August 13, 2025

Happy Tuesday, today’s smart brevity count is: 523 words, 4 mins. Edited by Nils Koppelmann.

Today's theme: Take a beginner's mindset

In today's newsletter, we will go over:

1. Strategic & Tactical: Take a beginner's mindset
2. Your new job in experimentation?
3. Upcoming events in 2025

Excited? Read on.

1 big thing: Take a beginner's mindset

Strategic Insights for Experimentation Leaders

When building and forming an experimentation program I often see leaders trying to get it perfect right away.

That defeats the point. Experimentation is not about being perfect or about being the expert, or more dangerously: pretending to be the expert when you're not.

→ Start with a beginner's mind and understand that being a beginner in fact is a feature not a bug.

This means that especially in the beginning of establishing experimentation in your organization, but also at various other stages, there will be things that don't go as planned.

These challenges offer the a unique opportunity to learn. (Remember last weeks insight: ”The experimentation maturity gap is a strategic capability problem that determines who learns faster.”)

Making learning the main focus of experimentation in your organization will outperform any aim for perfection.

This doesn't mean that you should aim for mediocrity:

• If you aim low (mediocrity), your outcome distribution centers lower. Even your “wins” are average.
• If you aim high (excellence), the whole distribution shifts right. Even your misses tend to beat “average.”

The paradox: perfectionism (waiting for flawless ideas or never shipping) kills iteration velocity → fewer shots on goal → mediocre portfolio returns.

Humbleness is a key trait that fosters an experimentation mindset in organizations and puts learning at the heart of the program.

What this means in practice:

• Optimize for rate of learning, not polish. Ship 80/20, increase velocity, then improve quality.
• Keep the bar of ambition high (problems worth solving), keep the bar of shipping low (frictionless release).
• Over time, compounding iterations + high-aim problems = outsized returns.

PS: shipping 80/20 doesn't mean skipping research and product work, it just means not going for perfection. Both in terms of experiments, but also building the program and process.

Give yourself permission to be a beginner.

2. Your new job in experimentation?

This week’s featured roles:

• ​Data Scientist – Experimentation at CoMind (London, United Kingdom)
• ​Consultant – Data & Optimisation (CRO) at WeLyft (Paris, France)
• ​Software Engineer, Experimentation at Vercel (London or Berlin)
• ​Manager, Product Analytics and Experimentation at Ticketmaster (USA)
• ​CRO Specialist at Brightscout (Remote)

Couldn't find a job that's interesting to you? Check out more here.

3. World class events

Upcoming conferences in in 2025:

• 13th-17th October 2025, Experiment Nation Connects, Online
• 20th-22nd October 2025, EXL 2025 in Austin TX, USA
• 21st-23rd November 2025, Conversion Hotel in Texel, Netherlands

Find more events over at lu.ma/experimentation-events.

That's a wrap – until next week.

– Nils

P.S.:

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