In this episode, Chris Goward, founder and CEO of Widerfunnel, the Go Digital Group and the author of “You Should Test That!” shares his insights on creating dramatic business improvements by developing a culture that looks to improve the user experience for customers.
Some topics we discussed include:
- What got Chris started on the journey to improve user experience for customers
- What experimentation as a methodology means
- The observed mistakes marketers make today
- What’s driving the change to improve user experience for customers
- Chris’s perspective on what it takes to grow a business
- What is the infinity optimization process as a framework
- How to use the infinity optimization process to help build and implement experimentation in businesses
- How to apply testing to non-revenue areas of a business
- How to factor in emotion into your marketing
- and much more
00:00 Chris Goward: Hi. I'm Chris Goward, founder of Widerfunnel and author of "You Should Test That!" I help create predictable business success by helping companies to improve their customer experience and ultimately enterprise value by making evidence-based decisions in their digital experiences.
00:18 Vinay Koshy: Chris, thanks for taking time out to join us on the podcast.
00:22 Chris Goward: Well, thank you very much for the invitation.
00:25 Vinay Koshy: No ice, pleasure to have you. Chris, I think, if I remember correctly, you have had streaks of entrepreneurism and experimentation at a very young age, but I'm curious, what would you say is your personal area of strength?
[chuckle]
00:41 Chris Goward: A good question. Yeah, entrepreneurship has been always an interest of mine. From the early days, I think, at one point on my LinkedIn profile, I had my first experience when I was 8 or 9 years old, creating lemonade stands. But I would say that, as we all do, combining the experiences throughout our career, picking up various skills and things along the way that contribute towards understanding customers and how to deliver value to them. And, to me, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got when I was working at an ad agency at the time in accounts and service, someone said, "If you view yourself as an entrepreneur, even if you're working for someone else, if you're in a job, if you're... Whether you're self-employed or you're employed at the post office, if you see yourself as an entrepreneur, meaning that you have customers around you that you're providing value to, then you're gonna be a better employee, you're gonna be a better consultant, you're gonna be a better salesperson or an actual entrepreneur, because you're thinking about the value chain." So, that perspective and picking up skills for how to do that has really always been important.
01:58 Vinay Koshy: Certainly. And what would you say in that area of strength is something that businesses don't know but should?
02:06 Chris Goward: Well, you know what, I find it's almost even worse in the larger businesses, but companies tend to degrade their perspective or move more and more internally focused and think about their needs as a business and their needs as an employee within the business or a department within the business, whether it's politics and fighting for space or budget, or whatever that is, and totally forgetting about the customer. And it's almost... It's so obvious that the customer is the most important thing when you're thinking about how to grow your business, but it's surprisingly difficult for companies to do, to maintain that strict customer obsession, that focus on what is best for them.
02:50 Vinay Koshy: I'm curious, what would you say was a defining moment which got you started on this journey of behavioral science experimentation. Was there a specific event?
03:02 Chris Goward: Yeah. I don't know if I could pinpoint one specific defining event, but it was certainly a defining experience in my life, where earlier in my career I was working, as I said, at these ad agencies for quite a few years. And I was specifically mainly in the direct marketing area, direct mail, email marketing, CRM sort of area. And I was also building websites. And what I saw in a lot of traditional agencies, they had developed these digital departments, and they were building websites and then also running a lot of campaigns. And I saw them proposing these budgets to clients that, to me, didn't make any sense because so much of the budget was going towards developing these big shiny ideas, and there was an aversion to having any kind of measurability or testing or even focus on results in a lot of cases.
03:55 Chris Goward: And so they were selling what I thought was, seemed like a lot of snake oil sort of smoke and mirrors or perception of mystique, and it wasn't really tied to business value. And I thought, "There has to be a better way to do this. It just doesn't seem right the way these budgets are being spent." And so I left the ad agencies with a real strong drive to do something completely different, and that's how we started Widerfunnel, as an anti-agency at the time, this was back in 2007, where I actually made a promise that we would never make a recommendation that we wouldn't test, which is the exact opposite of what most agencies still today do. And so that was a defining moment that really set the trajectory for what Widerfunnel has done since.
