Che was the 4th data scientist at AirBnB’s and later was on the data science team at Webflow. He observed how today's experimentation tooling - both 3rd party and internal tools - all require onerous amounts of manual work and still lead to a brittle process. He set out to create a solution that would enable companies to scale product-led growth strategies without scaling headcount, which led to the creation of Eppo.
Che Sharma is the founder and CEO of Eppo. It's a next gen A/B experimentation platform that helps product teams run tests that are reliably informative. He was previously an early Data Scientist at Airbnb, where he spent 5 years working on fraud ...
In episode 11 of The Right Track, Stef Olafsdottir speaks with Che Sharma, CEO and Founder of Eppo. This conversation includes many unique insights from Che’s experience scaling Airbnb’s early data culture, as well as lessons on leading data teams, defining a good North Star metric, and leveraging experimentation tools. For more developer focused content, visit https://www.heavybit.com/library
“Data teams are actually experimentation teams. It’s kind of funny, given the level of consequence of this stuff, that there aren’t really any great commercial tools yet,” he said. “You don’t really know what product changes are going to lead to the biggest results, and so the best benefits happen when you [test] it comprehensively. Who would have thought that the… new tab experiment was going to be the biggest metric mover over the machine learning model that took three months to build? You don’t really know that stuff before you measure it.”
"With the recent market dip and potential recession, we are seeing a huge boost to the demand for experimentation as companies can no longer take growth for granted," said Chetan Sharma, CEO and founder, Eppo. "Data teams need to become revenue-generating teams rather than cost centers, and experimentation is the most effective way for data investments to verifiably improve metrics."