Testing Mind Map Series: How to Think Like a CRO Pro (Part 73)

Interview with Jake Sapirstein

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 get buy-in when the numbers aren’t pretty.

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 Jake Sapirstein, Head of Strategy at LiftCentro and CEO at Datatinga.

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

I got into it a bit by chance in the early days of A/B testing being applied to the Internet, but have always loved the unique combo of being creative from a UX strategy standpoint and then geeking out on data at the same time. There aren’t too many gigs where you can do both.

I also enjoy helping organizations discover and grow with experimentation.

Answer in 5 words or less: What is experimentation to you?

Does 2 work? 🙂  Always learning. 

What’s the one resource you recommend to aspiring testers?

There are a bunch out there, but I’ll give the nod to GuessTheTest. Deborah O’Malley does a great job assembling real-world experiment case studies and presenting them in a fun way that challenges viewers to guess the winner. It’s a great way for novices (and pros!) to see what others are testing, what other test data sets look like, etc.

What are the 3 tools every experimentation program should invest in, and why? 

Beyond the obvious (an experimentation platform), analytics tools (that drive both quant and qual research) are essential for coming up with test ideas rooted from hard data. 

A tool to centralize ideas and insights spawned from data initiatives is important, in order to proliferate data and experimentation DNA around the workforce. I am building such a tool, so I may sound biased, but I really think this is the foundation from which experimentation programs can really take off.

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

For a couple of different customers recently – in different spaces – I have been finding that navigation fly out testing (layout and design) can go a long way at accelerating visitor pathways into product pages and I have seen really positive impacts on downstream conversion as a result. I was pleasantly surprised about how profound the impacts were on conversion rates.

Years ago, I did some testing of people imagery in different countries, including relatively homogenous cultures, and we hypothesized that images that included people that looked more like the people where these campaigns were being run, would yield more engagement. The opposite was true – across multiple (and very different) regions. I thought that was interesting, even if not a win. You test and you learn.

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, and Matt Tilling.