The Experimentation Edge
The Experimentation Edge is a podcast about how product teams decide what to build and what not to build. Product, growth, and engineering leaders share how A/B testing, feature flags, and experimentation drive business outcomes, with examples from companies like DoorDash, Atlassian, and UPS. Hosted by Ashley Stirrup, CMO at GrowthBook, it is aimed at product managers, engineers, data scientists, and growth leaders at B2B tech companies. Episodes focus on experimentation culture, statistical rigor, and shipping with confidence, without marketing speak.
Episodes
Typeform on how to stop running experiments and start earning them
If 80% of A/B tests fail, how do you de-risk decisions that touch pricing, product, and brand? Aleksandra (Aleks) Bass, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Typeform, shares how her team “earns the right to A/B test” with medical-grade rigor—moving from literature reviews and user tests to simulated trials before exposing changes to customers. She details Typeform’s repositioning fro
How Moxie Pest Control boosted conversions 5% with data and coaching
Think pest control isn’t a digital business? Think again.Raj Mehta, Vice President of Product and Technology at Moxie Pest Control, outlines how he turned a spreadsheet-run operation into a data-driven engine across 9,000+ daily calls.Raj shares how consolidating fragmented systems into a data lake unlocked automation—from shrinking lead routing from 20–25 minutes to under 30 seconds—to d
Upwork on AI-Driven Ops at scale
SummaryWhat do you test rigorously—and what do you ship fast and fix forward—when every change could impact millions?Vinoj Kumar, Vice President of Engineering at Upwork, leads at the intersection of infrastructure and product, where feedback loops are longer and the blast radius is wider.He shares a pragmatic framework for experimentation—blast radius x reversibility—that sets testing ri
From chatbots to open-world agents at Microsoft: evals, go-live metrics, and copilot velocity
AI is moving so fast that what “good” looked like a few months ago is already outdated.So how do you measure value, ship safely, and scale what works? Marco Casalaina, VP of Products, Core AI and AI Futurist at Microsoft, joins to unpack how his team builds and evaluates next‑gen AI—at hyperspeed.Marco leads the AI Futures team and previously led Azure OpenAI, Azure Cognitive Services, Re
Truist on shipping faster and more safely with AI and human-in-the-loop banking
How do you boost developer velocity in a highly regulated industry—without sacrificing safety or customer trust? Charles Williams, Senior Vice President and Software Engineering Director at Truist (formed from the BB&T and SunTrust merger), shares how his team elevates developer experience to ship faster and more reliably. Charles breaks down shifting quality “left” with automation, m
The 5 pixels that cost LinkedIn a million dollars a month
SummaryHow do you build a culture where nothing ships without evidence—and leaders actually act on the data? Makram Mansour, Head of Marketplace at ID.me and former experimentation leader at LinkedIn and Intuit, shares the systems, mindsets, and guardrails behind “experimenting everywhere.” At LinkedIn, he helped support 10,000+ annual experiments with 2,000 weekly platform users, and he
Fyxer's engineering playbook to go from $1M to $35M ARR
SummaryHow do you drive hypergrowth without guessing? Kameron Tanseli, Head of Growth Engineering at Fyxer—an AI assistant for your email—breaks down the experimentation playbook that helped the company scale from $1M to $35M ARR, with sights set on $100–$150M. Kameron explains how startups should think about A/B testing differently: de-risk big bets, not just button colors. He shares a r
Ancestry on AI Storytelling, Paywalls, and Decision Quality
SummaryWhat happens when A/B testing stops being a tool and becomes your operating system? Suresh Teckchandani, VP of Product & Technology at Ancestry (formerly PayPal and eBay), shares how the team scaled experimentation from isolated tests to capability-building that drives roadmap and revenue. He details the “growth metering” and paywall experiments that unlocked a 5.3% lift in key
Inside Chess.com's Plan to Run 1,000 Experiments in a Single Year
SummaryChess.com ran its first A/B test in 2023. Two years later, the team is on track to run 1,000 experiments in a single year—and they've already shipped 195 in Q1.In this episode, Ashley Stirrup sits down with Nafis Shaikh, Director of Product Management at Chess.com, to get inside the experimentation engine powering one of the world's most beloved gaming products.Nafis brings experie
