Designing For Impact

A year ago Steve Burt and I set up Experimentation North because it was frustrating that to see the top speakers in the world of CRO & Experimentation we had to travel to London, the US or Scandinavia. Instead, alongside creating opportunity for north based speakers, we wanted to bring that talent to the North of England. We wanted to bring together the community that already existed in this space but had similar challenges in congregating. And in doing so grow it further by tapping into some of the huge companies based in northern powerhouses like Leeds and Manchester.

Erin Weigel has been public speaking for over a decade. She has spoken at conferences across the world such as Conversion Hotel in the US, Growth Marketing Summit in Germany, and UX London. She is author of the hit book on design & experimentation, Design For Impact and is an advisor to Absmartly alongside names such as Lukas Vermeer and Georgi Georgiev. Perhaps slightly biased as a big fan of her book, but it’s fair to say that she was exactly the stature of speaker that we wanted to bring to the CRO community through the creation of Experimentation North.

Even aside from her speaking experience, Erin has experience at some of the biggest companies in the world such as Booking.com and Deliveroo. Being both one of and working with some of the seminal figures when it comes to digital experimentation.

It was therefore no shock that the final Experimentation North event of the year was the one which had attracted most registrations. 130 people signed up, some as early as three months prior. The topic of the session was to be Conversion Design, an extension of the themes discussed in her book, followed by an extended Q&A session giving the audience an open opportunity to discuss anything from Ai to cultural challenges.

Starting with Ronald Fisher, Erin guided us on the importance of good experiment design as part of conversion design and how that can drive growth. Bringing to the fore the idea of using this concept to make things better, not just different. Also that through conversion design people can embrace complexity through systems thinking referred to in books such as Thinking In Systems. Introducing the conversion design process as a dynamic iterative cycle of understanding and testing she went on to explain how it could unlock value through the accompanying value cycle, using the combination of human-centered problem solving, scientific method and value creation. Digging deeper into some of the specifics she discussed a strategy behind research and where experimentation fits into this research method as a reliable form of evidence. Using the powerful hierarchy of evidence as an illustration of where randomized controlled tests sit in terms of reliability of research.

Finally she explained how it is using the concepts described to drive decisions and how this can have a compounding impact over time to have an exponential impact. But also how it can be used to be more efficient in terms of the ideas being shipped.

The subsequent Q&A saw great engagement from the audience with an array of questions. These covered potential future trends in terms of conversion design and compatibility with Ai alongside tips on practical applications of the concept and how common obstacles such as conflicting opinion from leadership can be tackled.

With the talk and questions over a number of guests continued the discussion at the Absmartly stand while enjoying a demonstration of the tool and the opportunity to purchase a copy of the book directly from the author (if you missed out you can buy it here).

It proved a hugely successful way to end the year and was the culmination of a lot of hard work over nine events in 2025. While Experimentation North will be joining Experimentation London and CRAP Talks for the mega meetup on the day prior to Experimentation Elite. It was the final event of the year and now we look forward to 2026. Check our website for details of our upcoming events.