Announcing: Experiment Collaboration – Optimizely

If you’re part of an experimentation team, these scenarios might hit home: 

• Struggling to find time for real-time collaboration 
• Finding it challenging to capture all the nuances of an idea in one place  
• Increasing velocity = Increase in project management…until the program manager becomes the bottleneck  
• No way to share and reference key learnings as a long-term company asset

If any of these resonate with you, you’re not alone. In a recent survey of our users, 95% rated collaboration and planning capabilities as the most crucial aspect of their experimentation programs. Yet, half of them expressed dissatisfaction with the current tools available! This feedback has driven us to develop a new set of capabilities, which we’re calling Experiment Collaboration. 

Built on the technology behind our Content Marketing Platform, Experiment Collaboration is designed to help teams manage their experiment ideation, planning, and hypothesis-creation process more effectively. Let’s take a closer look at what we’ve built and what’s on the horizon.

Structured experiment planning 

We’re taking the guesswork out of the planning stages. I often hear from teams after tests are run, they say things like “I wish we had implemented this metric” or “I’m not sure how these results help me make a business decision.” What we’ve created isn’t just a form – it’s a launchpad for brainstorming, encouraging teams to iterate on bolder and more impactful variations.

Idea crowdsourcing and submission forms 

Test plan templates can also be used as an idea submission form, allowing you to crowdsource ideas into a centralized request queue. This becomes the starting point of collaboration, sparking creativity and innovation.

Workflows and approvals 

Experimentation is a team sport that requires help from other disciplines.  We introduced workflows to help manage the process, allowing you to focus more on the creative aspects of experimenting. Workflows will help your team understand who needs to work on which experiment and when, ensuring a consistent and successful outcome.

Results sharing  

After the conclusion of an experiment, it can be challenging to share results so that everyone in your organization can learn from them. We introduced a feature that allows you to record your results in the context of the test plan, ensuring that all learnings are retained and accessible in one place. Now, your learnings are treated as a reusable and valuable asset to your company like they ought to be. 

Roadmap planning  

Our testing roadmaps provide a holistic view of running and planned experiments in a list view, timeline view, or board view. This gives you a bird’s eye view of all experiment ideas on the backlog and allows you to plan experiments on a timeline view. 

Using the Board view, you can see all your experiments organized into the stages of your workflow. You may want to move an experiment into In Development since a developer has extra capacity? You can easily drag the card to the next column and orchestrate your entire program from one place.

Or, maybe you’re a visual planner and want to see these planned experiments on a Timeline view?  You can do that with the experimentation calendar view. If QA is delayed, you can easily update the due date for QA and have the planned launch date and other dates automatically updated.

Linking Web and Feature Experimentation experiments 

Coming Soon

We plan to closely integrate Collaborative Experimentation with how you use our experimentation products. This will allow you to link hypotheses – the primary object in Experiment Collaboration – with experiments from a Web or Feature Experimentation project, making all information about the experiment at your fingertips.

Experiment Collaboration enables your teams to work effectively in one place to increase testing velocity. If you think any of these capabilities would be valuable to you, I have exciting news: we have opened early access to Experiment Collaboration.

Join our beta waitlist and be notified when you can try this out yourself!