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Weiss: Early products lack the scale for A/B testing and require intuition

Noah Desai Weiss · Lessons from Slack on decision making, product-led growth, and taking big swings | Noah Desai Weiss · Jul 13, 2023 · at 5:16

Noah Desai Weiss, CPO at Slack, explains the limitations of empirical experimentation when building early-stage products.

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“And definitely for most early products, you don't even have the scale to actually be able to say, we ran a test, we're gonna run the test for a year before you get statistical significance. You have to use intuition, judgment, strategy a lot more.”

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