How AB tests help Growth Product Managers

With more and more companies investing in Product Growth, running AB tests became a promising strategy for leveraging digital products. Presenting one or more versions of a layout, navigation flow, or content to users increases the likelihood of product conversion while providing insightful data about your business.

Given that Product Growth managers are responsible for handling the overall strategy of how a product should be sold and used, AB tests should be their best friend of all time.

If you are a growth PM and wish to understand how it can help you, keep up with us.

What are AB tests?

AB testing is a type of user experimentation. The main idea is to present a different version of content to users to measure how they impact your goals.

It is worth emphasizing that to be assertive, an AB testing strategy cannot start from guesswork. To draft your first hypotheses, you should analyze previously collected data and put yourself in your users' shoes to think about how to improve their experience.

If you are new to this world, this template can help you start a plan off on the right foot.

How can AB tests help growth product managers?

Today, most companies understand the matter of a data-driven strategy.

Although AB tests don't allow you to know exactly how each user will behave in a given situation, the ability to identify and analyze the probability of something happening as you expect is very promising.

Simply put, AB testing can help your product growth strategy in many different ways:

• Efficiency over investments
  AB tests make your decisions less arbitrary and more data-driven. Consequently, it helps your team avoid influencing HiPPOs and contextless stakeholders, make fewer mistakes, and get better results with the available resources.
• Scale and speed
  It would help if you had well-defined processes to scale fast. By making your decisions more data-driven, you avoid the pitfalls and the back and forth of subjective analysis.
• Room for innovation
  One of the most significant benefits of using AB tests is that you also enable a scenario with more conditions for innovation. That's because the domain of experimentation allows you to take control of risks, a fundamental characteristic for companies that want to start something new.

When to use AB tests in your strategy?

Before answering this question, it is essential to highlight that you shouldn't use AB tests as a silver bullet. As a growth product manager, you should make the most of what's available to improve the user experience: running experiments, personalizing the content, analyzing RFM segments, using progressive profiling, and so on.

That said, we can list some cases where it can shine:

• Validate UI and communication aspects
  One of the most well-known applications of AB testing is for UI validations. Tweaking all factors like layout, copy, images, and page elements are essential to guarantee users can browse and solve their problems quickly. Monitoring and testing them is an ongoing process: they can significantly improve results no matter how small the changes are.
• Optimize users' flows
  As AB tests mature, we can go far beyond testing copy and images. Croct, for example, allows you to connect several pages in unique flows so you can test the users' paths. Thus, you can analyze whether a different flow or a shortcut can influence the conversion rate.
• Check technology updates
  We know that keeping up with so many shifts in technology is not easy. How do you test all recently-launched products or features without being surprised with some bad news along the way? In some cases, it is wise to AB test them in small parts of your user base to ensure the improvements would help you evolve your product.

If you want to put experimentation into practice, we are here to help you with this challenge. We have the right engine for you to AB test each step in your users' experience. Create your free account and explore our platform by yourself.