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Accelerating Innovation with AB Testing

4.7 (66)

·

2 Weeks

·

Cohort-based Course

Learn from a world-leading expert how to design and analyze trustworthy A/B tests to evaluate ideas, integrate AI/ML, and grow your business

This course is popular

6 people enrolled last week.

Previously at

Microsoft
Airbnb
Amazon

Course overview

Empower your organization to be data-driven and innovative

Through multiple real examples of well-run experiments and real stories at Microsoft, Amazon, and Airbnb, you will see the humbling reality that we are terrible at assessing the values of ideas.


Trivial changes can be surprisingly useful, whereas large efforts often fail. Accelerate innovation by building Minimum Viable Products and Features (MVPs) and make the organization evidence-based and humbler, as it adopts and learns to use evidence from the gold standard in science: the controlled experiment.


You will understand the challenges in designing and running trustworthy controlled experiments, or A/B tests, including the importance of the Overall Evaluation Criterion (OEC), scaling, pitfalls, and Twyman's law.


The 2nd week covers additional topics, some more technical, including cultural challenges, institutional memory, maturity model, observational causal studies, offline evaluations, AI/Machine learning and triggering, scaling, build vs. buy, challenges, and requested topics.

Who is this class for?

01

Data science managers and scientists will be able to design and interpret the experiment results in a trustworthy manner

02

Program managers focused on growth, revenue, conversions, and prioritization will understand how to provide the org with robust clear metric

03

Engineering leaders will be able to make the organizations more data-driven and efficient with fewer severe incidents through A/B tests

What you will learn from this 10-hour course

Understand and internalize the humbling reality that we are poor at assessing the values of ideas: most ideas fail!

You will hear multiple real memorable stories and examples, many that don't make it to books or articles. These were chosen from over 20 years of experimentation. You'll have the data to show that the poor success rate is documented across multiple organizations; expected it!

Understand the key advantages and limitations of A/B testing

Understand key concepts like causality, hierarchy of evidence, and key organizational tenets required for effective experimentation.

Learn how to design metrics and the Overall Evaluation Criterion

Designing metrics is hard. There is a hierarchy of metrics and perverse incentives. The most important metrics comprise of the OEC - The Overall Evaluation Criterion. We will look at good and bad examples.

Learn how to designing trustworthy A/B tests

Getting numbers is easy; getting numbers you can trust is hard. You'll understand common pitfalls and how to design reliable and trustworthy tests.

Learn about the cultural challenges

Learn about the cultural challenges, the humbling results (most ideas fail, pivoting, iterating, learning), institutional memory, ideation, prioritization, experimentation platforms

Learn about the relationship to AI and Machine Learning Modeling

When building AI or machine learning models, using A/B testing and triggering to evaluate the models that were built offline based on historical data

Learn about complementary quasi-experimental techniques

When you can't run an A/B test, quasi-experimentation methods and the risks of observational causal studies

Learn about existing challenges

What are key challenges and open questions in the field

Learn about YOUR topic of interest

If there is something specific you want to cover, there is time allocated for topics voted by the audience to discuss

Technical to your needs

The course focuses on developing the intuition and common misunderstandings, without the details of the statistics, which you can find in many books. We cover p-values, statistical power, and triggering.

You can go as technical as you want in the Q&A and community discussions

Course syllabus

Week 1

Dec 2—Dec 8

    Dec

    2

    Session 1

    Mon 12/24:00 PM—6:00 PM (UTC)

    Dec

    3

    Session 2

    Tue 12/34:00 PM—6:00 PM (UTC)

    Dec

    5

    Session 3

    Thu 12/54:00 PM—6:00 PM (UTC)

    Session 1: Introduction, interesting examples, organizational tenets

    2 items

    Session 2 - End-to-end example, metrics, and the OEC

    1 item

    Session 3: Statistics, E2E ex 2, Twyman's law, Ideas, prioritization, ethics

    0 items

Week 2

Dec 9—Dec 12

    Dec

    9

    Session 4

    Mon 12/94:00 PM—6:00 PM (UTC)