04:44 Vinay Koshy: Nowadays, I would say, I see a lot of principles of psychology and behavioral science being used both in conversion and testing. Is it just the awareness of these principles that's driving this momentum, or is there something else that's driving all of this?
05:06 Chris Goward: Well, I think it's just the... Well, there's a few things. When I started in this space, early days in experimentation, back then it was AB testing and multivariate testing, everyone was really excited about this technology that allowed them to do that. But most of the people who were really excited about it were in an analytics department, or they were analytics consultants, or maybe they were managing ad campaigns, but it was a very conversion-rate focus, very tactical. And I came in a little bit naive, not really understanding analytics that much. I knew the basics of analytics, but I was more interested in marketing and customer behavior and the persuasional elements of why certain test results win and why others don't. I was more on the creative side of testing and understanding people.
05:56 Chris Goward: And so I came in with a completely different perspective that really aligned with behavioral science. And that's why early on in the development of Widerfunnel, we created frameworks that changed the industry away from just thinking about analytics and numbers, which are important but don't tell the whole story, and thinking about how to put yourself in the shoes of your customer. For example, the LIFT Model, which was the first framework that we developed, the whole purpose of it was really to help put yourself behind the lens of the customer to think about the barriers and the persuasive elements that they're facing in that moment. And really what we were using was a behavioral science model, called the fuel and friction model, which shows that there are two primary forces, and the LIFT Model which is a specific application of that behavioral science framework.
06:52 Vinay Koshy: So, this is going beyond using the tools that people talk about, like the heat maps, and analytics, and things of that nature, to really understanding people and their experiences. Is it a process that involves just watching and monitoring? Or does it also involve interacting with these individuals?
07:16 Chris Goward: Right. Yeah, the best methodology combines a lot of different techniques to get a rich view of the customer. The analytics is still very important. We use analytics every day, whether it's clickstream analytics, or your typical Google, Adobe analytics tools, or more rich, video capture analysis or smaller numbers qualitative, one-on-one individual studies, like user testing and different types of things, even ethnographic research studies. All of these combined in a very defined methodology, which we call a mixed method approach to this, is every different type of methodology has different uses. Some are more qualitative, which give you more rich understanding. Others are more quantitative, which gives you more confidence. Some are more attitudinal, which, like surveys, gather what people believe that they believe, or believe that they'll do, versus behavioral, which is more observational of what they're actually doing. But any one methodology only takes one perspective and looks at one particular aspect. And so you have to combine all of those different tools to get a really rich, high-fidelity view of what your customers actually believe and how they act.
08:46 Vinay Koshy: And in terms of this whole experimentation methodology that you're advocating, would I be right in saying that it really answers questions around conversion and, and user experience, as opposed to more revenue-generating-type outcomes?
09:05 Chris Goward: Well, it's really about understanding your customers, generating insights about your customers to help you make better business decisions in terms of your experience, and your value proposition, and your product and innovation, ultimately leading to more reliable business growth and enterprise value. It should be... If it's done properly, it's actually connecting the business objectives, through to the questions about how to accomplish those business objectives to running experiments that aren't just about customer experience or conversion rate. Those are just methods to get to the end point, which is answering business questions that lead to business growth.
09:49 Chris Goward: There are many different lenses that you can apply experimentation to. Some of them are very tactical, "What color buttons should I have? What kind of imagery should we use? And how should the forms be designed?" And all of those types of things, all the way up to customer questions and then real business questions. For example, we're often running experiments that, for some of our clients that are asking fundamental questions about their product, about their product roadmap, about their customer and their perception of the value proposition, where they should be positioned against competitors, all of those things can be answered using experimentation and to get, overall, the business growth.
10:32 Vinay Koshy: And if I understand this correctly, you work with sites that obviously have a large volume of traffic or data from which you can extrapolate. Would that be correct?
