The Best CROs start with RESEARCH with Rommil Santiago

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Transcript

Rommil Santiago 0:00
Hi, my name is Rommil Santiago, and this is Experiment Nation, the short podcast, a podcast series about experimentation for folks who have no time for podcasts. in under five minutes, I’ll share some of my most recent thoughts about the industry and the craft of experimentation. Let’s get to it.

Rommil Santiago 0:25
Where should you start testing, like with most processes, starting is usually the most challenging part. You know the feeling, it’s when you don’t have your flywheel going quite yet, and you’re not sure at what stage to jump in. When it comes to experimentation. The usual places I see people jump in are at research, hypothesis creation, or setting up the test. And I’m going to tell you why the best CROs always start with research. But before I do that, let’s take a quick step back. If you’re listening to this, I’m going to assume you’d like to create an enduring cycle of testing and learning and yes, ultimately winning. And as we all know,

Rommil Santiago 0:59
all cycles eventually come back to the same spot. That’s what cycles do. After all, in the case of experimentation, that generally happens right after you’ve run your tests and generated your learnings. It’s at this point where inexperienced experimenters ask themselves what now it’s at this point that the cycle often stalls and most of the momentum is lost outside of failed regression testing or internet outages. Rogers. However, if one starts with research, generating a new hypothesis is trivial. Let’s take a basic example. Let’s say we noticed that some office workers are grumpy and from research we discover that they are grumpy because they are hungry. There are many ways we can address this grumpiness problem that range from different snack and dinner options to cruelly ignoring their complaints. But because we have research, we can go through the testing cycle over and over again trying different solutions, generating one learning after another.

Rommil Santiago 1:51
Our testing or learning agenda would be guided, purposeful and efficient.

Rommil Santiago 1:57
Had we skipped the research phase, we would waste cycles, randomly testing hypotheses, or wasting everyone’s time in setting up tests that made no sense. We would certainly waste many cycles asking ourselves what now as we generated lackluster learnings, time and time again. In the end, remember this research helps generate ideas. research focuses thinking, research reduces wasted cycles. Start with research.

Rommil Santiago 2:25
My name is Rommil Santiago. Until next time.

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