What separates experimentation programmes that scale from those that stall
I was at an Eclipse Group Solutions experimentation roundtable last week with senior CRO, product and experimentation leaders from across the industry.
One thing stood out. The teams scaling this well have stopped treating experimentation as a testing programme. They treat it as an operating model.
What that actually looks like
A few things came up again and again:
- A shared vocabulary for hypotheses, so a "test" means the same thing to everyone in the room
- A clear model for where CRO sits in the wider organisation, rather than floating between marketing and product
- A place where learning actually lives after a test finishes, instead of dying quietly in a deck nobody opens again
The Centre of Excellence question
This came up a lot. Decentralise experimentation and standards drift. Centralise it and velocity dies. The hybrid model tries to hold both, but it only works if someone actually makes it work day to day.
More tests isn't the goal
The real shift is towards faster decisioning, backed by insight, not just a higher volume of tests running at once.
It's something we're thinking about a lot at TLA as we experiment and iterate to build more relevant, personalised experiences for our audiences.
