Evelyn EBO talks about the importance of Experimentation to Product Managers

Rommil from Experiment Nation: Hi Evelyn, thanks for taking the time to chat with us today! For the benefit of our audience, could you introduce yourself?

Evelyn: I’m Evelyn EBO. I’m a product manager at Advans Nigeria, a leading international microfinance bank that is geared towards providing premium financial services to her clients. I’m Nigerian.

Very cool. I'd love to learn more about your career path and how you got to where you are today.

Over the years, I have built up a diverse set of skills, qualities, and experience from various customer facing roles, the quest to upskill and stay updated in the industry has got me to where I am today in my career.

In your opinion, how important is Experimentation with Product Managers today?

Knowing how to experiment is a vital skill for Product Managers today. It's as important as building the product itself, we are often faced with choices that are experimental in nature in the course of performing our daily tasks.

I completely agree. But I guess I'm pretty biased!

One of the most important things a Product Manager will ever do is "make product decisions". How does Experimentation help make good product decisions?

Experimentation helps make good product decisions because they expose any weak point in the product strategy and identify knowledge gaps that need to be filled with evidence gathered from customer insights. 

Scenarios that might play out in the future are tested, guess work is eliminated and time wastage is avoided.

Definitely. I think that's something that many Product Managers don't understand. While it feels like Experimentation slows down product development, it actually speeds up the time to a product that actually resonates with customers.

When experimenting with products, we need to find our users. You recently shared ??insights from Moshe Mikanovsky’s talk on Where to find users. I'd love to get your take on where to find them?

I agree with Moshe Mikanovsky’s insights on where to find users. Depending on the target segment for our products, our users are always available in specific places where our target segment is found. 

My tip is to define and understand your target users, develop a persona for your users and from insights on what your users love and their activities, you can outline where to find them.

Have you run any interesting experiments on a product? If so, could you tell us about it?

Today, I run a product teardown workshop on LinkedIn where we pick two products solving about the same problem in the the same sector and run interesting experiments on various aspects of the products such as Onboarding, User Interface & User Experience, Product Goal & Strategy from the Product Manager’s Point of View, Complaint Management, Suggestions to help each Product Scale amongst others.

Very cool. Well, it's that time again. It's time for the Lightning Round!

Describe yourself in 5 words or less.

Positive about Change.

Frequentist or Bayesian?

Bayesian.

If you couldn’t work in Experimentation, what would you be doing today?

If I couldn’t work in Experimentation, I will be a sales person today.

What do you have going on that you feel our audience should know about?

Asides the Product Teardown Workshop, I open up my calendar from time to time in giving back to the Product Community by having a one on one session called “Product Management in 33 Minutes” with Product Enthusiasts and help them break into Product Management. I try to answer their questions, clear their doubts and fears about Product Management.

I love that. So many people out there are looking to get into Product Management.

Who should we interview next and why?

Olabanji Ewenla, because he is a great Product Manager who also loves experimentation.

Awesome! Well - we'll definitely reach out! Thanks for your chatting with us today!