many times have you been given a problem and thought or said “I can’t” or “this won’t work”? 

This is a fixed mindset or the belief that intelligence or creativity are immutable characteristics that cannot be changed. 

This mindset limits us and makes us so afraid of failure or embarrassment that we avoid risks and end up sabotaging long-term opportunities simply because we are afraid to admit what we don’t know. 

Conversely, a growth mindset is when you believe creativity and knowledge are like a muscle that must be trained over time with persistence. It gives us the chance to improve in small, incremental ways that add up big over time. 

We encourage a growth mindset amongst our clients and our team by living out our core value of “Make Improvements Not Excuses.” We are a team of lifelong learners who understand the value of growth through practice, not perfection. 

A fixed mindset tells us that receiving critical feedback means you are not measuring up or have personally failed. However, a growth mindset allows us to take feedback as an opportunity to improve our work and grow in our discipline.

2. Early Failure is a Key to Long-Term Success

David and Tom Kelley write about failure a lot in Creative Confidence as something to embrace rather than avoid. 

Early failure in a project helps us find weaknesses and correct them in the innovation cycle. Owning a setback allows us to actually learn what to do differently in the future. 

Psychologist Albert Bandura discusses this in his work around curing phobias: giving people small successes to focus on can help them overcome limiting beliefs and build creative confidence. 

An easy way to learn “quick, easy, and cheap” is through prototyping. Prototypes can be as rudimentary as a drawing on a napkin and as high fidelity as an interactive digital mockup. 

They give us the latitude to quickly test ideas to understand the best pathway forward.

Here’s an example of a low fidelity mockup of a zoo app that I created in a course. Taking this first step gave me and my peers a starting point to work off of. 

As we continued working on the prototype, we found weak points and areas for improvement that led us to the more polished version. Below you can see the high fidelity mockup of the same zoo app once we iterated on it as a team. 

While the first version was far from perfect, it gave us ideas on how to improve and helped guide us to our final product. 

When you approach challenges this way, failure is no longer a scary word but a part of the innovation process. 

At The Good, we take it one step further when designing multivariate tests for our clients. A failed test does not garner blame or frustration but is labeled a “learner” or an opportunity to iterate and improve an experience for the future. 

3. Be an Empathetic Detective

At the heart of all the work we do as creative professionals is the end-user. 

Cultivating curiosity and empathy for your users is the best way to create better experiences for them and in turn, helps us boost creativity.

 It is all too easy to fall back on what we already know, especially with time constraints and budgets to consider. So how do we conduct research in a way that helps us develop valuable insights?

Below are a few strategies:

• Apply a beginner’s mind to everyday tasks, what do you notice that you normally would not?
• Instead of simply looking at what competitors are doing, cultivate empathy for your users and what their perspectives and needs are.
• Look for ways to update and refresh your worldview. Field observations help you notice details that you wouldn’t otherwise pick up in structured interviews.
• Ask why, then keep asking why. Are you gaining new insights from user interviews or just hearing what you expect?
• Use customer journey mapping to get in the mindset of your users. Look for insights, patterns, and anything that can be improved. This is such a critical strategy behind how to boost creativity and build a better experience for customers, that our team created an informative video on the subject. 

4. Collaboration is Key

The fact is, creativity does not happen in a vacuum. It requires input from all the disciplines contributing to a project or goal. 

Multidisciplinary teams keep our perspective fresh and create a system where sharing ideas is encouraged. 

Teams that have creative confidence are ones that have a back and forth culture where team members ask “what can I do to improve this concept” rather than “that won’t work” or “that is a bad idea.” They share ownership of a project because that gives everyone a stake in successes and failures. 

A great way to foster this creative collaboration is to designate a time for open discussion and ideation. We have weekly and monthly meetings dedicated to internal reviews of our work and brainstorms. Anyone on the team can attend and anyone can bring a topic to cover. These meetings create a culture of internal feedback and collaboration. 

David and Tom Kelley recommend thinking of each team member as a superhero. What are their strengths? What is their kryptonite (weaknesses)? How can you best draw on strengths and diminish weaknesses during a project lifecycle? 

Great teams are diverse. They are not afraid of uncomfortable conversations and are prepared to bring their whole selves to work which allows us to understand their unique perspective.

