The goal of this interview series is to inspire and help people to transition their career into a new or next experimentation related role. In this edition Maria Luiza de Lange shares her journey. You can follow Maria on LinkedIn.
Please introduce yourself to our readers.
Hi Everyone! My name is Luiza. I have been living in Sweden for 12 years now and I consider it my home, however I was born in Poland and am married to a Dutch man, so I am a blend of these 3 cultures. There is a bit of each in me đ Personally I love traveling and discovering new places. I am a bird photographer and an amateur ornithologist, a hobby that I discovered during covid times. I am also a die-hard fan of Lewis Hamilton and Formula 1 in general.
I have started my career at Electrolux Europe(central headquarters), where I spent 9 years. I come from the business side. Originally I was a part of the in-store team, but as digital became more and more relevant, I started leading omni channel projects. After spending half a year in the local market, I moved to the âDigital teamâ, where I was a content manager and at the same time I got this side responsibility that was called analytics đ At that time all resources were consultants and I gradually built analytics capabilities for Electrolux in house, where we managed 90 domains, run experimentation and personalization. That journey took more than 3 years.
Most of my career I have been learning from the fantastic specialists around me, both junior and senior. I did not do much operational work. I was the bridge between the business and the tech and was a line manager for the analysts. As the Electroluxâs landscape was very familiar to me, I started feeling complacent. I longed for a new learning experience.
Then an opportunity came up and I moved to the agency side Precis, where I got to learn about different business models and analytics set ups. I was advising clients on their data strategy, conducting maturity audits and suggesting data projects to run. It was a very valuable experience as I worked with a nice mix of clients from Soundtrap, Royal Design, Hjarnfonden, Hemnet and H&M group.
After that I joined the great Tele2 team and have been building CRO capabilities since August 2022. We just got awarded as a winner in the âTeamâ category of Experimentation Culture Awards. We are very proud of that.
What is your current experimentation role and what do you do?
I am currently a CRO Lead at Tele2. Itâs one of the major telecoms in Sweden and the Baltics offering mobile, broadband and tv subscriptions. I am responsible for the CRO strategy at the Tele2 group. I maintain the relationship with our partners and I set the ambition for the CRO growth.
Together with my colleagues we run, monitor and analyze experiments across websites and apps. I am also responsible for stakeholder management and data democratization across the business. What that involves is spreading the knowledge about experimentation across the Tele2 group and steadily involving more and more of the functions into the process.
My ambition is also to lead a cross functional forum where different touchpoints running tests such as email, paid search and social teams share the tests they run and vice versa, so we can learn from each other and share the learnings.
How did you enter the experimentation space? What was your first experimentation related role?
Management at Electrolux was demanding that we increase our efforts in experimentation. That was in 2018, when we ran maybe 2 tests a year at that time⌠We were supposed to scale that to 10 tests a year. It really looks funny reflecting back to it now. But that did the trick, as in order to deliver on that, I needed to understand how that really worked and started breaking down the process into pieces. At the time Cecilia Jeppsson was our partner at Bombay Works, the agency Electrolux collaborates with and she taught me and the rest of Electrolux organization the basics.
Once I understood what are the key roles involved in CRO: designers, analysts, developers and product owners, I began the work of securing these resources and made sure that first 0,5 FTE and then full analyst FTE was dedicated to just doing that.
One of the learnings I had was that you can not run an experimentation program successfully if your analyst has to split time between different responsibilities. You need to have a dedicated resource to be able to grow. We very quickly realized that you also need a dedicated developer resource to be able to run tests.
How did you start to learn experimentation?
I kind of answered it in the questions above. I have been optimizing processes and consumer experience my whole career and life really, but it was only when I became a part of the digital team that it was officially called experimentation.
I think being an Optimizer is a unique set of characteristics of a person that just wants the world around them to be better. Whether that is their own individual development, the development of their personal and professional relationships or the improvement of the consumer experiences that we have a direct impact on.
Itâs a person that extracts satisfaction and motivation from things just working better, more efficient, customers and their friends, partners and family members being happier⌠Usually CRO people donât just improve conversion rates, they improve the company’s processes, culture, motivation of people working with them and their own lives overall.
What are you currently doing to keep up with the ever-changing industry?
That is precisely the challenge for a professional in our space. You really need to stay up to date with the latest on not just experimentation, but analytics overall, measurement, voice of consumer, ux design and privacy to just name the few.
I personally enjoy attending conferences and learning directly from the speakers. I make sure to attend at least one conference every second month. Additionally I am active on LinkedIn and as long as you follow the right people, I believe LinkedIn can be also a good source of information.
And I read books on the topics I am interested in, whether that is a theory of experimentation, or leadership skills. There is so much good material out there.
Lastly, I feed off the fantastic stars in the CRO community. Earlier this year, as a result of attending Superweek, we got a super valuable set of 3 consulting hours with Ton Wesseling. In April 2023 Marianne Stjernvall joined the Tele2 Group as a Digital team Director, learning from her everyday. I also joined the âWomen in Experimentationâ group created by Daphne and Lucia van den Brink.
What recommendations would you give to someone who is looking to join the experimentation industry and get their first full-time position?
Try to contribute to the process. A good CRO Lead opens the experimentation process to the rest of the company and we know who our allies are, trust me. We see who is adding hypotheses into the backlog, we see who attends the experimentation forums open to everyone. We see who is asking the right questions.
As the organization matures, it involves more and more function into the experimentation process and you can be the bridge to bring experimentation the function you are currently in, whether that is development, content management, paid media or email marketing.
If you are looking for something a bit more short term, there are a lot of courses out there at IHM, Media Institutet or Hyper Island Schools, that many companies source from for junior positions.
Try to get as much practice as possible, while studying, as that will make you stand out.
How will AI change how experimenters work?
AI and automation overall is not new to experimentation. The AB testing platforms have been using ML algorithms for some time now. Whether that is to speed up the result of the test i.e. CUPED or use additional conversion points to declare the winner.
I believe machine learning will add more and more to this space as we go into the future. I am however a strong believer of fixing the basics before you fly person and would rather focus on optimisation of the process, before jumping too much ahead into the unknown.
I would say use AI with caution and particularly when it makes your work more efficient.
What are your plans for the summer?
I am flying to Ireland today, hoping to have a very relaxing week, after a very busy start of the summer. I am also going to Barcelona in September, Morocco in October and Texel, Netherlands for Conversion hotel in November. It is going to be my first time! I canât wait!
Do you want to share anything else?
Discover learning opportunities at your organization. Usually companies have a certain âtrainingâ budget dedicated to each employee, I advise you to use that to the fullest to educate yourself in whatever direction you are interested in, challenge your managers to extend these budgets too, as your needs grow.
Which other experimenters would you love to read an interview by?
Simon Elsworth
Thank you Maria for sharing your journey with the community.
