Ben Labay: Career Interview
CRO weekly #212
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Welcome to a fresh CRO weekly newsletter with this week a career interview with: Ben Labay
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Ben Labay: Career Interview
Please introduce yourself to our readers
Hi, I’m from Texas and live outside of Austin currently. I’m married to a French woman, so I spend a lot of time in during the summers in France and in Europe because of that, and we have two young boys.
What is your current experimentation role and what do you do?
I have two primary ‘experimentation’ roles:
I’m CEO of Speero, an agency and consultancy that focuses on scaling testing and experimentation programs. So I lead teams and scope work around experimentation. It’s a lot of ‘CRO on CRO’ type of work. So product development, a focus on making things more efficient and effective.
I also lead a single program as sort of a contract in-house testing lead role, a program doing 15+ tests/month. I do this to keep myself grounded in the work, as this role I work as a program strategist, scoping a portfolio of tests for a marketing site and in product.
How did you enter the experimentation space? What was your first experimentation related role? Share your origin story here.
I was in academia before, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. I was also as a hobby building websites for some side hobby projects, so getting familiar with the web and marketing world. This led me to take advantage of a family friend (Peep Laja) when he mentioned he had a ‘researcher’ role. My start was doing UX research work for what is now CXL, the digital marketing learning community. At that time we had behind the paywall not only courses but custom research I was producing. It was hard, expensive, and not what people were engaging with, so we shut that down after about 9 months. After that I started to help out the agency….eventually I took it over.
So I’d say the first role in our ‘industry’ would have been a UX researcher for agency testing programs. But I was doing data science and research for 10 years prior, so I had a strong background in data.
How did you start to learn experimentation?
I started by being a part of MANY testing programs, so seeing it done by others around me. This is the great benefit of agency life, drinking from a firehose of different types of programs.
How do you apply experimentation in your personal life? (what are you tinkering with or always optimizing?)
At the moment, most of my experimentation is in two areas:
My kids. I mentioned I have two boys. I am not a natural ‘parent’ and need to constantly try to push myself to learn to do things differently. I luckily have a great co-CEO here in my wife ;).
My health, so diet and exercise related I’m constantly experimenting. This is tied to long term goals but also short term energy levels as well. For example I’m playing around with a super high protein diet right now, I’ve taken blood work before I started and will do after about 3 months to see how it affected things. Will also measure % body fat/muscle/etc to see changes in proportions of these things as well.
What are you currently doing to keep up with the ever-changing industry?
Honestly my primary focus is on what doesn’t change. This is harder in some ways, to focus on the first principles of our work. It’s why I’m geeking out a bit on organizational structure and why Speero is getting into experimentation program consulting. This is where the sustainable work is in many ways. “Be the lab not the test” in a way.
That said, AI training (webinars, talks, workshops, etc) to make design, development, and UX research more efficient is a key focus by our agency and myself.
In the full interview you will also learn which developments Ben excites in experimentation. How does he sees the field changing in the next 5 to 10 years? He also shares recommendations to someone who is looking to join the experimentation industry.
Job opportunities
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