5. Just Do It

Not just Nike’s famed catchphrase, the principle of “just do it” applies to building creative confidence and boosting creativity as well. 

“If you want to make something great, you have to start making.” 

In the workplace, this can be challenging especially when faced with a problem that has no clear solution. Instead of being a passive observer, tackle a doable piece of the problem. 

Get started, even if your start feels inconsequential. Prototyping comes into play here as a low-stakes way to get ideas flowing and engage the team/clients in the story you are trying to convey. 

Test your prototypes with users, get feedback, and iterate. 

If you are a procrastinator, try reframing. Replace ‘procrastinate’ with the word ‘resistance’ and you may realize that the gap between thinking and action is something you can bridge.

Leverage Your Inner “Ecommerce UX Designer” To Boost Creativity

Creativity is something that must be worked and stretched to become a practice that feels comfortable, like any muscle. 

Design thinking should not be siloed between our work and personal lives. In fact, design thinking pervades every aspect of our lives. 

In our work at The Good we use a human-centered approach to solve challenges. Working as a team helps us keep ideas flowing and provides fresh perspectives. 

We set goals and find ways to go beyond what we even thought was possible. 

We see problems and take action to solve them. 

Don’t let fear of failure and the thought that you are “not creative” limit you from what you can achieve. We can all benefit from design thinking and applying the key principles of creative confidence to our lives.

The post 5 Tips To Boost Creativity From An Ecommerce UX Designer appeared first on The Good.

Like many organizations, we were knocked off-balance by the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic instability. Multiple clients wanted to pause or stop their services while they figured out what was going to happen with regards to consumer behaviors and manufacturing or fulfillment operations.

The global health crisis also shut down our office for months, which forced us to shift to a full-time, remote workforce. We came together as a team and found ways to not only sustain our traditional operations but also uncover efficiencies that helped us produce even better results for ourselves and our clients.

Within a few months, we found ourselves feeling confident in a remote work setting and started to bring on our first location-independent team members. For the foreseeable future, we would be recruiting candidates from the global talent pool, not just the Pacific Northwest.

We were able to weather the storm and, as time passed, we found that the global response to COVID-19 dramatically increased demand for digital commerce. This worked in our favor, and by the end of the year we were once again on a growth trajectory.

As we planned for 2021, we revisited our long-term goals and realized that some of the systems and processes that got us to our current level would not be sufficient to get us to where we wanted to be. That’s when we decided to adopt the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), an approach to business management made popular by Gino Wickman and his book Traction.

Getting started with EOS involved a lot of self-reflection, brainstorming, and uncomfortable conversations, but it helped us realize that as we examined everything from our organizational structure to our operating procedures, we also needed to refresh our Core Values to better reflect our future aspirations.

This created both an opportunity and a necessity for us to reshape our core values so that they would better support our distributed team and ensure that every new team member we welcomed would be a good cultural fit.

Ultimately, our new core values preserve much of the essence of the previous ones, while also adding specificity and clarity.

The Good’s Core Values

Impact Over Income

Our company exists to eliminate every bad experience online, of which there are many. You’ve probably run into several just this week.

• A checkout experience where you encounter surprise extra expenses that show up at the very last minute
• Trying to cancel a purchase and being forced to navigate a maze of confusing pages that leave you unsure whether you were even successful
• Deceptive web design practices that make you think you’re doing one thing when you’re actually doing the opposite of what you want

These experiences are often the result of teams or entire organizations making design choices that serve company goals, not user goals. We view our role as the strongest advocate for the person who is not in the room when those decisions are made – the customer.

It’s easy to see how an agency could put blinders on and forget about the customer. After all, it’s our job to support the ecommerce operator’s growth. But, it’s key. We work with our clients to create online experiences that truly benefit both their customers and their bottom line.

Impact over Income means that we’re not just chasing dollar signs. Money is a necessity, but it’s not the end game. We deliver outstanding results and earn a profit, but we also invest a portion of that profit back into our own people, the surrounding community, and the causes that need our support.

Our team members are compensated well, but we actively seek out individuals who are more motivated by the impact of the work they do than the size of their paycheck. Both as individuals and as a team, we are constantly seeking out ways we can have a tangible, positive influence on the lives of others.