10:44 Chris Goward: Yeah. Primarily we're working with very, yeah, usually higher traffic websites. And a lot of the validation work needs a lot of quantitative sample size to be able to get statistical significance, for sure.
10:57 Vinay Koshy: I'm curious, with the volumes of data that you're getting, especially qualitative data, and I'm thinking of, say, getting answers to your product roadmap, for example, you tend to get a wide spectrum of answers. How do you filter the ones that are probably more aligned to your business objectives as opposed to others that can take you off on a tangent?
11:25 Chris Goward: The answers that you get from customers in terms of the question...
11:29 Vinay Koshy: Yeah.
11:30 Chris Goward: Well, and that's where the different methodologies in combination work well together. If I'm running, qualitative surveys that get customer feedback, yeah, we could have a variety of different types of perspectives from different customers that might be in contradiction to one another, or they might just not represent the entire customer base, because it's a small volume, but from the qualitative studies, we'll perhaps hear the voice of the customer in a different way than if we had predefined an experiment. And so it's kind of a rich way of gathering more potential insights. But those are only directional until we then take it to a quantitative method for validating which ones of those are actual problems faced by the larger group of customers, and then, most importantly, which of our solutions actually answer that problem or solve that problem, answer that question or direct the business in the right way. That's actually why qualitative and quantitative studies need to be paired together to both enrich the insights and then validate the solutions.
12:45 Vinay Koshy: And in terms of getting this holistic understanding, there's organizations like yourself that come in and consult and provide solutions, but is it just a lack of knowledge that prevents companies from doing this themselves and making some headway at least?
13:04 Chris Goward: Yeah. Well, in a lot of cases, that's true. The science is, on its face, fairly simple. Look at evidence, create a hypothesis, design an experiment, and look at the results. Relatively simple. But there are many different gotchas along the way that show that if an experiment is designed incorrectly, you can actually have very misleading results and make poor decisions that unfortunately you're actually more confident in because you've designed a poor experiment that's told you something that's incorrect, for example. And then also creating weak questions, the hypothesis, the design of the experiments, if you design it incorrectly, you can actually spend a lot more time running experiments that you didn't need to run because you could have designed it better to maximize your growth and insights.
14:00 Chris Goward: So, there's a whole lot of expertise in not only identifying the problems, designing solutions, which is a whole skill in itself, and then running proper validation experiments. It's relatively advanced work, and there are a lot of great companies that are out there doing it, we're certainly not the only ones who have a monopoly on how to run experiments, but our clients really value that we've been doing this since the early days and continue to push the field further in terms of methodology and reliable framework so that they can implement those kind of frameworks and methodologies in their company and start to build that as a core competency over time.
14:40 Vinay Koshy: And you talked about the LIFT Model earlier on as a way of understanding customers and users of websites and apps. That's evolved into what's called the Infinity Process Optimization framework.
14:55 Chris Goward: Right.
14:55 Vinay Koshy: Could you talk us through that, and the key elements of how it would work for a company?
15:04 Chris Goward: Yeah. The LIFT Model was the first framework that we developed. We've continued to develop and evolve the frameworks to answer specific questions that we come up with as we go, and the purpose was really to create very robust, rigorous methodologies that are reliable, so you can plug a lot of different people into the methodology and still come out with reliable, confident results. And so the LIFT Model was designed first, which was to understand how to evaluate experiences from customers' perspectives based on the six factors that we identified were causing either problems or motivation for customers to complete an action. The value proposition is the core, the relevance of the presentation, the clarity, anxiety, distraction, urgency. And those six factors are generally the most important categories that all of the friction and fuel elements fall into. That was the first point. But then surrounding that... Yeah?
16:06 Vinay Koshy: Sorry, can I just ask a question on that, because a lot of people talk about having a really clear value proposition, and maybe this is just me or... But I get the feeling that others have this difficulty as well, in that there are often elements that distract from the user experience or from the value proposition that aren't easily picked up on by business folk. How would you go about identifying those distractions?
