Skip to content
All Skills

Experiment Designer

Use when planning product experiments, writing testable hypotheses, estimating sample size, prioritizing tests, or interpreting A/B outcomes with practical statistical rigor.

Business, Marketing & Sales|v1|Updated 7/14/2026|GitHub source
MCP get_skill({ skillId: "experiment-designer-8b3e8162" })

Use this skill with your agent

Create a free account and connect via MCP

Get Started Free
# Experiment Designer

Design, prioritize, and evaluate product experiments with clear hypotheses and defensible decisions.

## When To Use

Use this skill for:
- A/B and multivariate experiment planning
- Hypothesis writing and success criteria definition
- Sample size and minimum detectable effect planning
- Experiment prioritization with ICE scoring
- Reading statistical output for product decisions

## Core Workflow

1. Write hypothesis in If/Then/Because format
- If we change `[intervention]`
- Then `[metric]` will change by `[expected direction/magnitude]`
- Because `[behavioral mechanism]`

2. Define metrics before running test
- Primary metric: single decision metric
- Guardrail metrics: quality/risk protection
- Secondary metrics: diagnostics only

3. Estimate sample size
- Baseline conversion or baseline mean
- Minimum detectable effect (MDE)
- Significance level (alpha) and power

Use:
```bash
python3 scripts/sample_size_calculator.py --baseline-rate 0.12 --mde 0.02 --mde-type absolute
```

4. Prioritize experiments with ICE
- Impact: potential upside
- Confidence: evidence quality
- Ease: cost/speed/complexity

ICE Score = (Impact * Confidence * Ease) / 10

5. Launch with stopping rules
- Decide fixed sample size or fixed duration in advance
- Avoid repeated peeking without proper method
- Monitor guardrails continuously

6. Interpret results
- Statistical significance is not business significance
- Compare point estimate + confidence interval to decision threshold
- Investigate novelty effects and segment heterogeneity

## Hypothesis Quality Checklist

- [ ] Contains explicit intervention and audience
- [ ] Specifies measurable metric change
- [ ] States plausible causal reason
- [ ] Includes expected minimum effect
- [ ] Defines failure condition

## Common Experiment Pitfalls

- Underpowered tests leading to false negatives
- Running too many simultaneous changes without isolation
- Changing targeting or implementation mid-test
- Stopping early on random spikes
- Ignoring sample ratio mismatch and instrumentation drift
- Declaring success from p-value without effect-size context

## Statistical Interpretation Guardrails

- p-value < alpha indicates evidence against null, not guaranteed truth.
- Confidence interval crossing zero/no-effect means uncertain directional claim.
- Wide intervals imply low precision even when significant.
- Use practical significance thresholds tied to business impact.

See:
- `references/experiment-playbook.md`
- `references/statistics-reference.md`

## Tooling

### `scripts/sample_size_calculator.py`

Computes required sample size (per variant and total) from:
- baseline rate
- MDE (absolute or relative)
- significance level (alpha)
- statistical power

Example:
```bash
python3 scripts/sample_size_calculator.py \
  --baseline-rate 0.10 \
  --mde 0.015 \
  --mde-type absolute \
  --alpha 0.05 \
  --power 0.8
```
#work-life#productivity#business#finance#marketing#product#meeting-analysis#ab#testingpython

Related Skills

More skills in Business, Marketing & Sales

Ab Testing

When the user wants to plan, design, or implement an A/B test or experiment, or build a growth experimentation program. Also use when the user mentions "A/B test," "split test," "experiment," "test this change," "variant copy," "multivariate test," "hypothesis," "should I test this," "which version is better," "test two versions," "statistical significance," "how long should I run this test," "growth experiments," "experiment velocity," "experiment backlog," "ICE score," "experimentation program," or "experiment playbook." Use this whenever someone is comparing two approaches and wants to measure which performs better, or when they want to build a systematic experimentation practice. For tracking implementation, see analytics. For page-level conversion optimization, see cro.

#work-life#productivityMIT

Ab Test Setup

When the user wants to plan, design, or implement an A/B test or experiment. Also use when the user mentions "A/B test," "split test," "experiment," "test this change," "variant copy," "multivariate test," "hypothesis," "conversion experiment," "statistical significance," or "test this." For tracking implementation, see analytics-tracking.

#work-life#productivityMIT

Ab Test Setup

Ab Test Setup linked from Corey Haines marketing skills, with the upstream skill instructions available on GitHub.

#work-life#productivityMIT

Ab Test Store Listing

When the user wants to A/B test App Store product page elements to improve conversion rate. Also use when the user mentions "A/B test", "product page optimization", "test my screenshots", "test my icon", "conversion rate optimization", "CPP", or "custom product pages". For screenshot design, see screenshot-optimization. For metadata optimization, see metadata-optimization.

#work-life#productivityMIT

Account Research

Research a company or person and get actionable sales intel. Works standalone with web search, supercharged when you connect enrichment tools or your CRM. Trigger with "research [company]", "look up [person]", "intel on [prospect]", "who is [name] at [company]", or "tell me about [company]".

#work-life#productivityApache-2.0

Account Research

Research a company using Common Room data. Triggers on 'research [company]', 'tell me about [domain]', 'pull up signals for [account]', 'what's going on with [company]', or any account-level question.

#work-life#productivityApache-2.0