Own Your Experience

Perhaps you’re familiar with the concept of “locus of control.” If not, it is a psychological concept that contends most people fall into one of these categories:

1. INTERNAL Locus of Control – People who believe that their success or failure is a result of the actions they took or decisions they made.
2. EXTERNAL Locus of Control – People who believe that their success or failure is a result of external factors beyond their control, such as luck, fate, injustice, or bias.

At The Good, we want to attract people who have an internal locus of control. They believe that they have the ability to influence their outcomes through the choices they make and effort they put forth. This includes taking ownership of problems and actively working to find solutions, both for our clients and within our organization. 

If a team member identifies an issue, they don’t assume that someone else will fix it or that it doesn’t fall under their job description to solve it. They take action, either personally working to resolve the problem or enlisting the help of those who have the necessary knowledge and skills to do so.

Collectively, we see every problem as an opportunity. As we work with our clients to help them convert more visitors into buyers, we naturally uncover opportunities to improve the user experience. Instead of simply calling out the flaws, we use research and data to show them that the issue is actually an opportunity to improve their sales performance, not just a blemish in need of a cover-up.

Make Improvements, Not Excuses

There is incredible power in small, incremental growth that compounds over time. We’ve been in the business long enough to know that there is no silver bullet or overnight success when it comes to optimization.

That’s why we strive to help our clients get 1% better every day. Delivering on that promise is the best way to ensure that at the end of the year we can look back and say, “look how much progress we’ve made.”

The same can be said for how we operate as a company. We naturally attract people who are lifelong learners and who understand the value of growth through practice, not perfection. Furthermore, we hold each other accountable to our growth goals and when mistakes happen or we fall short of expectations, we’re there to pick each other up, not look down with disdain.

Strive For Clarity

When working with clients, there will be times when it’s not immediately clear why they’re experiencing a particular problem. Many agencies would fire back a haphazard recommendation full of false confidence, for fear of being seen as anything less than an expert.

That’s not our style. And, frankly, it’s a dangerous way to do business.

Instead, we find it much more helpful to admit that we aren’t sure and that we need to dig into the data more to determine the cause. And, more importantly, we actually do the legwork to figure out the best approach and come back to you with an evidence-based course of action.

Internally, we’ve intentionally built a team with such a diverse range of knowledge and experience that we can almost always defer to an expert when we find ourselves lacking clarity around a particular situation. This requires each of us to be humble enough to ask for support and gracious enough to share our expertise when it’s required.

How Our Core Values Play Out In Our Work

So how do our core values actually transform the way we do business? There are several ways.

First, when hiring new team members, we specifically ask questions that are informed by our core values. We want to build a team of people who care about more than just their income. 

Second, our leadership team is striving to model these behaviors and to lead by example. This includes everything from how they interact with team members and clients, to the messaging used in emails, ad copy, marketing messages, blog posts, etc. We want our core values to become infused in everything we do, and that starts with the leadership team embodying them.

Third, we’re taking simple, yet meaningful steps to create physical, visual reminders of our core values. We display our core values in our physical office space, as well as having apparel made. Our desire is that these visual cues will, over time, help every team member be intimately familiar with our new core values and fully embrace them as their own. 

Finally, we’ve created an award that we call The Good Cup. Every quarter, each team member has the opportunity to nominate another team member for the award, and the nomination must include examples of how that person lived our core values over the past quarter. Everyone votes on the nominees and the winner receives a trophy, along with $500 in cash. The goal is to motivate everyone both to put our values into action, as well as to recognize those who are making a real impact.

Growth Requires Change

Changing our core values isn’t something we did on a whim. It wasn’t a means of “shaking things up” initiated by an incoming CEO or an effort to latch on to a societal wave of mission-driven companies.

Instead, it was the result of an unforeseen environmental shock, a forced move toward becoming a digital-first organization, and a serendipitous growth milestone all coming together at the same time.

The truth is, by the time we started to take a closer look at our core values, we realized our organizational DNA had already changed. And while we never considered throwing out the originals, we also knew that we needed to update them to better reflect our current situation and help us get from where we are to our desired destination.

