What Exactly Is The “Frankenstack”?

If you’re running an experimentation program, you probably have your own system for tracking tests, documenting results, and managing implementation. Maybe it’s a collection of Airtable bases connected to Jira tickets, with results in Google Sheets and insights captured in Notion. Perhaps you’ve created impressive dashboards in Tableau pulling from multiple sources, or built custom workflows connecting various tools.

Congratulations! You have created what we call a “Frankenstack.”

Like Frankenstein’s monster, this creation is cobbled together from different parts that weren’t designed to work as a unified whole. And while it might appear to function on the surface, beneath that facade lies dysfunction that’s silently undermining your program’s effectiveness.

Why We Build Frankenstacks (And Feel Good About It)

Let’s be honest about why these patchwork systems are so common—there are legitimate reasons why smart, capable teams end up here:

Flexibility and control: You’ve created exactly what you need, customized to your specific process.

Budget-friendly (at first): Many of these tools have free tiers or are already paid for by your organization.

Quick to implement: You didn’t need a lengthy procurement process—you could just start building.

Familiar territory: Your team already knows how to use these tools, so there’s no learning curve.

Visible productivity: There’s genuine satisfaction in building these systems. It feels like meaningful work.

These are all valid advantages, which is why the Frankenstack approach is so pervasive. But they mask deeper problems that become apparent only when we measure the true cost.

The Project Management Mindset Trap

Here’s the fundamental disconnect: When building a Frankenstack, specialists naturally apply a project management mindset to what actually requires a governance mindset.

This subtle but critical difference explains why even meticulously designed DIY systems fail. You spend countless hours perfecting APIs, automations, and integrations between tools, creating the illusion of a robust system. But these technical connections don’t address the fundamental governance requirements of experimentation.

We regularly encounter organizations that have invested in elaborate spreadsheet templates or custom Airtable setups, only to discover critical gaps months later:

• They failed to include fields for predicted business impact, making ROI calculations impossible
• They had no framework for connecting experiments to strategic objectives
• They lacked mechanisms to track implementation outcomes against predictions
• Their system couldn’t enforce methodological consistency across teams
• They provided no way to capture decision rationales for future reference

The consequence? A technically impressive but functionally inadequate system that misses crucial experimentation governance requirements. Your team ends up unable to answer essential questions that leadership cares about most.

As one client told us: “We spent six months building what we thought was the perfect tracking system, only to realize we weren’t capturing the information that actually mattered for business decisions.”

The Specialist Comfort Zone: When Convenience Trumps Accountability

Here’s a hard truth about Frankenstacks that’s rarely acknowledged: they’re often intentionally designed with only the specialist’s convenience in mind, not organizational transparency.

The DIY nature of these systems creates a double-edged sword. On one hand, specialists get tools tailored to their daily workflows. On the other hand, these systems frequently become impenetrable black boxes to everyone else in the organization—especially stakeholders and executives who need visibility into program performance.

Consider these common characteristics of Frankenstacks:

• Complex access requirements: Multiple login credentials for different systems, making stakeholder access cumbersome
• Specialist-only language: Technical terminology and jargon with no translation for business stakeholders
• Buried implementation tracking: Success metrics highlighted but implementation follow-through hidden deep in the system
• Obscured methodology: Testing protocols and quality controls visible only to practitioners
• No executive views: Absent or inadequate leadership dashboards showing strategic impact

This lack of transparency isn’t always accidental. As one executive candidly shared with us: “Our experimentation team built a system so complex that only they could navigate it. It created a convenient shield against tough questions about business impact.”

The uncomfortable reality is that Frankenstacks can become accountability shields—allowing specialists to highlight successes while obscuring failures, delaying uncomfortable conversations about implementation, or avoiding strategic alignment.

A proper governance system balances practitioner needs with stakeholder visibility, creating appropriate interfaces for each audience while maintaining a single source of truth. It doesn’t eliminate specialist autonomy but does create healthy accountability that ultimately elevates the program’s strategic impact.

When Customization Becomes The Enemy of Quality

A common reaction we hear from specialists when first encountering proper governance systems is resistance to constraints:

“Why can’t we add more columns to the Kanban board?” “Why can’t the dashboard show these specific charts?” “Why is there a character limit on our insight statements?”

These reactions reveal a critical misunderstanding: what specialists perceive as arbitrary limitations are actually intentional guardrails designed to ensure quality, consistency, and strategic value.

The freedom to fully customize every aspect of your experimentation system often results in:

• Inconsistent methodology: When everyone can track experiments differently, you lose the ability to compare results across teams or time periods.
• Diluted insights: Unlimited fields for documentation often lead to insight sprawl—where critical learnings get buried in mountains of unstructured text.
• Misaligned metrics: Custom dashboards for different stakeholders create multiple versions of the truth, leading to confusion and distrust.
• Lack of scalability: Hyper-customized systems often break when you try to expand them across departments or teams.

