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Keeping It Simple By A/B Testing

This week, we tested different ad copy for our e-commerce business, Rugby Bricks.

The only difference between the ads is the copy.

Ad 1:

Ad 2:

We got a 32% reduction in ad costs from ad 2.

Both ads use social proof, but one is universal, and the other is not.

“Aaron Smith, Quade Cooper & Valentine Holmes” are familiar names in rugby, but it does not mean most people seeing our ads know who they are.

“The ad copy with “900+ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reviews.” is universal social proof as this is how most customers buy.

The hero of this story though?

A/B testing.

Had we not tested the ad copy, we would have continued to have higher customer acquisition costs if we’d just run with the first ad.

Most of what makes up business is about testing something, applying what is learned, and iterating.

Keep it simple; keep testing and keep learning.

Performance Reviews Done Right

I had a whole other bit ready for this week, but then life happened.

So, instead, I'm going to share what I've been working on for the past six hours to fix my abysmal performance review process.

For a start, let's acknowledge that virtually no one enjoys doing performance reviews. They're tedious, admin-heavy, and, unless you're the type that enjoys being a judgemental ass, just don't feel very human.

Nevertheless, I want my staff to get better at their work. If the last 100 years of Harvard-educated corporate America haven't delivered a better way of doing that than the performance review, then that's where I should settle.

So, for the past two years, I've been trialling many different ways to do these reviews with large degrees of error, and none worked well. They didn't deliver the nudges toward better results I wanted. Any positive changes I did see from my staff post these reviews were, in hindsight, more coincidental than anything else.

And that's where Lenny comes in. He writes a highly successful newsletter for product managers (250,000+ readers) and is a top-10 business podcast host. But a long time before that, he was a young up-and-coming product manager at Air BnB, who'd just become Vlad Loktev's responsibility. And for the first time in his professional career, he'd experienced a performance review that actually helped.

"The clarity of his feedback, the care in his delivery, and the simple organization of his framework all came together to create a career development experience unlike any I'd ever had."

In time, when Lenny became a senior manager of his own, he adopted that same process to develop his juniors and build one of the highest-performing teams at Air BnB.

And now, so have I and I'm loving the newfound clarity this process provides our team.

So, without further ado, here's the article by Lenny covering this process in depth, supported by complementary resources like this performance review template.