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What I Learned Sharing Product Experiments with City College Students

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 A few months ago, Shaun Lowthorpe put out a call on LinkedIn for people willing to share real‑life experiences of using business analysis at work. Although I haven’t done what you’d call traditional business analysis for years, I work in a Product led organisation, and I love getting up in front of a room and talking. So I volunteered, and Shaun kindly accepted.

I wanted to show how we use tools like Amplitude to test and measure the impact of user interface enhancements. After chatting with colleagues, I put together a short ten minute presentation about some of the A/B experiments we’d run to improve the guest booking details experience. I’d never presented this kind of material on my own before, so it was a little daunting. I was keen to make sure I had the details right, especially in case I was hit with any tricky questions.

Presenting can be unpredictable. Sometimes my energy doesn’t quite match the mood of the room, even after I’ve got them all to grin and wave for a photo. But the group from City College were already chatting when I walked into the room. They introduced themselves enthusiastically, shared where they worked, and I even discovered that I’d been at school with one of their employers - Norwich really is a small place.

The presentation went down really well, I got laughs in most of the right places and some excellent questions at the end. It was all over in about half an hour, and I’m hoping to get the chance to come back to City College and speak again.

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