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 Xeï Hulshoff shares her journey. She is CRO specialist at My Jewellery.
Find a position where you can work together with more experienced specialists, this way you can learn faster than trying to figure out everything by yourself.
Xeï Hulshoff
Please introduce yourself to our readers.
I’m Xeï Hulshoff and since graduating in Design for Interaction at Delft University in 2012 I’ve been in several different UX and CRO positions. I enjoy diving deep into the interaction of people with products and try to find answers to the problems they face without losing sight of business goals.
What is your current experimentation role and what do you do?
I’ve been the team lead of the CRO team at My Jewellery for almost 2,5 years. A Dutch brand selling jewellery, clothing and accessories online and in stores in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France. I guide a team of UX-designers, a UX-researcher and a CRO specialist (previously also front-end development) to improve our customer experience in a profitable way. We do this by performing qualitative and quantitative research, generating new designs that fit the brand and evaluating the new ideas with A/B tests. My previous roles in UX-design (with front-end development), UX-research and CRO helped me a lot in guiding the team.
Though at this point in time, we are looking for somebody else to fill this position as I am moving back into my previous role as a CRO specialist. This will leave more room for me to do the things I love most: dive into the data, putting the pieces of the puzzle together and grow our experimentation programme hands-on.
How did you enter the experimentation space? What was your first experimentation related role? Share your origin story here.
After graduating I started as a UX-designer at the Dutch company: Coolblue. Next to creating designs and writing simple CSS and HTML I worked together with an agency to perform usability research. Besides that I started setting up A/B tests with Sitespect, which unfortunately was transferred to the BI team pretty soon after. I quickly figured out that design was not my strong point (I suck at creating visually attractive things, haha) and started to focus more on UX-research, which was a new role within the company. I performed many researches and field studies in order to figure out usability of the app, internal platforms and the website in both the Netherlands and Belgium (together with Els Aerts).
How did you start to learn experimentation?
I started doing experimentation at Coolblue and StudyPortals (my second job), but really learned the ins and outs of A/B testing at the online agency Tribal. Working together with 3 more experienced CRO specialists and finishing several courses from CXL I learned how to perform A/B tests in a structured way. Serving clients in E-com, leadgen, B2C and B2B I learned what’s possible to evaluate with A/B tests or what can better be evaluated with another method. When working at this agency I learned to figure out the needs for different brands and their target groups to find out what sticks and what doesn’t by means of experimentation and research.
How do you apply experimentation in your personal life? (what are you tinkering with or always optimizing?)
I’m not sure if I would call it experimentation, but I do like to try and optimise to get the most out of the hours in a day. For example, I’ve placed timers on “useless” apps on my phone such as games and Facebook, so I don’t spend more than 15 minutes a day there, because that feels like a waste of my time. I also like to combine activities, such as listening to CRO podcasts when I do laundry or read books / articles while watching my kids at sports class.
For me, optimizing the things in my life is about reflecting on what activities give me joy and energy. So when I was feeling drained after watching another movie on tv with my husband (because that’s his way of relaxing) I started searching for other activities. So now I’m doing lego projects or creating jigsaw puzzles to clear my mind while he’s watching tv in the same room :).
What are you currently doing to keep up with the ever-changing industry?
I enjoy going to meet-ups or events to get inspired by the activities other CRO people are doing. Next to that I try to check LinkedIn daily or listen to podcasts and share interesting content with my colleagues. There’s so much good content out there, that it can be a challenge to keep up, but doing a little every day sparks me with new ideas to continue optimizing. Sometimes it also works for me to plan demo’s with tools to see what new technologies they use to get better at optimizing and determine if that direction fits us as a company.
What recommendations would you give to someone who is looking to join the experimentation industry and get their first full-time position?
Find a position where you can work together with more experienced specialists, this way you can learn faster than trying to figure out everything by yourself. A workplace where there’s room/time to spend on gaining knowledge and mistakes can be made in order to learn and become a better version of yourself. If you end up in a position where you are the first and only one, start by doing and trying (and evaluating!) things as quickly as possible, don’t “waste” too much time creating a plan.
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?
There’s so many technical developments going on that I don’t believe experimentation will be the same in 5 to 10 years from now. A thing that I learned over the years working in an agency is that you can’t do the same “trick” for different brands and target groups, what works and what doesn’t heavily depends on your product, the context and your audience. I do believe that this is one of the things that’s not going to change in the next ten years. The empathy needed to reach that level to figure out the diversity in needs of the audience might be something that will not be replaced by AI in the upcoming years.
Is there anything people reading this can help you with? Or any parting words?
At My Jewellery we have already been experimenting for a while, but we have difficulties increasing the amount of tests year on year and grow to a more mature level of experimentation. I’ve already been gaining knowledge about this from inspiring CRO folks like Ben Labay and Ruben the Boer, so now it’s time to get it into practice. That’s one of the reasons I’m going back to the specialist role and go from ideas to practice. I like to learn from all the people struggling with the same aspects or have already gone through this phase.
Which other experimenters would you love to read an interview by?
You already have a lot of inspiring experimenters on your list, so this question gets harder every time I guess. I do think Annemarie Klaassen or Daphne Tideman might be an interesting addition to your list.
Thank you Xeï for sharing your journey and insights.
