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 Niklas Bräutigam shares his journey. He is CRO Manager at C&A and also co-founder of Conversion Stash.
… it will become increasingly challenging for large companies to remain competitive if experimentation is not a fundamental part of the company’s product development and culture.
Niklas Bräutigam
Please introduce yourself to our readers.
Hallo 👋 I’m Niklas and my passion for e-commerce, computers and the web began in 2001 when I was 7 years old, helping my parents sell books on eBay. And back then, the UX really had room for improvement … Today, I’ve been working in the CRO/experimentation space for 4+ years, mostly in large fashion companies, but also in the travel and education industry. Apart from that, I live and work in the beautiful city of Paderborn in Germany, describe myself as a smart home geek and enjoy playing any kind of sport with a racket.
What is your current experimentation role and what do you do?
Currently, I’m a CRO Manager in the User Research & Experimentation team at C&A, which is a global fashion retailer. As such, I lead the CRO and personalization strategy in our Search & Select teams, improving the UX of product detail pages and search results pages through experimentation.
Furthermore, I am one of the co-founders of Conversion Stash. About 1.5 years ago, two colleagues and I launched the largest directory for CRO and experimentation resources. In addition to almost 300 resources such as books, blogs, newsletters and podcasts, we also offer CRO templates & frameworks, a CRO event calendar and a CRO job board on the website. Our goal is to get more people excited about this fantastic field and provide easy access to high-quality curated resources.
How did you enter the experimentation space? What was your first experimentation related role? Share your origin story here.
During my Master’s degree, I worked as a working student and Conversion Manager at the German EdTech start-up StudyHelp, where I helped to optimize the company’s online presence and, in particular, its online shops. To this day, the company sells, among other things, the textbooks of major German educational influencers.
We used Shopify in combination with Google Optimize and were able to prove with an A/B test, for example, that a hero image of maths YouTuber ‘Daniel Jung’ on the homepage led to significant more clicks on the call-to-action when he was looking towards the button on the image. In the control group, he was just standing in front of a blackboard looking at you.
I was so fascinated by how seemingly small, simple changes (replacing an image) can have a demonstrably large impact on the user behaviour of a website and ultimately the economic success of a company. Soon after, I wanted to learn everything I could about A/B testing and conversion rate optimization, and ended up writing my master’s thesis on the subject.
How did you start to learn experimentation?
For the research of my Master’s thesis, I studied all German and English-language resources I could find. I quickly realized that the amount of literature is limited and that other formats such as video courses, podcasts and newsletters are also essential for building up knowledge, as the field has changed rapidly in recent years.
Among the resources I still like to refer to today are the books ‘Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments’ by Ron Kohavi, Diane Tang and Ya Xu as well as ‘Conversion-Optimierung’ by André Morys (German only). In addition, the video course ‘The complete CRO course’ by Ruben de Boer gave me wonderful practical insights and the ‘CRO.CAFE’ by Guido X Jansen was my go-to resource while jogging.
How do you apply experimentation in your personal life? (what are you tinkering with or always optimizing?)
In my everyday life, I make a lot of small bets. For me, small bets mean that I work on several small, risk-free projects (like small A/B test variants) at the same time to see what has potential before I decide on a project to invest more time in. For example, I played tennis for 12 years until I tried other racket sports at university and found that I enjoyed squash and badminton much more.
I also love integrating modern and smart project management tools such as Notion, Airtable and co. into my personal life to boost productivity. For me, they were a game changer when planning my wedding… 😎
What are you currently doing to keep up with the ever-changing industry?
I enjoy reading CRO/experimentation newsletters and books, listening to current podcast episodes and exchanging ideas with like-minded people at conferences or trade fairs.
What recommendations would you give to someone who is looking to join the experimentation industry and get their first full-time position?
Take online courses on experimentation and A/B testing, get certified and look for junior roles or internships on job portals. Ideally, try to gain practical experience by working on private projects and send proactive applications to companies.
Which developments in experimentation excite you? How do you see the field changing in the next 5 to 10 years? What will stay the same? What’s not going to change in the next ten years?
First of all, I believe that it will become increasingly challenging for large companies to remain competitive if experimentation is not a fundamental part of the company’s product development and culture. The scientific method is timeless and the principles of statistics do not change. If you continue to insist on your own opinions without evidence when making product decisions, or engage in spaghetti testing, then it will be very difficult to prove yourself in the market.
Of course, AI will shape the next few years like no other technology and will continue to shape experimentation programs. Looking at practical examples, I believe that it will bring more and more benefits, especially in qualitative user research, as the analysis of such data sets has now become extremely easy and time-saving. At the same time, the question ‘Why is something going wrong in this area of the website?’ will be answered more quickly, and repetitive tasks such as preparing test results will be replaced.
Is there anything people reading this can help you with? Or any parting words?
If you have a valuable resource that should not be missing in the Conversion Stash resource directory, please contact me on LinkedIn or fill out this form. The platform only exists because a lot of smart people have produced great content in the past, such as amazing books, blog posts like this fantastic interview series, must-read newsletters and more.
Which other experimenters would you love to read an interview by?
Disclaimer – Apologies for only mentioning great CRO/Experimentation practitioners from Germany:
Nils Koppelmann, David Stepien, Christoph Rottler-Lavoie, Fabian Hans, Stane Zabot, Boris Nazarov and Lea Koch.
Thank you Niklas for sharing your journey and insights.
