Estonia For The Win

Tallinn is the capital of Estonia which is one of the most advanced countries in terms of digital governance & operations. The city is not so big but it’s very beautiful and Estonians were friendly & helpful. The conference occurred in June, a time period when actually there is no “nighttime”. On June, Estonians celebrate the biggest day of the year which actually means that the sky got dark (not so dark though) about 2 hours/day only!

Digital Elite Camp Key Takeaways

1. Dunning-Kruger effect is cognitive bias that describes people who are incompetent in something but they don’t know that they are incompetent. Instead, they believe they are great on what they do. Beware people, this bias can’t be identified from yourself, always ask for feedback. Moreover, “ego” is not the best trait for CRO and ideas are just wishful thinking. Let your users decide which one works better for them.
   
2. Morgan Brown insists that Marketing & Product should be one team in order to have an efficient CRO strategy. Kill silos & create hybrid teams that have no ego, avoid HiPPOs and be obsessed with your users.
   
3. If you do not know your customers well, then 99% of your assumptions are wrong, just ask your customers! Problem Solution Fit Canvas translate problems into solutions, that will be adopted.
   
4. When it comes to content the answer is simple: Create something significantly better than your best competitor. Stop creating mediocre content and START creating epic content
   
5. Best practices are vague. We need to do our own research and adjust best practices to your website & industry. Also, we need more user research. Quantitative data is great when we need to know the “what” but qualitative data help us answer the “why”. When you do user research, Do not listen to your users, observe them and you will understand their pain points.
   
6. People, Process & Priority are the 3 key pillars for a good CRO program. Check Conversion XL framework, it is very interesting.
   
7. Identify your north star metric and make everyone obsessed about it. Here is an explanatory article that can help you understand Facebook’s Aha moment, and another one that will help you identify yours.
   
8. Erin from Booking.com said that we have to be strict and consistent with A/B test documentation. Also, failing, (and learning) is the only way to succeed. Concept != Execution. True story 🙂
   
9. Your product needs to evolve as fast as your users do, not faster. There is a tendency -due to CRO fast-paced environment- to overcomplicate and change our product faster than our users need to.
   
10. Understand & learn statistics. In general, CRO experts are not statisticians and statisticians do not care with CRO so there is a gap in here. Work on your evaluation method it really matters. There is an interesting article about Frequentist vs Bayesian method that helped me understand which one works best for my A/B tests.
    
11. Last but not least, CRO is not just another marketing vertical. Continuous testing is a mentality that needs to be embraced by everyone. Ideas from other departments are more than welcome but you have to prioritize and implement them efficiently.

Bonus Hint: Jeff Sauers shared his learnings about marketing attribution and whether it’s worthwhile for your or not. Here is an interesting GA channel grouping that highlights what many people think when it comes to attribution ?

To sum up, Digital Elite Conference was a great conference and I recommend everyone that works in Product Marketing to join it next year!