How Experimentation Led to Annual Growth at Fanatics
SummaryMost e-commerce companies test a handful of features each month. Fanatics runs nearly 100 experiments monthly and delivers a big portion of the company's total annual growth through experimentation alone. Medha Umarji, VP of Growth and Experimentation at the multi-billion dollar sports merchandising retailer, explains how she built a program that scales from 10 tests per month to 1
How UPS generated half a billion from 80+ apps with A/B testing
This episode of The Experimentation Edge shows how UPS's A/B testing program drove $500M+ in incremental revenue across 80+ customer-facing applications. Dave Massey — head of the J.E.D.I. team (Journey Experience and Design Innovation) — walks through the first test that proved UX could move revenue, how he defended counterintuitive results to skeptical execs, and how a small experimenta
How DoorDash saved millions with one A/B test
This episode of The Experimentation Edge unpacks how DoorDash's experimentation platform runs 12,000+ A/B tests per year across 42 million monthly active users — and now powers merchant-led testing on menu pricing and promotions. Ilya Izrailevsky, Senior Engineering Manager leading the platform, explains how feature flags, marketplace experimentation, and CEO-level experiment reviews buil
Atlassian on the talent product turnaround from A/B testing
This episode of The Experimentation Edge explores how A/B testing, feature flags, and user research transformed Atlassian's talent product after it failed with its first users. Andrew Willingham — 11 years at Amazon, now Head of Legal and People Products at Atlassian — shares how product experimentation works when you can't test at scale, why your customer and your user are not the same p
The 2% close rate increase that turned Ford Credit's product teams into believers
SummaryOn this edition of The Experimentation Edge, Ashley Stirrup talks with Geoffrey Bell, Experimentation Product Specialist at Ford Credit, about building an experimentation practice inside a captive auto lender. Geoffrey shares the losing test that earned his program credibility, the "experimentation piggy bank" he picked up at Microsoft, and the breakthrough of connecting online exp
RingCentral's DART framework: The four metrics that actually measure AI agents
SummaryRingCentral's Director of Product Management for AI Products, Mayank Agarwal, joins host Ashley Stirrup to dismantle the metrics most teams use to judge AI agents. Drawing on his background founding an AI-first quantitative trading firm and scaling Groupon's bookable marketplace, Mayank explains why accuracy and thumbs-up/down feedback both mislead, and introduces DART — a four-met
Signet Jeweler's "View All" page made more money by showing less
SummaryCraig Kistler, VP of Experience Design, Personalization, and Experimentation at Signet Jewelers (the parent company of Kay, Jared, Zales, Peoples, and Banter), joins host Ashley Stirrup on The Experimentation Edge to unpack how a hybrid online-and-in-store jewelry retailer runs experimentation at scale. Craig shares the counterintuitive "view all" experiment where his team blocked
Squarespace killed its blank template and built something better
SummaryWhat do you do when your big launch increases engagement and tanks conversion? On this episode of The Experimentation Edge, host Ashley Stirrup talks with Lina Blackman, Director of Product Analytics at Squarespace, about the blank template launch that flopped — and how its learnings became Blueprint, Squarespace's AI-guided website builder. Lina explains how her embedded analyst t
Twitch on why false negatives kill product ideas
SummaryHow do you make a high-stakes product decision when the safe choice is to never test it at all? In this episode of The Experimentation Edge, host Ashley Stirrup talks with Arun Bodapati, director of data science at Twitch, about the discipline behind trustworthy experimentation. Drawing on his experience at Schwab, Uber, and Twitch, Arun explains why false negatives are the most da
Ship faster, measure better: experimentation tips from JPMorgan Chase
SummaryHow do you know if the thing you just shipped actually worked? On this episode of The Experimentation Edge, host Ashley Stirrup, CMO of GrowthBook, sits down with Kevin Yang, Executive Director and Head of Experimentation at JPMorgan Chase, who has spent six years building experimentation across Chase's digital platforms. Kevin shares how his team turned experimentation into more t