16:41 Chris Goward: Yeah. Well, the way I define value proposition is... There's four components to value proposition. There is the perceived benefits, which include the tangible and the intangible benefits. And then there are the perceived costs, which include the tangible and intangible costs of taking action. And it's an equation that goes on in a person's mind, between the perceived cost and the perceived benefits of taking action. And if the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived cost, there is a positive motivation, we'll say it's a positive value proposition, and you can enhance those by removing perceived costs or enhancing perceived benefits. It's really that simple.
17:28 Chris Goward: But what's challenging is really understanding, from the customer's perspective, what are all of those perceived costs and benefits? 'Cause so many of them are based on previous interactions with your brands, expectations, interactions with previous... Your competitors, the cultural perceptions, and where they grew up and different geographies and regions. All of those things influence the perception. So, it really takes some of those different study methodologies to understand the components of that. And then you really only wanna focus on the ones that create motivation or remove any uncertainty. And so anything else is distraction, as you've mentioned. And that's why distraction is very important, distraction is one of those top six factors that you have to identify.
18:22 Vinay Koshy: To help some of the listeners really focus on the one objective or outcome that you're trying to get a person to follow through on, on the screen that's in front of them, is that a good rule of thumb?
18:37 Chris Goward: Well, yeah. Clarity and removing distraction are sometimes two sides of the same coin. Clarity is how quickly are you communicating the important elements of the value proposition to your customers and removing any distracting elements, which are anything that redirects attention from the primary message and the primary action you want them to take. And distraction can take a lot of different forms. It can be over-embellished design. It can be too many bullet points, too much copywriting, too many different offers or calls to actions, or price options, or you see all these charts of all the different SaaS subscription price options, and it just might be overwhelming for people, this paradox of choice starts to kick in at some point. And so that's where the elegant design of the experience will be able to solve that problem by communicating more rich information in a much more simple elegant way that eliminates that distraction and communicates with more clarity.
19:40 Vinay Koshy: Assuming you have the LIFT Model worked out, what would be the process of developing hypotheses and testing out and repeating this process?
19:51 Chris Goward: Right. Yeah. That's where Infinity has come into play in the last few years, where Infinity expanded on this idea that... Because what we found is that there are two mindsets that we ended up using pretty early on in Widerfunnel's growth, where we would bring our consultants and strategists together to analyze experiences. And what I discovered early on was that we had to separate the meeting into two components. One is identifying problems and looking at all of the data and all of the messy pieces of information that we understand about the customers, analyzing the problems based on the customer's perspective. And then the other side of... The other half of the meeting was designing solutions and finding new ways of solving those problems to create powerful experiments.
20:44 Chris Goward: And so what we discovered is that it's actually a much bigger challenge where we actually... What the Infinity model shows is that there's two sides or two mindsets that have to be working together. One is the explorer side, where we're looking at... Overturning rocks and looking at all the data, and it's a messy process of talking to customers and looking at analytics, to find potential opportunity, it's really an expansive mindset of looking for opportunities. And then the validate mindset is the opposite. It's a reductive mindset of eliminating anything that doesn't prove itself to add business value and not complicate the business even more. And so, they're often in businesses, different people are better at different mindsets, but the best marketers are those who can embrace that conflict between the explorer and validate mindsets, and come up with really powerful ideas, and alternate between the two to continue to enhance their ideas through using more exploration and then switching over to validation and reduction, and back and forth. So, there's a lot more nuances built into the design of the Infinity framework, but that's the main takeaway from how it's designed.
22:00 Vinay Koshy: Sure. And I'll include a link to the Infinity Process in the show notes. But I'm curious, from what you were saying I gather, that this isn't necessarily a job for a single person. It requires a few people to really come in and bring their thoughts to the table, would that be correct?
22:22 Chris Goward: Well, it certainly is enhanced with more people, sometimes specialist, experts that are really deep specialists in certain areas. But, in a pinch, if you have a really talented marketer or optimizer or a business-person that can think expansively and creatively as well as rigorously and reductively, then it's certainly possible, but that's much more rare to find those kind of unicorns that are able to operate in both of those mindsets.
