Consulting

I ran my first A/B test back in 2008 while contracting to a London law firm. They were spending upwards of £100 per click on PPC to recruit plaintiffs in class action suits for people with Mesothelioma (that's asbestos cancer to you and me).

Google Website Optimizer was a new thing and, with some curiosity, I discovered with a handful of experiments and a few false starts, I was able to halve their cost of 'customer' acquisition. That same £100 click was now getting them twice the number of conversions as before.

I was hooked.

Over the next few years, I kept learning about A/B testing, analytics, UX, research, and optimisation while making all the classic mistakes. Button colour experiments, low statistical power, malformed hypotheses, data dredging, early stopping. Name a way to run an experiment badly, and I did it, twice or even three times.

But slowly, I began to learn the secrets of experiment design and began to get actual results. Not just big, headline-grabbing wins (though I’ve had a couple of those too), but the kind of small, sustained incremental changes which add up, marking the shift from decision-making via guesswork and intuition to iterative, data driven transformation.

In 2013, I was hired by Britain's first 4G telco to build an internal Optimisation team. Not only did I have to run experiments, I also had to navigate the cultural and evangelical hurdles of building buy-in and acceptance and creating a culture of optimisation.

I subsequently began working with The Telegraph (one of the oldest broadsheet newspapers in the UK) where I was charged with building out an optimisation function. Beyond optimising for subscriptions and increasing advertising revenue, I worked at empowering and evangelising to the various business units to use experimentation to their competitive advantage.

We tested the impact of the masthead's new typeface (it didn't have any impact), experimenting with deliberately slowing down the site to measure the impact of AdTech bloat and helped the travel team find the most profitable affiliate partners for hotel bookings.

These days, I work as a consultant helping experimentation programs to get unstuck and drive better, more reliable results.

By addressing both the technical and human aspects of experimentation, I guide teams towards achieving sustained growth and meaningful insights.

My focus is on creating a robust experimentation culture where data-driven decision-making is the norm, enabling organisations to stop guessing and start iterating and learning.

Clients include Kmart Australia, JB HiFI, Nissan and Australian Super.

How to work together

I'm always open to having a chat and discussing your business, whether you're ready to work together now or not.

Feel free to get in touch via email or book a meeting.