    Dec

    12

    Session 5

    Thu 12/124:00 PM—6:00 PM (UTC)

    Session 4: Cultural challenges, maturity, observational causal studies, pitfalls

    0 items

    Session 5: AI/ML, triggering, leakage/interference, scaling, requested topics

    0 items

Post-course

    Jan

    8

    Optional: Alumni event for Accelerating innovation with A/B Testing

    Wed 1/84:00 PM—5:00 PM (UTC)
    Optional

    Optional: Alumni event for Accelerating innovation with A/B Testing

    1 item

4.7 (66 ratings)

What students are saying

100% Customer Satisfaction Guarantee

Not satisfied after attending the first session and before session 2 starts? Get a full refund

Not satisfied after attending the first session and before session 2 starts? Get a full refund

Testimonials: What People on Sphere wrote (the platform where most cohorts were taught before Maven)

        Ronny made the content amazingly easy to consume...I can't recommend it enough
Dylan Lewis

Dylan Lewis

Experimentation Leader at Atlassian
        If you're interested in running A/B tests and learning the science behind them, my highest recommendation is to take Ronny Kohavi's cohort-based course on the topic. (The book Ronny co-authored is tied for first on my reading list too.)
Ryan Lucht

Ryan Lucht

Director of Growth Strategy, Cro Metrics
        The entire course and the way it was delivered was amazing - had tons of learning, especially on where we could go wrong. Examples followed by key concepts was great. Really appreciate Ronny taking time to answer each question even after the session.
Pavan Gangisetty

Pavan Gangisetty

Staff Data Analyst @ Intuit
        The culture of Q&A during the session. The depth and width of the experimentation topic. Really eye-opening learnings from Ronny. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Han Dong

Han Dong

Sr. Business Intelligence Engineer @ Credit Karma
        Ronny covered similar topics that are in his book, but in a way that internalizes the points much deeper.
Scott Theisen

Scott Theisen

Experimentation Product Manager @ Ford Credit
        I love that the session goes beyond the tech & stats of experimentation and also address the cultural aspects.
Sharath Bulusu

Sharath Bulusu

Director of Product Management @ Google
        The curation of relevant examples/stories provides the type of evidence often needed to make a case internally. So helpful to have it assembled in a clear strategy/direction.
James Niehaus

James Niehaus

Director of Experimentation @ Kaiser Permanente
        I love Ronny's stories. I think that apart from the learning, two of the most valuable things from this class are: 1) Stories because you will remember them and they will come in handy and 2) Links so that you can dive deeper.
Ishan Goel

Ishan Goel

Lead Data Scientist @ Wingify
        Ronny is the authority in experimentation...I highly recommend Ronny as a teacher in all things experimentation as I learned a ton from him while working with Microsoft. Ronny is extremely skilled in communicating deep technical knowledge with clarity, friendliness and expertise.
Jakub Linowski

Jakub Linowski

Chief editor of GoodUI - Conversion focused UI Designer
        50% of what I've learned myself about experimentation is wrong. The other half I learned from Ronny.
Deborah O'Malley

Deborah O'Malley

Founder & CEO @ GuessTheTest, named a "top-10" digital marketing experts to follow
        Want to take on the challenge of evolving the scientific culture in your organization with experimentation? I'd highly recommend considering Ronny Kohavi's Sphere cohort...lessons from Ronny's career driving experimentation culture and impact, and invaluable networking opportunities with experimentation leaders.
Aaro Wroblewski

Aaro Wroblewski

Head of Experimentation, Personalization, Marketing, and User Understanding at Zillow
        Ronny's tons of experience is valuable and hearing it firsthand is amazing.
Jialin Huang

Jialin Huang

Director, Customer Knowledge & Strategic Insights @ Fidelity
        Favorite part: Practical info and learnings that weren't in the book but were probably not easily publishable.
Scott Rome

Scott Rome

Senior Principal Engineer @ Comcast
        This is an amazing opportunity. I think of all of the times I have questioned, “does X make sense?” I saved up all of those questions. I’ll tell you that Ronny Kohavi covered MANY of them in his lecture content (so I didn’t have to ask those). It was so powerful to just ask directly. Easily saved me hundreds if not thousands of hours of research.
Aaron Gasperi