22:50 Vinay Koshy: Correct me if I'm wrong, but on a high level, it sounds almost like a growth mapping framework. Would that be correct?
23:00 Chris Goward: Well, it certainly drives the growth. It's growth mapping in that sense.
23:06 Vinay Koshy: Yep. Because you... It seems to me that you follow a similar process of creating a hypothesis or a series of hypotheses determining which ones have the best potential probably based on data, and then investing your time and energy on validating those, which then draws you back to the hypotheses scenario again, where you're coming up with more experiments to better the overall experience and thereby revenue.
23:36 Chris Goward: Yeah, that's exactly right. That's really describing the validate side of the Infinity Process, where you've got to identify the hypotheses, prioritize which ones are the most important to answer, design experiments to maximize the growth and outcomes... Growth and insights, I should say, and then run the experiments with proper methodology to get the answers that you need, and then analyze those to create new hypotheses or new questions to answer in the explorer side. So, it becomes a virtuous cycle of building on the insights from previous experiments. If the experiments are designed properly, you can generate... Every experiment is what I call a winner because there is some insight that you gathered, some new nugget about the customer that can build into further questions and more growth.
24:29 Vinay Koshy: What would be... I'm just gonna take a simple example here of, say, a landing page. What do we need to keep in mind with this type of mindset in determining a good baseline for making it live and publishing it if we have some insights into what customers want? Is there a few must haves that determine a baseline?
25:00 Chris Goward: The baseline for creating a good experiment?
25:03 Vinay Koshy: Experiment and perhaps more, to bring to more practical level. Let's say it's a landing page.
25:09 Chris Goward: Like designing a good landing page?
25:13 Vinay Koshy: Yeah. Is it just about the elements on the landing page or are there particular behavioral science type must haves that need to go into the production of a landing page?
25:28 Chris Goward: Well, there are a lot of them. We know of nearly 200 cognitive biases, for example, that can be at play if you're using the right or the wrong words or images. It's not like there's a checklist of, here's the 20 things that every landing page has to have. There's a lot more than that to it. But I would say that the starting with something like the LIFT Model is a really good starting point, because it at least gives you a checkbox of six things, six categories of things anyway, to scan the page and understand. The way you would do that is look at your initial landing page design, and go through and understand, first of all, the core of it. "What is my value proposition? What are my actions trying to communicate?" And actually documenting, "Okay, what are the perceived costs and benefits of taking action? Okay, which ones are the highest priority benefits that I should emphasize. Is that on the page? Am I communicating those value proposition points?" And then go through the rest of the LIFT points.
26:31 Chris Goward: Clarity. "Is there anything on this page that is maybe compromising the clarity of the communication? Is there anything that is reducing the ability to understand what I'm saying? Is the wording flowing well? Is the imagery reinforcing the value process?" All of those things contribute to that. And then thinking about relevance. "Is it relevant to where they just clicked from?" Looking at the ads they just clicked on, or the previous page in the typical flow, "What button did they click, and is that paid off on this page? Are there expectations and needs being paid off here?" Then anxiety, distraction, urgency, all of these things. What you do is, even with each of those filters, scan the page, and ask yourself, "Is there anything that I'm seeing in this section of the page that's creating a problem in one of those areas?" And that'll usually end up revealing many different elements or potential ideas for how it can be improved with new experiments.
27:36 Vinay Koshy: I'm curious, can this also be applied to a video or even a podcast?
27:43 Chris Goward: Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah. We're applying these methodologies to all kinds of customer experiences. Usually they have some visual element to it, 'cause it creates a lot more richness to how we can... What we can work with, but video for sure, product, even product interfaces, whether it's video game interfaces we're doing, some work with email, of course, and everywhere... Anywhere that customers interface with your brand is an opportunity.
28:11 Vinay Koshy: Okay, right. So, there needs to be an element to interactivity, would that be correct? As opposed to something like a podcast where it's more of a passive...