In our experience working with hundreds of experimentation programs, we’ve found that the most impactful teams eventually recognize that some constraints actually enhance creativity rather than limit it. Much like how the structure of a sonnet doesn’t restrict a poet’s creativity but provides a framework to channel it, proper experimentation governance creates productive boundaries that focus energy on generating insights rather than managing tools.

As one converted skeptic told us: “I used to fight against the standardized fields and processes, but now I see they free me to focus on experiment design and analysis instead of documentation. The guardrails actually make our program more agile, not less.”

Debunking The Governance Myths

Let’s address some common misconceptions about experimentation governance:

Myth #1: “Governance will stifle our creativity and slow us down”

Reality: Proper governance actually amplifies creativity by removing the administrative burden that currently consumes 30% of your team’s time. Instead of building and maintaining systems, your specialists can focus on what they do best—designing innovative experiments and generating insights.

As one experimentation lead told us after implementing governance: “I was worried about losing flexibility, but I’ve actually gained at least 10 hours a week to focus on experiment design rather than managing tools.”

Myth #2: “Governance means bureaucracy and rigid processes”

Reality: Effective governance isn’t about bureaucratic control—it’s about creating the infrastructure that enables strategic impact. Think of it as building highways that help ideas travel faster, not roadblocks that slow them down.

Governance provides the guardrails that ensure quality while giving specialists more freedom to innovate within a framework that connects their work to business outcomes.

Myth #3: “We’ll lose our agility and ability to iterate quickly”

Reality: Organizations with mature governance frameworks actually experiment more effectively, not less. They experience:

• 42% reduction in duplicated experiments
• 76% higher implementation rates
• 68% better strategic alignment

This means more of your experiments deliver actual value instead of disappearing into the void.

Myth #4: “Our custom system matches exactly how we work”

Reality: Your workflow should be designed around best practices in experimentation, not limited by the constraints of your tools. A proper governance system adapts to optimal workflows rather than forcing you to adapt your process to tool limitations.

As one director of optimization put it: “I didn’t realize how much we had compromised our methodology to fit our tools until we implemented proper governance.”

The Hidden Costs Of Your Frankenstack

1. The Knowledge Preservation Crisis

Our research shows that organizations using disconnected tools for experimentation retain and reuse only 28% of insights generated from experiments. That means 72% of your hard-earned learnings effectively disappear into the void.

Think about this: How easily can you answer questions like:

• “Have we tested this idea before?”
• “What did we learn from our tests on the checkout flow last year?”
• “Which insights from our pricing experiments have we applied to other areas?”

If finding these answers requires digging through multiple systems, old meetings notes, or—worse—asking “whoever might remember,” you’re experiencing knowledge loss first-hand.

2. The Implementation Black Hole

The average organization fails to properly implement over 40% of successful experiments. When results live in one system, implementation tasks in another, and there’s no accountability framework connecting them, it’s no wonder successful tests fail to generate actual business value.

Consider your last 10 successful experiments. How many were fully implemented? How many generated the predicted business impact? If you can’t confidently answer, your Frankenstack is hiding a serious implementation gap.

3. The Strategic Disconnect

Less than a third of experiments directly support strategic business objectives in organizations using fragmented tools. Without a governance framework connecting experiments to strategic priorities, testing becomes activity without purpose.

When executives ask, “How is our experimentation program advancing our strategic goals?” can you provide a clear, data-backed answer? If not, your program is likely operating in a strategic vacuum.

4. The Resource Drain

Teams spend an average of 30% of their time on manual processes maintaining their Frankenstack—transferring data between systems, creating workarounds for missing functionality, and building custom reports to provide visibility.

That’s nearly one-third of your team’s capacity spent on “shadow work” that generates zero insights or business value.

5. The Trust Gap

Perhaps most damaging is the “trust gap” that emerges between promising test results and leadership confidence in those results. When executives can’t easily trace the connection between experiments and business outcomes, experimentation becomes viewed as a tactical activity rather than a strategic capability.

This undermines your ability to secure resources, influence decisions, and elevate experimentation to the strategic level it deserves.

The False Economy Of DIY Systems

What starts as a cost-saving approach ultimately creates significant financial inefficiency:

Implementation failure cost = (# of failed implementations) × (average cost per failed implementation)

For a mid-sized program, this often exceeds $500,000 annually in wasted opportunities.

Knowledge loss cost = (# of duplicated experiments) × (average cost per experiment)

With experiments typically costing $20,000-$50,000 each, redundant testing due to poor knowledge management quickly becomes a six-figure problem.

Resource inefficiency cost = (team size) × (% time on manual processes) × (average salary)

For a team of 10 specialists spending 30% of their time on Frankenstack maintenance at an average salary of $80,000, that’s $240,000 annually of wasted expertise.

