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Isford: Prioritize Directional Signals Over Statistical Significance in Niche Experiments

Lauryn Isford · Lauryn Isford: Product Growth Secrets from Facebook, Airtable, BlueBottle, Dropbox & Notion | E1037 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 19, 2023 · at 51:08

Lauryn Isford is the Head of Product Growth at Notion. She explains how growth teams should evaluate experiment duration and metric changes when testing on small user sets.

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“In some cases, if you're making a change that's focused on a pretty narrow set of customers, you may never actually get to that significance. It might take months, right? Or even a year. So in general, I worry less about how long to run an experiment and think more about what are the key signals that will help us determine if the behavior we seek from our customers is happening or not happening. And then what are the guardrails that we want to look at? So even if you run an experiment for a week or two, you might see that more people are paying for your product or fewer people are paying for your product. And without significance, it could give you enough signal to say, let's keep moving and let's get this out the door and ship it to everyone.”

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