[overlapping conversation]
28:19 Chris Goward: Yeah. I would say that we're really looking at giving the customer a choice in the action that they wanna take. They have to take... They'd be willing to... Or need to take some kind of action, then we can talk about how to optimize that experience.
28:34 Vinay Koshy: Certainly, okay. What about things like non-revenue areas of a business? For example, engagement with content, is that something worth pursuing, or do you really recommend looking at more revenue-driven areas of a business?
28:53 Chris Goward: Well, wherever there are questions that you have about a customer's experience, you can answer them with experimentation. It's certainly within content. If your goal is... It's really about the business goal. If your goal, as a business, or as a non-profit, or as a government organization, or whatever it is, is to communicate a message and to have more content consumption, then that can be a goal that you can test. In most cases, there's some sort of revenue-driving action because that's more interesting to most businesses or are tied to more direct business goal, but we've optimized for all kinds of elements, whether it's consuming more content.
29:35 Chris Goward: We know that publishers do all kinds of experimentation to try to get people to consume more pages of content because ultimately they're compensated by showing more CPM base, these ads, views, and so that can be a valid goal. Although you wanna balance it also with customer satisfaction. There are often guardrail metrics that you wanna use in those kind of experiments. You don't degrade your customer experience just for the purpose of short-term revenue gains, and that's a whole other topic about how to create the right metrics.
30:12 Vinay Koshy: What would you recommend to businesses that perhaps have parts of their site or app, for example, that don't receive a lot of traffic. How do you experiment for those type of conditions?
30:29 Chris Goward: Yeah. Well, in that case, you're gonna want to wait more towards the qualitative experiments. Experimentation doesn't need to be high volume to aim for a 95% statistical significance to be useful. You can get useful insights from talking to customers using qualitative methods. We've developed a methodology, for example, called motivation lab, which is like an enhanced user experience testing that where traditional user experience, user testing, it looks for UX problems, like barriers or errors or things that people can't seem to accomplish. Well, we realize that there's an emotional aspect of this as well, that's much richer and more valuable in some cases in terms of customer understanding. So, motivation lab identifies the user testing barriers, and then on top of that, identifies the emotional context that someone's going through as they go through that experience, which then can identify emotional hypotheses that might improve the experience.
31:37 Chris Goward: And you can even validate using qualitative methods for low traffic sites just by doing some quick validation test, whether it's a five-second test or those kind of things that you can get feedback from. It might not necessarily be with your direct customers. You might be able to go to a panel to do that. We've developed another methodology, just brand new, that we haven't even launched publicly yet, we've just been pilot testing with some of our larger clients, called Prevision, which allows us to tap into a large panel and test feedback on different designs at scale with very low investment, but with high insights, without actually having to go publicly and test. So, there are different methodologies that are available. There's always a way, if it's valuable enough.
32:27 Vinay Koshy: Certainly. If I were to say, what is, I guess, a common mistake or a big mistake that you see businesses making in terms of running interviews or gaining some of this data that can feed into optimizing the user experience, what would you say it is?
32:52 Chris Goward: Well, there are many, depending on the business' approach of things, but I would say that there are generally five categories of areas that companies have to get right in order to have a great program. And it's what I call the experimentation packet. It's the process, accountability, culture, expertise, and technology. And a lot of times, businesses are very attracted to the technology side of it, and really want to hope and pray and dream that if they just buy a tool, it'll solve all their problems, or at least that's what the tool vendors will sell them on.
33:32 Chris Goward: And technology is absolutely critical for being able to keep pace today, for sure, but it's not a solution in itself. You need to have a strategy around it. And the other four elements are just as important, so you got to have the right process. And if you don't have the right process, you can be really inefficient in getting results. You have to have the right accountabilities, the right people doing the right things with the right metrics, and making sure that the metrics are rich and actually answering the right questions. The culture is important to make sure that everyone is asking questions and looking at the evidence for answers, rather than their gut feeling or trying to sabotage, sometimes, the results. And then having the right expertise. All of those things are areas where there's often gaps or things that are missing, and if companies aren't focused on them, they might overlook some of their barriers.
