Experimentation

The formula is not a clerical detail A business asks a causal question: What happens if we change X? The analytics team returns a formula. Everyone relaxes. The effect is identifiable, the notation looks official, and a graph somewhere has probably been blessed by someone with a PhD. Excellent. Time to move to dashboards. ...

A/B tests are expensive in the least glamorous way. Not because the math is hard. Not because a conversion metric is philosophically mysterious. The real cost is coordination: product approval, legal review, user-risk arguments, instrumentation, waiting for enough traffic, and then explaining to someone why the “obvious winner” was not statistically obvious at all. ...