From Cobbled Systems To Governance

The solution isn’t abandoning your experimentation efforts or returning to gut-based decisions. Instead, it’s elevating your approach through proper governance—a unified system that:

• Creates a single source of truth for experimentation knowledge
• Establishes clear connections between experiments and strategic objectives
• Enforces accountability for implementing successful insights
• Provides appropriate visibility to stakeholders at all levels
• Measures program health through meaningful governance metrics

Organizations that transition from Frankenstacks to governed experimentation systems see dramatic improvements:

• 76% increase in implementation success rate
• 68% increase in strategic alignment
• 42% reduction in duplicated efforts
• 3.4x increase in experimentation program ROI

Introducing Efestra: Purpose-Built for Experimentation Governance

After working with hundreds of experimentation programs across industries, we saw the same pattern repeatedly: smart, capable teams held back by cobbled-together systems that failed to deliver strategic value. This observation led to the creation of Efestra—a purpose-built experimentation governance platform designed to close the Trust Gap.

Born from Experience, Not Theory

Efestra wasn’t designed in a vacuum by software engineers imagining what experimentation teams might need. It emerged from nearly a decade of hands-on experience with real experimentation programs facing real challenges.

As our founder, Manuel da Costa, observed while working with experimentation teams: “These were brilliant specialists running sophisticated tests that were reshaping user experiences—yet most couldn’t tell you what tests they’d run last quarter or what they’d learned.”

We built Efestra to solve the problems we witnessed firsthand:

• Knowledge disappearing when team members left
• Successful experiments never making it to implementation
• Leadership questioning the value of experimentation
• Teams spending more time on documentation than insights
• Strategic disconnection between tests and business objectives

Designed Around the Complete Learning Loop

Unlike generic project management tools repurposed for experimentation, Efestra is built around the Complete Learning Loop—a framework that connects experimentation to strategic decision-making through five essential components:

1. Strategic Direction: Aligning experiments with business objectives
2. Governance & Structure: Ensuring quality and consistency
3. Knowledge Creation: Generating reliable insights
4. Implementation & Action: Translating insights into business decisions
5. Organizational Learning: Building institutional memory

This framework ensures that every experiment contributes to organizational learning and strategic outcomes, not just tactical improvements.

Balancing Practitioner Needs with Stakeholder Visibility

Efestra doesn’t force specialists to choose between their workflow preferences and organizational accountability. Instead, it provides:

• Practitioner Interfaces: Streamlined workflows for test creation, execution, and analysis
• Leadership Dashboards: Strategic views for executives focused on business impact
• Stakeholder Access: Appropriate visibility for cross-functional partners
• Single Source of Truth: Connecting all perspectives to a consistent data foundation

The result is a system that supports specialists in doing their best work while creating healthy transparency and accountability.

Guardrails That Elevate Rather Than Restrict

The thoughtfully designed constraints within Efestra aren’t arbitrary limitations—they’re intentional guardrails based on best practices from hundreds of experimentation programs.

For example:

• Character limits on insight statements ensure clarity and focus rather than documentation bloat
• Standardized methodology fields create consistency while allowing for innovation
• Implementation tracking mechanisms enforce accountability without bureaucracy
• Strategic alignment requirements connect individual tests to business outcomes

As one client explained: “What initially felt like limitations became liberating. Our team spends less time deciding how to track work and more time generating insights that matter.”

From Fragmentation to Governance in Weeks, Not Months

Unlike DIY approaches that require months of building and continuous maintenance, Efestra can be implemented and producing value within weeks. Our implementation approach includes:

• Comprehensive assessment of your current state
• Migration of existing data and insights
• Tailored configuration to match your needs
• Team training and enablement
• Strategic alignment workshops

Organizations typically see measurable improvements in governance scores, insight reuse, and implementation rates within the first 90 days—with minimal disruption to ongoing experimentation activities.

Is Your Frankenstack Holding You Back?

Ask yourself these questions to assess your current situation:

1. Can you immediately identify all experiments related to a specific business objective?
2. Do you have visibility into which successful experiments were actually implemented?
3. Can you measure the business impact of your experimentation program beyond test win rates?
4. Is there a governance framework ensuring methodological consistency across teams?
5. Do executives trust experiment results to make strategic decisions?

If you answered “no” to two or more questions, your Frankenstack is likely limiting your program’s strategic impact.

The Choice: Frankenstack or Governance?

The question isn’t whether to document and manage your experimentation program—it’s whether to do so with disconnected tools that create hidden costs or a unified governance system that drives strategic value.

Your experimentation program can be:

• A tactical activity with limited visibility, challenged to prove its value
• A strategic capability directly influencing business decisions at the highest levels

The Frankenstack approach has served its purpose in the early days of experimentation, but as programs mature, they require governance systems that can elevate them to strategic relevance.

Efestra exists to close the Trust Gap—ensuring that what works in testing delivers in reality, transforming experimentation from a technical activity into a strategic business capability.

Your experimentation program deserves better than a Frankenstack. It deserves governance.