Experimental Mind: Culture, Walmart, Podcast, Datasets, Megastudies …

Hi everyone,

This is newsletter number 122. In the last couple of years I have learned a lot about making a newsletter that people actually read. I’m thinking of creating a short course on how to build your own succesful newsletter. If that sounds interesting to you, let me know.

For this week’s overview, I have selected 6 articles and 24 job opportunities (including 3 new ones).

Let’s go 👇

🔎 What I’ve been reading this week

1. The role of culture in innovation

One way that culture affects innovation is by encouraging or discouraging innovators – the people willing to experiment and take risks. People have a natural desire to invent, but innovators have more freedom to develop and disseminate inventions when they’re in a culture that embraces innovation.

2. Why are you not running more experiments?

Ronny Kohavi shared this insight from a presentation about the culture of experimentation at Walmart:

[tweet https://twitter.com/ronnyk/status/1468678355222368256]

3. New podcast: Experimentation Masters

This is a new podcast by Gavin Bryant:

Learn practical tips, methods and techniques from world-leading experts in experimentation. Design better experiments, lead with more confidence and have more impact in your organisation. Learn faster. Make better decisions.

4. Datasets for Online Controlled Experiments

Bryan Liu explains in this video about the initiative to make A/B testing datasets publicly available.

5. Online course: Experimentation Program Management

New CXL course by Ben Labay on experimentation program management. So in case your experimentation program can use a big push, consider this course. You will get a clear understanding of the pillars of experimentation programs and how to scale them to your needs.

6. Paper: Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science

Paper by Katy Milkman et al. in Nature:

Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes1. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time intervals2. The lack of comparability of such individual investigations limits their potential to inform policy. Here, to address this limitation and accelerate the pace of discovery, we introduce the megastudy—a massive field experiment in which the effects of many different interventions are compared in the same population on the same objectively measured outcome for the same duration.

🚀 Job opportunities

Are you looking for a new opportunity? These are this week’s featured jobs:

Or check the other 20 open roles from companies like RTL, ANWB, VodafoneZiggo, IKEA, Netflix, Apple, Adidas, Gitlab, Stripe, Just Eat, Skyscanner, Lego and Spotify.

Is your company hiring? Post your open roles to the job board. Readers of this newsletters can post for free, by using this coupon code at the last step: SUBSCRIBER200

📅 Upcoming events

This is a running list of upcoming events:

Do you know of an event that should be on this list? Let me know.

💬 Quote of the week

“The only way to get better is to constantly experiment.” — James Altucher [source]

😉 Fun of the week

I came across this funny, illustrated children’s book, teaching analytics terminology to young kids: ‘A is for Analytics‘.

🔁 Any feedback?

I like to hear what you think of this newsletter, Share your feedback, it takes less than a minute.

🙏 Thanks for reading

If you’re enjoying the Experimental Mind newsletter you can buy me a coffee or beer (in case you rather use Paypal, you can send it to ‘kevin@experimentalmind.com’. Thanks to 14 people who already did it. Much appreciated.

And share this email with a friend or colleague. I would love this community of experimenters to grow. You can point them here to subscribe.

One new subscriber recently shared that his new manager added this newsletter to the onboarding program as “a resource to pay attention to”. I think these are simply the best recommendations.

Have a great week — and keep experimenting.

Kevin

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