How Disney picks which experiments to run
SummaryWhat does it look like to kill a multimillion dollar feature before anyone builds it? In this episode of The Experimentation Edge, host Ashley Stirrup talks with Crystal Ammari, a digital product optimization and experimentation strategy leader whose career spans Nike and The Walt Disney Company. Crystal shares the "dry test" that used a single fake button to measure demand for vid
Inside The Home Depot's experimentation at a $25B scale
SummaryWhat does experimentation look like inside a $150 billion retailer? In this episode of The Experimentation Edge, host Ashley Stirrup talks with Kim Ting Li, Senior Manager of Experimentation at The Home Depot, where one centralized team tests every major change to a $25 billion online business. Kim explains how 40 people serve 40–50 business teams, why executives join test readouts
How Fin went from weeks to hours of analysis using AI
SummaryIn this episode of The Experimentation Edge, host Ashley Stirrup sits down with Raunak Kumar, senior manager of GTM analytics at Fin (formerly Intercom), to unpack how experimentation actually works when the data is messy and the traffic is thin. Drawing on nearly 12 years in marketing analytics across Atlassian, Stripe, and Fin, Raunak explains how AI tools like Claude Code have c
What the Expedia Group cannot measure, it cannot ship
SummaryAmir Moghaddam, Director of Software Engineering at Expedia Group, joins host Ashley Stirrup on The Experimentation Edge to make the case that measurement is not a reporting step but a gate: what you cannot measure, you cannot ship. Drawing on nearly four years at DoorDash and his current work leading Expedia's air booking platform, Amir explains why he refuses to label experiments
The metric Stitch Fix says every experimenter should chase
SummaryIn this episode of The Experimentation Edge, GrowthBook CMO Ashley Stirrup sits down with Nick Beyler, data science manager at Stitch Fix, where he leads the decision and insights team and owns the company's internal experimentation platform. Nick shares why the metric he most wants is the one he can't measure yet, a North Star that predicts a client's long-term value from their ea
Diligent explains why moving on from an experiment might cost you
SummaryDan Layfield, Director of Product Management at Diligent, joins host Ashley Stirrup on The Experimentation Edge to trace what fifteen years of A/B testing across Codecademy, Uber Eats, and the Fortune 1000 boardroom actually taught him. He breaks down the Codecademy trial-model rebuild that took four months and several rounds to deliver a 35% conversion lift, why moving on from a l
The 'wine effect' and other surprises that reshaped how Box runs e-commerce experiments
SummaryIn this episode of The Experimentation Edge, host Ashley Stirrup talks with Danielle Olean, Director of E-commerce at Box, about what it really takes to build a culture of experimentation inside a B2B company. Drawing on 15 years across B2C and B2B at Wayfair, Drizly, Zoom, and now Box, Danielle explains why experimentation belongs to every product team and not just e-commerce, wal
How Kargo turns losing experiments into competitive edges
SummaryIn this episode of The Experimentation Edge, host Ashley Stirrup, CMO of GrowthBook, sits down with James Falzone, Director of Product Management at Kargo, to unpack how a high scale ad tech marketplace turns failure into its biggest advantage. James explains how Kargo connects advertisers to publishers through real time auctions that resolve in milliseconds across up to 10 billion
How Fin A/B Tests Millions of Samples in Days
SummaryOn this episode of The Experimentation Edge, host Ashley Stirrup talks with Pedro Tabacof, Principal Machine Learning Scientist at Fin (formerly Intercom), about how one of the most advanced AI customer support agents in the world is built on relentless experimentation. Pedro explains why unit tests don't work on non-deterministic AI, how Fin runs up to two dozen concurrent A/B tes
How Cogniteer Built an Experimentation Engine From Scratch
SummaryIn this episode of The Experimentation Edge, host Ashley Stirrup talks with Fabian Hans, founder and behavioral psychologist at Cogniteer, a consultancy that helps enterprises build in-house experimentation programs and raise both test velocity and win rate. Drawing on fifteen years in conversion rate optimization, Fabian explains why mass-producing the same A/B tests across client
Why Farfetch manages by learning rate, not win rate