And while we know that we won’t always be able to live out our core values perfectly, we also know that even striving for incremental improvements will produce big results in the long run.

The post How We Created & Live Out Our Core Values appeared first on The Good.

Success hinges on agility and a deep understanding of your customers. That’s why the ‘test and learn’ ideology is crucial–it puts experimentation and data-driven insights at the core of your business.

Your goal is the same as your customers’: to solve problems and fulfill needs. Users come to you looking for solutions, wanting to know if your product or service can improve their lives. To truly help them, you need a deep understanding of their pain points and desires. A culture of experimentation improves this understanding, helping you uncover what customers truly want and how to deliver solutions that exceed their expectations.

In this article, we’ll explore the undeniable benefits of creating a ‘test and learn’ culture in your organization, showcase real-world examples of its success, and equip you with a practical roadmap for implementing it within your organization.

What is test and learn culture?

‘Test and learn’ is a process in which all changes and investments are considered hypotheses to be tested. It is a strategic approach that involves constantly testing new ideas, analyzing the results, and leveraging those insights to optimize digital experiences. This ensures that you’re making informed decisions that resonate with your customers rather than relying on past experience or gut instincts. 

‘Test and learn’ organizations that adopt this methodology invest their resources wisely and prioritize strategies with proven results. They understand that continuous iterations of ‘test and learn’ protocols empower their business to become smarter, fueling unexpected and powerful innovation.

Why is a culture of experimentation important in a digital optimization strategy?

The ‘test and learn’ culture is the driving force behind continuous improvement, and its impact on your business cannot be overstated. Unlike quick wins that can fade, a ‘test and learn’ culture fosters incremental improvements that compound into significant ROI gains. This approach delivers results that last and consistently drive your revenue upward.

Embracing a culture of experimentation empowers you to make informed decisions, build sustainable growth, outpace the competition, and unlock the full potential of your digital business.

Business leaders who build a culture of experimentation within their organizations will realize many benefits. A test and learn approach:

• Provides freedom to fail. When failure is expected and accepted instead of condemned, your team will ultimately get to the right solution faster.
• Lowers the opportunity cost and minimizes major investments in changes that don’t actually work. It’s better to make a series of small, tested changes over time to increase the effectiveness of a website rather than try and rebuild from scratch every two years to try and please the CEO.
• Provides data-backed research that reduces internal debates by making it clear that decisions are settled based on data and not egos or pecking order.
• Builds a culture that cultivates teamwork. It’s like working a puzzle together – everyone gets to pitch in, develop ideas, propose the next piece to see if it will fit, and celebrate when portions of the work come together.
• Nurtures innovation and unorthodox thinking. When teams feel encouraged to try new approaches, it ignites creativity and often leads to unexpected, impactful solutions.
• Accelerates time-to-market. By testing and refining concepts iteratively, businesses can confidently launch new products or services faster, optimizing them based on real-world feedback.
• Enhances customer satisfaction. Understanding your customers deeply is key to exceeding their expectations. A ‘test and learn’ approach helps you tailor your offerings, boosting satisfaction and loyalty.

Building the Foundation: Essential Pillars of a Test and Learn Culture

A true culture of experimentation isn’t created overnight–it requires a strategic shift within the organization that is built on several foundational pillars:

• Curiosity
  Spark a relentless desire to ask questions. Encourage employees to challenge assumptions, explore unconventional avenues, and explore new possibilities. Curiosity is the fuel that drives innovation.
• Data
  Emphasize the importance of not only collecting data but also the skills to interpret and leverage it effectively. Distinguish between being merely data-informed, data-backed and truly data-driven. Decisions should be grounded in reliable analysis.
• Accessibility
  Experimentation should not be confined to a select group or department. By providing tools, training, and a streamlined process, you empower every team member to contribute to optimization efforts. This democratization of testing creates engagement and uncovers insights from diverse perspectives within the organization.
• Transparency
  Build trust by celebrating both wins and learnings. Be transparent about the outcomes of experiments, even those that don’t initially meet expectations. This creates a safe space for taking calculated risks and fosters a culture where continuous learning is valued over individual successes.
• Budget
  Experimentation, and the potential for the valuable insights it brings, requires investment. By allocating a dedicated budget for testing initiatives, you signal the organization’s commitment to continuous improvement and data-driven decision-making.