34:30 Vinay Koshy: When you say culture, are you talking specifically about the culture of the team that may be tasked with this specifically, or does it need to be more of an organizationally wide culture?
34:43 Chris Goward: Well, it's... Whether it's in the team or in the organization is a function of the maturity of the company. And so when a company starts with experimentation, it might start with one person, one champion who really wants to experiment, and then they might build up a team. They get some traction and they get some buy-in, and they start to do that. But eventually, it will spread throughout the organization, where it becomes just the way a company does business. And experimentation is in every fiber of the company, and that's where it's a real mature experimentation organization. That's where the leaders are today, the leading companies have this as a culture from top to bottom.
35:30 Vinay Koshy: That would suggest to me that there needs to be quite a bit of ongoing education, would that be correct?
35:38 Chris Goward: Yeah, absolutely. Right. Yeah, and there are various ways that different companies are accomplishing that, from creating, in some cases, centers of excellence, where the experts within the company will be a resource for people as they're learning to do this. There may be a cycle of people from different departments joining a center of excellence for a period of time to gather that information, then go back and become ambassadors. There may be internal training programs. There's all kinds of ways of doing that, depending on how the company is structured.
36:12 Vinay Koshy: So, the general philosophy of something like this would be that you map out the various touch points with customers and look to optimize each of those? Would that be the general thought process?
36:28 Chris Goward: Well, yeah. Part of this... One of the factors that we look at is all of the customer touch points and prioritizing which ones are most valuable to the company. And we use a methodology to prioritize them, not surprisingly, we have a framework for that as well. It's called PIE, and we prioritize the zones to experiment in, based on potential, importance, and ease of the area, as well as the hypothesis or the idea.
37:00 Chris Goward: And so, we have to take into account the business goals. If it's just about optimization and increasing conversion rate, then we can just look at the zones that need the most attention for improvement, and we can prioritize there. But if we also wanna answer more important business questions, then we need to prioritize what questions are most powerful for the business and consider that in the prioritization as well. And prioritization is incredibly important, because, as everyone listening knows, I'm sure you have finite resources. You only have a certain amount of work you can do every month. And so, you have to really focus your experiment energy on the most powerful areas that are going to be replicatable or applicable to more areas of the business.
37:49 Vinay Koshy: Chris, is there any other aspect of experimentation or improving user experience that I should have asked about and we haven't covered?
38:00 Chris Goward: I think you've had some very well-prepared questions here, so I think we covered quite a lot of ground. I think that... We touched on a little bit about the maturity of organizations, and there's... We've found five distinct levels of maturity. And so, when you're thinking about this experimentation packet, process, accountability, culture, expertise and technology, at any one point in time, one of those will be your constraint, your barrier to increased velocity of insights. And so, what I would suggest is that, if you identify what that area is, that will tell you where to focus not just at the hypothesis level but at the program level, "How do I improve the program the most?" Will be to focus on my one area of constraint, widen that, and then continue to improve the program that way. That's the last thing I'd leave you with, I think.
38:53 Vinay Koshy: Excellent. Chris, if you were listening to this episode, what would you say would be your big takeaway?
[chuckle]
39:01 Chris Goward: Well, I would take away that the rigor and methodology is very important to get right, rather than just flying by the seat of your pants and trying to look at tips and tricks. So, look for reliable, replicatable methods for the scientific approach, rather than a list of tips and tricks. That's what I would hope to take away.
39:25 Vinay Koshy: Certainly. Widerfunnel.com is your website. Is there any other place that you would recommend people head to in order to find out more or connect with you?
39:36 Chris Goward: Well, widerfunnel.com/blog is a great place to sign up and get the ongoing news and webinars and white papers and research reports. You can also check out my book, called "You Should Test That!" at wherever books are sold in your area. And at youshouldtestthat.com there's a little bit of information about that, that's a good start.
39:58 Vinay Koshy: Excellent. Thanks so much, Chris.
40:00 Chris Goward: Thank you.
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