Gareth Bradley
I'm Gareth - I've been shipping code, bugs, UI/usability enhancements, performance wins, gnarly refactors and // TODO comments for a shade over a decade. And as time goes on, I'm becoming increasingly interested in the history of tech, and its future. (Maybe partly influenced by missing the Bitcoin gravy-train...)
Building a culture & practice of experimentation sounds cool on paper - but what does it actually look like to put it into practice?
I'll walk you through a few years worth of improving the search experience at Trade Me.
It's a tricky area - The path forward
isn't always set out for us, and the investment cost of some ideas can be high. We've been able to use experimentation practices to break down work to smaller investments, dream up new ideas, build better analysis loops - and quantify the business outcomes of the work we've done.
Most importantly - it's been fun, rewarding & purposeful for teams, and nice to watch the ripples across the company.
It may not have been pretty - but the Internet of the 90s was strangely compelling as hell. It was ultimately a wild terrain for countless ideas to be trialled, that wouldn't quite follow any master plan. Let's look 20-something years back at how things were oddly similar, oddly different, and how it shaped the digital backbone of our lives today.