Testing Mind Map Series: How to Think Like a CRO Pro (Part 91)

Interview with Dzifa Mensah

There’s the experimentation everyone talks about. And then there’s how it actually happens.

We’re hunting for signals in the noise to bring you conversations with people who live in the data. The ones who obsess over test design and know how to secure buy-in even when results are complex.

They’ve built systems that scale. Weathered the failed tests. Convinced the unconvincible stakeholders.

And now they’re here: opening up their playbooks and sharing the good stuff.

This week, we’re chatting with Dzifa Mensah, a Conversion Optimization Specialist with over a decade of experience spanning web development, growth marketing, and experimentation across multiple industries and continents.

Dzifa, tell us about yourself. What inspired you to get into testing & optimization?

I’m a CRO Specialist with experience across SaaS, e-commerce, and the charity sector, three worlds that couldn’t be more different from each other, which honestly makes the work endlessly fascinating. At my core, I’ve always been someone who experiments: with habits, decisions, routines. So in hindsight, it feels inevitable that I ended up working in Experimentation professionally. The moment it clicked was when I realised I could take the scientific method,  hypothesis, test, learn, and apply it directly to understanding what real users actually want. That combination of rigour and curiosity hooked me.

Answer in 5 words or fewer: What is the discipline of optimization to you?

Making every interaction meaningfully better

How is AI influencing experimentation for you? How do you think about incorporating AI in your workflows?

AI has quietly become a reliable thinking partner in the pre-test phase. Where I used to spend hours manually consolidating quantitative data and qualitative research, I now use AI to surface patterns and contradictions much faster and translate those into sharper hypotheses and test ideas.

But it doesn’t stop at ideation. I’m also leaning on AI for stakeholder management: drafting test announcements, writing reports that are actually readable, and communicating results in ways that land with non-technical audiences. Ultimately, the goal is to spend less time formatting and more time thinking.

Where are CRO & experimentation headed? And why? How can practitioners adjust?

Like most corners of technology, I believe CRO is moving towards a place where critical thinking and rigorous analysis will be the last competitive advantage. The tools are getting smarter. The automation is getting better. But what AI can’t replicate is genuine human understanding, ie, the ability to sit with a user during research, notice the hesitation in their voice, catch the detail that doesn’t show up in any dashboard.

Practitioners who double down on their analytical instincts, stay curious about user psychology, and treat every test as a learning opportunity rather than just a metric chase will be the ones who thrive.  

Talk to us about the unique experiments you’ve run over the years.

One that sticks with me: I ran a multivariate experiment across several country websites – French, English, and German versions of what was essentially the same proposition. The assumption was that the audiences were broadly similar, so results would be broadly similar. They weren’t. Only the English website reached statistical significance.

It was a humbling reminder that localisation goes far beyond translation. Cultural context shapes how people interpret, trust, and act on information in ways that generic copy simply can’t account for. One message, very different meanings.

Then there’s the work I do at a charity. Optimising for donations isn’t like optimising for purchases. You’re working at the intersection of emotion, empathy, and trust. These are metrics that don’t sit neatly in a dashboard. I’ve had to fundamentally rethink what “conversion” means when the user’s decision is about generosity, not convenience.

Last but not least, AI taking over repetitive tasks and simplifying execution. How has that changed the way you describe work? 

I talk less about doing tasks and more about directing outcomes. The mechanical parts of the job, including formatting reports, structuring briefs, and pulling together research summaries are increasingly handled. What remains, and what I focus on, is the judgement layer: knowing which questions to ask, what to test, and what the results actually mean for real people.

If anything, AI has made the human side of this work feel more valuable, not less. The craft is in the thinking.

Cheers for reading! If you’ve caught the CRO bug… you’re in good company here. Be sure to check back often, we have fresh interviews dropping twice a month.

And if you’re in the mood for a binge read, have a gander at our earlier interviews with Gursimran Gujral, Haley Carpenter, Rishi Rawat, Sina Fak, Eden Bidani, Jakub Linowski, Shiva Manjunath, Deborah O’Malley, Andra Baragan, Rich Page, Ruben de Boer, Abi Hough, Alex Birkett, John Ostrowski, Ryan Levander, Ryan Thomas, Bhavik Patel, Siobhan Solberg, Tim Mehta, Rommil Santiago, Steph Le Prevost, Nils Koppelmann, Danielle Schwolow, Kevin Szpak, Marianne Stjernvall, Christoph Böcker, Max Bradley, Samuel Hess, Riccardo Vandra, Lukas Petrauskas, Gabriela Florea, Sean Clanchy, Ryan Webb, Tracy Laranjo, Lucia van den Brink, LeAnn Reyes, Lucrezia Platé, Daniel Jones, May Chin, Kyle Hearnshaw, Gerda Vogt-Thomas, Melanie Kyrklund, Sahil Patel, Lucas Vos, David Sanchez del Real, Oliver Kenyon, David Stepien, Maria Luiza de Lange, Callum Dreniw, Shirley Lee, Rúben Marinheiro, Lorik Mullaademi, Sergio Simarro Villalba, Georgiana Hunter-Cozens, Asmir Muminovic, Edd Saunders, Marc Uitterhoeve, Zander Aycock, Eduardo Marconi Pinheiro Lima, Linda Bustos, Marouscha Dorenbos, Cristina Molina, Tim Donets, Jarrah Hemmant, Cristina Giorgetti, Tom van den Berg, Tyler Hudson, Oliver West, Brian Poe, Carlos Trujillo, Eddie Aguilar, Matt Tilling, Jake Sapirstein, Nils Stotz, Hannah Davis, Jon Crowder, Mike Fawcett, Greg Wendel, Sadie Neve, Cristina McGuire, Richard Joe, Ruud van der Veer, Merritt Aho, Felipe Henrique Fogarolli, Riccardo Oricchio, Bruno Borges, Daniel Mullins, Matthew Bass, Pieter Boonstra, and Simbar Dube.