SummaryLuis Trindade, Principal Product Manager of Experimentation at Farfetch, joins host Ashley Stirrup to explain how one of the world's largest luxury marketplaces built its own experimentation platform and the culture around it. Luis covers the move from a hybrid setup with an external testing vendor to Fabs 2.0, the in house system where a feature toggle is the single entry point fo
Why US Bank considers missing even 1% of customers unacceptable
SummaryHow does a major bank scale experimentation when even one percent of customers missing an experience is unacceptable? Vijay Lal, Lead Product Manager for Experimentation at US Bank, joins host Ashley Stirrup, CMO at GrowthBook, to share how his team made their experimentation platform self serve for non technical marketers, how a login widget experiment led to a two second fallback
How Principal A/B tests on customers who don't exist
SummaryWhat if you could A/B test on customers who don't exist before spending a single live impression? Erika Dunn, assistant director of data science at Principal Financial Group, joins host Ashley Stirrup, CMO at GrowthBook, to share how she built synthetic digital audiences entirely in house: profiles shaped by real data that rank content by likelihood of engagement, whose first live
Why The Aspen Group targets a 25% win rate
SummaryWhat does a winning A/B test mean when your website serves 1,100 dentist owned offices? In this episode of The Experimentation Edge, host Ashley Stirrup talks with Arie Polycarpou, Senior Manager of Test and Learn at Aspen Dental, about building experimentation programs at Kohl's, Marriott, Total Wine, and now the largest company in The Aspen Group's healthcare retail portfolio. Ar
Why JobLeads says one test won't move you, but 100 will
SummaryWhat happens when the most logical feature you've ever built has zero impact? In this episode of The Experimentation Edge, host Ashley Stirrup, CMO of GrowthBook, sits down with Edd Saunders, product experimentation manager at JobLeads, to unpack the pizza personalization experiment that cut an ordering flow from 22 clicks to 5 and changed nothing. Edd shares the problem mapping fr
How Clover experiments when billions of dollars flow through daily
SummaryHow do you run an experimentation program when classic A/B testing is off the table? Ben Schein, Director of Product Management at Clover, joins host Ashley Stirrup to explain how a platform serving 300,000+ merchants and processing billions of dollars daily proves every feature through pilots and ground-level testing before rollout, why uncertainty and downside — not feature visib
How Supercell A/B tests 300 million players without breaking trust
SummaryOn this episode of The Experimentation Edge, Ashley Stirrup talks with Shan Huang, data scientist on the central experimentation team at Supercell, the Helsinki mobile game company behind Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, Hay Day, and Boom Beach. Shan explains how a famously decentralized, creative-first company with 300 million monthly active users runs fewer than 100 A/B
The four questions Early Warning asks before any A/B test
SummaryWhat separates a valid A/B test from an expensive guess? Priya Singhee, VP of Enterprise Analytics & Data Science at Early Warning — the bank-owned consortium that fights payment fraud and operates Zelle, which processed a trillion dollars last year — joins host Ashley Stirrup to share the experimentation playbook she built leading storefront analytics at Wayfair. She walks thr
Learneo on testing the opposite of every hypothesis
SummaryRich Liebling, senior director of engineering at Learneo, joins host Ashley Stirrup to explain the practice that came out of growing Shop It To Me from 50,000 subscribers to one million in nine months: test your hypothesis, and test its opposite. Rich covers the page where cutting text lost and adding text won, why the inverse wins more often than teams expect, and why small focuse
How Zalando connects every experiment to its North Star
SummaryHow do you keep 1,000 experiments a year pointed at one North Star? In this episode of The Experimentation Edge, host Ashley Stirrup talks with Mi Tian, Head of Applied Science at Zalando, about running experimentation inside a central economics org that reports to the CFO. Mi shares how Zalando balances safe confirmatory tests with game-changing bets, how the team measured the dis
Realtor.com on using your AI as a junior data scientist
SummaryWhat do you do when your biggest experiment win turns out to be a loss? Whitney Perez, Director of Product Management at Realtor.com, joins host Ashley Stirrup to share the checkout bundling test that posted a 300% attach rate and still lost revenue, the 30/30/30 rule she uses to set expectations for a new experimentation team, and how AI is turning an English major into an aspirat
