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5 Ways to Ensure Data Quality When Running Experiments
Here's how to ensure you’re making experiment decisions based on solid data foundations.
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As a Product Manager, every quarter you’re given a goal and you’re responsible for producing a roadmap that meets that target. You and your team put your best ideas together, and you have some confidence because they’re good ideas founded upon user research, but you still don’t really know if you’ll quantitatively hit your number.
Welcome to the life of a modern product manager. It’s a role of gathering inputs, finding creative solutions, technical understanding, strategic prioritization, and a fair bit of persuasion. When experimentation, proven to be one of the most effective ways to achieve data-driven growth, is layered on top, there can be more pressure in how you’re judged based on the impact your team has made. That’s where Experiment Forecasting steps in.
Experiment Forecasting is designed to relieve some of your stress, giving you clarity, control, and confidence as you tackle conflicting demands.
Why Experiment Planning Matters
Experiments are integral to shipping high-quality features that move the needle, but they come with unique challenges. If you’ve experienced any of the following, you’re not alone:
- The “Just Ship It” Urgency: There’s constant pressure to release features quickly, often long before the data from experiments has come in. Do you push something unproven out the door or risk annoying stakeholders by advocating for patience?
- Engineering Bottlenecks: Maybe you’ve jotted down the perfect experiment idea but hit a wall waiting for resources to run the test. Now, it’s a scramble to keep progress going.
- Roadmap Whiplash: Plans change; sometimes slowly, other times at warp speed. Roadmaps can quickly morph into tangled webs that stress everyone involved.
- The “Always Ship More” Mandate: Whether it’s internal KPIs or external competition, there’s immense pressure to keep feature velocity high.
Experiment planning and forecasting allow you to zoom out and solve these issues systematically, bridging the gap between stakeholder expectations, engineering constraints, and the actual impact your team can deliver.
What Is Experiment Forecasting?
Experiment Forecasting is an approach that brings data-driven clarity to your product experimentation strategy. Instead of making wild guesses or operating on gut feel, it offers data-driven predictions. With tools like Eppo’s new Experiment Forecasting feature, you can chart out your future experiments on a timeline, project their potential impact, and assess if your quarterly roadmap is likely to hit your goals. Take control of your roadmap instead of letting it control you.
How Experiment Forecasting Helps You Win
Experiment forecasting changes how Product Managers approach planning and achieve their metric goals. It provides practical insights to create strategies, align teams, and make experiments more effective. Here's how it makes a difference:
1. Map Out Your Best Ideas and Gain Strategic Clarity
Experiment forecasting allows you to measure potential impact against your metrics. By using historical data, you can estimate outcomes and determine if your plans will drive progress or need adjustments. This insight helps you make thoughtful decisions with confidence.
2. Spot Gaps and Add Experiments as Needed
Forecasting helps you assess whether your roadmap includes enough experiments or if you need higher-impact initiatives to meet your goals. These insights enable you to adjust plans proactively rather than play catch-up later.
3. Communicate Expectations Clearly to Stakeholders
Experiment forecasting helps you craft a clear, data-driven narrative for stakeholders. Instead of presenting just a list of projects, you can share forecasts that show how your experiments align with hitting company goals. Quantitative estimates build trust and make setting realistic expectations with leadership and your team easier.
4. Jump-Start Collaboration with Eppo’s Experiment Drafts
With Eppo, you can draft your roadmap experiments, complete with key details like metrics, entry points, and projected impact. The timeline view helps place experiments visually, showing clearly how they’ll fit into your quarter. This makes cross-functional collaboration easier and ensures that, when the quarter begins, your plans are ready and endorsed by your team.
Experiment forecasting improves planning and lays out a path to measurable success. With tools like Eppo, your experiments and strategies have the clarity and alignment needed to drive results consistently.
Experiment Forecasting in Action
Here’s how a quarterly planning session might feel with Experiment Forecasting in place versus without it.
Without Forecasting:
You’re creating a roadmap that’s ambitious but lacks clarity. You feel a pit in your stomach because you think these experiments will hit the metric targets, but you’re not positive. Your team plans to evaluate on the fly, knowing you’ll probably need to pivot halfway through.
With Forecasting:
You sit down to map out 10 experiments for the quarter. For each, you know its primary metric, the entry point, and the forecasted impact based on past win rates. This lets you objectively benchmark your team’s goals against reality and adjust beforehand. You also clearly communicate key dependencies (engineering and data science needs, launch schedules, etc.) so everyone is aligned before the roadmap even kicks off.
Eliminating guesswork and unpredictability will help you and your team start the quarter with more confidence, alignment, and trust.
Balancing Strategy and Execution
Experiment Forecasting doesn’t just help you plan; it frees you to execute on real impact. It’s one more way to balance the art of product strategy with the science of experimentation while navigating the daily pressures you face. Our goal? To make your job as a PM just a little easier and more effective.
Want to see it in action? Learn more about Eppo’s Experiment Forecasting and how it can fit seamlessly into your product development cycle. With the right tools, the next quarter might just be your most productive yet.
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