Aaron Gasperi

Principal product manager, Walmart
        I had been running a/b tests for many years early on in my career thinking I was doing it "right", and Ronny's class opened my eyes to common mistakes I was making that could completely invalidate my learnings...I often find myself referencing best practices and methodologies learned from Ronny's course in my every day interactions.
Jessica Porges

Jessica Porges

Senior Experimentation Advisor, Split
        An exceptional course that provided in-depth discussions on real-world examples. The class poll, which tested real ideas implemented by big companies, and the winner after A/B testing was an unforgettable experience that cannot be obtained through book reading alone… I find myself going back to the course slides for reference, like today.
Haiyan Chen

Haiyan Chen

Staff Software Development Engineer, OfferUp
        I recently completed Ronny Kohavi's "Accelerating Innovation" program, and it was a truly mind-blowing experience. Throughout the course, I gained practical knowledge and hands-on experience in A/B testing, as well as online and offline testing of machine learning models, interleaving, and causal inference methods....
Emma Ding

Emma Ding

Data Science Career Coach
        Just had an incredible experience as the entire leadership team at Vinted Marketplace joined me in the 'Accelerating Innovation with AB Testing' course by Ronny Kohavi himself! 💪🔥 …Let's take our experimentation game to the next level! 
Manuel de Francisco Vera

Manuel de Francisco Vera

Sr. Director, Data Science & Analytics, Vinted
        Great real examples - love it!
Markus Wiggering

Markus Wiggering

Head of Product Management, CHECK24
        Loved all of it <3 Ron answered all the questions and the courses were exactly what I was looking for.
Sorin Tarna

Sorin Tarna

Conversion Optimization Specialist, Bitdefender
        This course is awesome! I think it is applicable for those with more-matured experimentation cultures and for smaller, scrappier teams navigating the dichotomy of product development and finding PMF. Great insights across the board and Ronny is a great explainer!
Gabriel Rodriguez

Gabriel Rodriguez

Senior Product Manager, Dr. Squatch

Companies with two or more people that took the course

Top: Companies sorted by approximate market cap.
A/B Vendors: sorted by alphabetical order

Top: Companies sorted by approximate market cap. A/B Vendors: sorted by alphabetical order

Meet your instructor

Dr. Ronny Kohavi

Dr. Ronny Kohavi

Ronny Kohavi was an executive at Amazon, Microsoft, and Airbnb and has over 20 years of experience running A/B tests and leading experimentation teams. He loves to teach, and his papers have over 55,000 citations. He co-authored the best-selling book: Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing (with Diane Tang and Ya Xu), which is a top-10 data mining book on Amazon. He is the most viewed writer on Quora's A/B testing and received the Individual Lifetime Achievement Award for Experimentation Culture in Sept 2020.


Ronny holds a PhD in Machine Learning from Stanford University.


See more at http://www.kohavi.com

Course schedule

10 hours total over 5 x 2-hour sessions

  • Week 1: Mon, Tue, Thu

    8-10AM Pacific Time

    Three x 2-hour sessions in week 1 on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday

  • Week 2: Mon, Thu

    8-10AM Pacific Time

    Two x 2-hour sessions in week 2 on Monday and Thursday


  • Optional Q&A

    15 minutes after each session


Free resource

A/B testing book Chapter 1

Interested in reading chapter 1 of my book: Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments : A Practical Guide to A/B Testing?


Get it by entering your email

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Accelerating Innovation with AB Testing

Learning is better with cohorts

Learning is better with cohorts

Real-world examples

We will review multiple real A/B tests

Deep dive design and analysis of two A/B tests

We will deep dive into the full lifecycle of designing an A/B test to answer a hypothesis and analyze the results

Learn with a cohort of peers

Join a community of like-minded people who want to learn and grow alongside you

Requested topics

Missing anything? We have allocated time to suggest topics, collect votes, and discuss them on the last session

Frequently Asked Questions

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Accelerating Innovation with AB Testing