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Weiss: Consistently neutral A/B test results signal a local optimum

Noah Desai Weiss · Lessons from Slack on decision making, product-led growth, and taking big swings | Noah Desai Weiss · Jul 13, 2023 · at 8:02

Noah Desai Weiss, Chief Product Officer at Slack, describes how Slack recognized that its onboarding funnel experiments had reached a plateau in mid-2020.

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“And this is, I think, often a good sign that you need to stop relying on experimentation and step back, which is that every experiment wasn't really positive or wasn't really negative. It was really just neutral. And it became increasingly hard to figure out What's going on where we can't make any positive or negative effect, which kind of seems to me that we had reached a, at least a local optima with the overall kind of end-to-end experience.”

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