Learneo on testing the opposite of every hypothesis
Blog post from GrowthBook
Rich Liebling, senior director of engineering at Learneo, describes how experimentation at Shop It To Me helped grow the service from about 50,000 to one million subscribers in nine months by making A/B testing a company-wide operational goal. A key practice emerged after a simplified page performed worse than the original while the opposite change—adding more explanatory text—won: teams should test the inverse of a focused hypothesis, since either result can reveal whether a variable meaningfully affects a target metric. Liebling emphasizes that small, isolated tests produce clearer learning than broad redesigns, while larger product bets may require repeated iteration, and successful variants should also be refined rather than assumed optimal. Shop It To Me translated its strategic subscriber target into a controllable goal of 300 tests, embedded experimentation into engineering onboarding by having new hires quickly ship their own tests, and encouraged ideas from all departments. At Course Hero, experimentation faces additional challenges, including teams with competing upload and subscription incentives, slow ad hoc analysis, concurrent-test interactions, and seasonal traffic patterns; the company addresses some of these through shared lifetime-value metrics and multi-armed bandit testing that shifts traffic toward stronger variations.
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