Experimentation at Amazon

Source: Harvard Business Review Published: October 2007

Source: Harvard Business Review
Published: October 2007

Experimentation at Amazon

Circulated: July 3, 2019

“What you really want to do companywide is maximize the number of experiments you can do per given unit of time. Since the outcomes of all these things are uncertain, if you can figure out how to conduct an experiment, you can make more bets. So the key, really, is reducing the cost of the experiments.

We have a group called Weblab that allows teams at Amazon to constantly experimenting with the user interface on the website. Weblab is a huge laboratory for us, and we’ve put a lot of energy into trying to figure out how to be very low cost with those experiments so that we can run a much larger number of them.”

- Jeff Bezos