How to develop test and learn culture in your organization

If you accept the idea that developing a ‘test and learn’ culture can help your organization make the most gains in the least amount of time, the question becomes one of how to establish test and learn as the foundation of your own digital experience optimization efforts.

These ideas can help you do that:

• Get personal with your motivation to inspire each member of the team. The better your team performs, the better each member of the team looks, and the more opportunities the individual members of the team will enjoy. Not only that, but a high-performing team makes management look good too. Everyone involved in test and learn gains rewards. Yes, teamwork is important – but let’s face it: individual recognition is important too.
• Highlight the broader benefits of ‘test and learn’ to give every stakeholder the big-picture view of where you want to go. Test and learn procedures provide deep insight into customer needs and behavior. ‘Test and learn’ will help you optimize customer experience, reduce customer support needs, and increase engagement metrics like acquisition, retention, revenue, and more.
• Stress the need for ongoing experimentation to keep expectations set realistically. ‘Test and learn’ is not a silver bullet. It’s not the knockout punch, but more like a personal trainer for your site. Executed correctly, your digital optimization work is ultimately concerned with learning more about your customers. Test and learn culture means ongoing experiments. It’s important to remember that the insights come from both winning AND losing tests. Once your team gets the feel for ‘test and learn’, there will be just as much value gained from what used to be called “failed tests” as from experiments that turn out the way the team wanted.
• Involve the team members in the entire process for deeper buy-in. The team can have an impact and application beyond just your digital experience. They can be included in the ideation process as well. Report insights often. Make the entire process an open window. Keep the team informed about results related to broader goals and explain what you’re doing next based on your learnings. Properly implemented, a ‘test and learn’ culture develops a sense of belonging and responsibility within the team. Everyone shares in the feedback, and everyone is invited to make suggestions and come up with new ideas.
• Provide convincing evidence to show the validity of ‘test and learn’. Bookmark this article to cite the examples given below (Stuido M, Prep Expert, and Laird Superfood). Collect other stories of test and learn success – Netflix, AirBnB, and Google are prime examples. Use case studies to provide strong evidence-based support. Check the Results page on our website for real-life examples of how ‘test and learn’ can pay off big.
• Count the costs ahead of time to prepare for the all-important presentations to stakeholders. Make sure you can defend the wisdom behind implementing a legitimate digital optimization effort based on a ‘test and learn’ strategy. If you’ll need to call in help from outside your company (and most organizations do), you can ask the optimization agency for help with your presentation. If you’re going with in-house help only, you’ll need to show the wisdom of that decision and establish your team’s ability to conduct the necessary work.

‘Test and learn’ cultures don’t develop overnight. Be prepared to dig in for the long haul. You’ll need to prove the value of test and learn by showing results – but those wins are most often preceded by “failures.”

Winning Examples of Test and Learn Culture

The proof of a ‘test and learn’ culture’s power lies in real success stories. Let’s dive into examples of companies that embrace experimentation and see remarkable results. These case studies demonstrate the tangible impact of a data-driven, test-focused mindset.

How Studio M encouraged ‘test and learn’ culture to keep innovation fresh

Studio M’s legacy of innovation spans decades.

From a small family-owned venture in the 1980s, they’ve grown into a thriving DTC and wholesale home and garden powerhouse. Their unwavering commitment to innovation fuels this success.

Even with substantial industry experience, Studio M resists the temptation to rely solely on assumptions about customer preferences. Thanks to Creative Team Director, Maura Godat’s, initiative, the company sought tangible, data-backed results to inform their strategies. At 10:30 AM, a bell chimes in the office. It’s that time of the day again—time to test, innovate, and experiment, and we were right there beside Studio M.

Partnering with The Good, they embarked on a rigorous testing journey, seeking evidence-based validation for each new website iteration. This collaborative approach, combining The Good’s data-driven expertise and Studio M’s deep industry knowledge, created a powerful synergy. Their culture of experimentation empowered them to challenge long-held beliefs and drive continuous, customer-focused innovation.

