Experimentation Works

Thomke studied experimentation programmes at companies including Booking.com, Microsoft and Amazon, and wrote about what turns testing into a capability rather than an occasional activity. The book covers what makes a good business experiment, the discipline required for a valid one, and the low success rate of ideas that everybody was certain about. A large part of it is about culture and management, including how to run a company where a junior employee's test result can overrule a senior person's opinion. There is material on scaling from a handful of tests to thousands, and on the infrastructure and governance that requires. Read it for the organisational argument rather than for the statistics.