Did it ever happen to you that you got so excited by a new idea that you ran an experiment without putting together a proper experiment brief? I am guilty of it. But I have learned from that mistake and to make life easier for you, I share my template for defining experiments with you.
Key sections of the template
As a minimum, always take the time to define the hypothesis (and background), expected business impact, and target audience.
- Never start a new experiment without defining a clear hypothesis. To craft a meaningful hypothesis follow for instance a structure similar to the following one. And do not forget to add a statement about how confident you are in this hypothesis so that you can also prioritize it among other experimentation ideas using the (R)ICE framework.
Because <some insight/learnings/data/evidence we have> we believe that <doing this thing> will result in <some change to this metric>.
- If you have been following my posts, then you will have noticed that I pay close attention to the expected business impact. When you are defining experiments, it is no different. You need to draw a line in the sand on how you expect the key metric(s) to move with the introduction of the new variant. Also make sure to write down how you are going to track the expected impact (who checks when and using which tools).
- It is important that you take some time to think about who should be exposed to the experiment so that you can draw the right conclusions. Define which audiences and platforms are targeted at what point in time.
Download free template
Download the free template here.