“Sometimes, our team thought something would be super impactful for shoppers, but it wasn’t. So it just goes to show that it’s always worth testing. It’s always worth experimenting.”

Maura Godat, Creative Team Director, Studio M

Takeaway: Even with decades of experience, continuous testing and a data-driven approach are essential for staying innovative and attuned to evolving customer preferences.

Read the full case study here.

How Prep Expert leveraged customer feedback and knowledge to inspire ideas for optimization

Prep Expert, a leading online education company, boasts an impressive track record of helping students achieve their academic goals and secure significant scholarships. Founder and CEO, Shaan Patel, fueled by a deep belief in his product, constantly pushes the company to strive for improvement and better serve their students.

However, they were running into decision-making challenges, with website changes determined more by individual opinions rather than clear data. Recognizing the need for an objective approach, Prep Expert sought a digital optimization partner to guide them.

“Anytime someone has an idea or an opinion on how to make sure our website appeals to our target market, we can take that idea and test it. This shows us in a very objective way what user behavior would become based on those ideas.”

Shaan Patel, Founder and CEO, Prep Expert

He emphasizes the importance of how this has helped their team stay laser-focused on what is proven to move the needle.

The Good’s team of strategists began by delving into user research and testing. A website audit revealed pain points in the student and parent experience. This, combined with Prep Expert’s extensive customer insights, sparked a wealth of optimization ideas.

Shaan emphasizes the value of this collaborative approach: “by using The Good’s ideas and our internal ideas, we get the best of both worlds. We have over a decade of conversations with our target demographic, but The Good is also bringing and testing ideas that we may have never thought of because they’re coming in with fresh eyes.”

With research-informed ideas for improvement, The Good put together a succinct, prioritized roadmap of testing ideas and reviewed the plan with Prep Expert.

Takeaway: A collaborative approach, combining internal customer insights with external optimization expertise, fuels powerful results rooted in both deep knowledge and fresh perspectives.

Read the full case study here.

How Laird Superfood created a best-in-class ecommerce site with the ‘stay curious and test’ mindset

Laird Superfood delivers on its mission of providing convenient, high-quality, plant-based products. When Alisha joined the then-small team, the website’s limitations were clear, hindering any flexibility to test and optimize. She spearheaded a complete overhaul, creating a fresh foundation for experimentation.

Alisha’s approach emphasized three core principles:

• Data-driven decision-making
• Testing everything
• Always listening to customers

To counter the pitfalls of ego-driven decisions, she instilled a “question everything” mentality, empowering her team to challenge assumptions and prioritize insights from real user behavior.

Determined to avoid reliance on gut feeling, every website element—from images and copy to seemingly minor details like shipping offers—became subject to rigorous testing. This incremental approach, combined with ambitious projects for greater personalization, delivered a superior customer experience and valuable data for continued optimization.

“When people follow their gut instincts, it can be successful to a point, but if you’re not testing it first, I think you’re going to be very surprised. So we’ve prioritized testing for everything that we do.”

Alisha Runckel, Vice President of Ecommerce and Growth, Laird Superfood

Alisha calls their partnership with The Good a “no-brainer,” and The Good feels the same way. Alisha and Angela’s culture of curiosity, objective thinking, and methodical experimentation make them powerful ecommerce experts.

And something we all agree on: the key to optimizing digital experiences is to “stay curious and test everything.”

Takeaway: A “question everything” mindset combined with methodical testing drives continuous improvement and a superior customer experience, even across large-scale personalization initiatives.

Read the full case study here.

Test and Learn Culture is the Path to Digital Success

Companies that thrive are those that embrace adaptability and customer understanding.

A ‘test and learn’ culture positions your business at the forefront of the digital paradigm shift. It’s a mindset that empowers you to replace guesswork with informed decisions, constantly innovate to exceed customer expectations, and drive sustainable growth.

By establishing a foundation built on curiosity, data fluency, accessibility, and transparency, you’ll create an environment where experimentation is celebrated and insights flow freely. Remember, the journey to an optimized digital experience is an ongoing one. Embracing ‘test and learn’ means continuous learning, fueled by both wins and setbacks.

Don’t hesitate to seek guidance along the way. If you’re ready to build a truly data-driven, customer-centric organization, contact The Good.

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