Even a loss is a win: Charlie Health's approach to experiments
SummaryOn this episode of The Experimentation Edge, Ashley Stirrup talks with Joe Yevoli, Director of Growth at Charlie Health, a virtual intensive outpatient program that sits between weekly therapy and hospitalization. Joe explains how removing a page from Charlie Health's intake form produced a winning test that created a new bottleneck further down the funnel, why Teachers Pay Teacher
What Samsung learned bringing B2C rigor to B2B
SummaryWhat changes when you take a mature B2C experimentation practice and apply it to a B2B storefront? Anuradha Tempe, Lead Product Manager at Samsung Electronics America, joins host Ashley Stirrup to share what she learned managing both sides of Samsung.com. She explains why B2B is not a sidekick to B2C, how a single bulk order can push a test into a false positive unless you normaliz
Why GoPro stopped judging A/B tests by win rate
Will Guyeskey is Director of Digital Product at GoPro, where his team owns the e-commerce side of gopro.com. Before GoPro he ran personalization at Gap and cut his teeth at Brooks Bell, testing for brands like Barnes & Noble, Under Armour and Ralph Lauren. In this episode of The Experimentation Edge, he tells Ashley Stirrup why knowing your customer is the through line of every good t
Why Twilio ships on signals instead of significance
SummaryWanli Lau spent eleven years at Expedia Group, most recently running consumer product analytics on a program that shipped more than 1,500 A/B tests a year. Five months ago she moved to Twilio to lead global R&D analytics. In this episode she walks Ashley Stirrup through what carried over and what did not.The centerpiece is a test that looked like a win. At Expedia, an account s
ServiceNow's Customer Zero approach to AI experimentation
SummaryServiceNow runs its own platform on itself. Ashraf Karim, Senior Vice President, Connected Customer Experience, owns everything that happens after a customer buys, and her team is Customer Zero, testing every product and capability internally before it ever reaches a customer.She joins Ashley Stirrup to unpack what that vantage point teaches you about experimenting with AI. The hea
PayPal's $180 million experimentation win
SummaryGaurav Sethi joins Ashley Stirrup on The Experimentation Edge to explain how PayPal's experimentation program went from 700 to 800 tests a year with four week readouts to 2,587 experiments a year and roughly $180 million in measured impact. Gaurav inherited a reported win rate of 55% to 60%, four times the industry average, and traced it to experiments logging assignment data inste
How MilliporeSigma lifted add to cart with a smarter search
SummaryDorothy Crepin runs the A/B testing program at MilliporeSigma, the life sciences business of Merck KGaA, where one global catalog has to serve three very different visitors: scientists hunting for a specific instrument, procurement buyers working off a list someone else wrote, and students doing research with no purchasing power at all. Add a regulated industry where what you can s
What Grubhub tests for big product bets before they ship
SummaryGrubhub does not run much classic A/B testing. Michal Lenik, Associate Director of Product Design at Grubhub, explains what the company does instead to make sure its big product bets win before they reach millions of users.She joins Ashley Stirrup to walk through Grubhub's playbook: small cohort rollouts that protect core order metrics, merchant round tables, AI built clickable pro
The auto researcher: How FanDuel finds a winning model in 300 attempts
SummaryMichael Mathews, Director of Data and AI Product at FanDuel, runs the teams behind the auto researcher, an agent that takes a data set, an objective function and the production model, then proposes, writes and scores about 300 strategies in an hour for roughly $300 in tokens, handing back the winner as readable code. Host Ashley Stirrup gets the three things that surprised FanDuel
Why more info lifted VidaXL's account creation nearly 40%
SummarySapna Kashyap, CRO Lead at VidaXL, runs the experimentation program for an e-commerce company operating in more than 30 countries, where product, development and business teams all validate their decisions with an A/B test first. She explains the biggest winner of her career: B2B buyers were abandoning a registration page, a survey showed they could not see what the subscription in
