How a team experiments matters as much as what

In this episode of Datadrivet, Joni Lindgren and Jasmin Yaya look at why the pace of experimentation often stalls, drawing on a workshop Jasmin ran for a cross-functional team. The team had scaled from zero to five experiments a month and wanted to reach ten.

The argument the hosts make is that the ceiling came from how the team worked together rather than from the substance of what they tested. When throughput stalls, the cause usually sits in the way of working.

A few specific things got in the way. Terminology was fuzzy, so the team needed to agree on what actually counts as an experiment before they could move faster. Several questions had no shared answer: what team members expected of each other, who was responsible for what, and how they communicated internally. Without clarity on those, the team kept getting stuck in discussion and frustration instead of getting more experiments out the door.

The workshop worked by naming the frustration and the obstacles first, then proposing new ways of working and a clearer split of the work. The fix was not a new tool or a clever test design. It was getting the team aligned on roles, definitions, and communication so that the experiments could actually flow.

The takeaway is that experiment velocity is a team problem as much as a method problem. You can know exactly what you want to test and still be capped by unclear roles and loose definitions.

If your team wants help setting up how it runs experiments, the hosts invite you to reach out to scilla.studio or contact them on LinkedIn, and they are keen to hear how other organizations work with data.

Listen to the full episode of Datadrivet for the full discussion of the workshop and what changed.