When you think of an organization with mature experimentation practices, what comes to mind? If you’re like most executives, you probably picture teams running hundreds of tests, impressive-looking dashboards full of metrics, and maybe a company that just won an award for “experimentation culture”
You’d be wrong.
After nearly a decade of working with hundreds of experimentation programs across global enterprises, we’re excited to announce our evolution from Effective Experiments to Efestra.
This isn’t just a rebrand. It’s a fundamental shift that reflects what we’ve learned about what organizations truly need to make experimentation work at scale.
In an era where competitive advantage increasingly comes from learning faster than competitors, experimentation represents a critical organizational capability. But like any capability, it requires proper leadership to realize its full potential.
Experimentation teams have failed at making learning valuable. Experimentation’s most pervasive hypocrisy: publicly celebrating learning while privately focussing on wins and conversion rate uplifts.
Organizations don’t lack experimentation driven insights & knowledge—it’s that they’ve made it inaccessible, incomprehensible, and therefore irrelevant to the people who need it most.
The experimentation industry has a truth problem. The dirty secret of modern experimentation is that we’ve optimized for theatrical success rather than strategic truth, and the language we use perpetuates this dangerous charade.
Make experimentation fun and accessible! This is the standard “democratize experimentation” playbook but enthusiasm alone cannot sustain or scale experimentation in an organization.
Experimentation programs lack a fundamental governance tool: an objective experiment scorecard that measures quality and reliability, not just statistical outcomes. Without such a scorecard, your experimentation program is flying blind, mistaking statistical significance for strategic value.
Most organizations approach hiring experimentation leaders the same way they’d hire senior practitioners—looking for deeper technical skills, more testing experience, and better optimization results. This approach virtually guarantees you’ll hire someone who will build a bigger testing factory when what you need is strategic decision-making infrastructure.
The way most companies approach experimentation documentation isn’t just inefficient—it’s a governance crisis that undermines the entire value of your experimentation program.
