Dorian Crespo Gonzalez: Career Interview
CRO weekly #265
Hi,
Welcome to a fresh CRO weekly newsletter, this week a career interview with: Dorian Crespo Gonzalez.
She is currently a Personalisation & Experimentation Specialist at Samsung, but will be relocating back to Mexico in September. Dorian is open to new roles in experimentation, CRO, or digital product optimization. Remote-first or hybrid would be ideal. Feel free to reach out to her.
Tom
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Dorian Crespo Gonzalez: Career Interview
Please introduce yourself to our readers
Hi! I’m Dorian, originally from Mexico but living in the Netherlands since 2019. I studied Mechatronic Engineering back home and later moved into the digital world with a Master’s in Digital Business & Innovation at Nyenrode. I’m a dog lover, a total foodie, and I absolutely love dancing.
I’m also neurodivergent, which plays a big role in how I see and interact with the world. My mind is always overthinking scenarios, scanning for patterns and looking for ways to improve things. I question everything, and I love diving deep into how people think and why they make certain choices. That curiosity and need to optimise is precisely what pulled me into experimentation. In a way, experimentation gave structure to how my brain already works, allowing me to test ideas, identify friction points, and constantly iterate.
What is your current experimentation role and what do you do?
I currently work at Samsung as a Personalisation & Experimentation Specialist for the BENELUX market. I run A/B tests across all product divisions, from the newest smartphones to refrigerators and washing machines. One day I’m optimising the PDP of a just-launched Galaxy phone, the next I’m testing a landing page for home appliances.
A big part of my role now is focused on personalisation, which I find super interesting. Because before we go live with a personalised experience, especially during peak moments like Black Friday, I need to be sure it actually improves conversion. So I don’t just launch ideas; I test and validate them. I’m in charge of the full personalisation strategy: from the initial idea, through hypothesis building, all the way to execution and go-live. It’s super hands-on and gives me a lot of space to experiment (literally) and learn!
How did you enter the experimentation space? What was your first experimentation related role?
My path into experimentation didn’t start with a job… it started with rats. Back when I was studying Mechatronic Engineering, we had a course where we learned about logic structures, operators, and coding, you know, if-else statements and all that. But the twist? We also studied conditioning. We trained rats using reward and punishment to teach them how to push buttons or even drive tiny cars in order to obtain food. That class completely blew my mind. It made me question if I had picked the wrong major; maybe I was supposed to study psychology.
What stuck with me was the idea that you could observe behaviour, adjust variables, and actually learn how decision-making worked, not just in animals, but in humans too. Later, during my bachelor’s studies, we developed a video game based on those same conditioning principles. That connection between tech, behaviour, and interaction got me hooked.
However, my first actual experimentation job came years later at YourSurprise, where I had the chance to work closely with the amazing team from Online Dialogue. That was when I really dove into the beautiful world of A/B testing, hypotheses, behavioural insights, and structured experimentation. And honestly, I haven’t looked back since.
How did you start to learn experimentation?
I actually started learning about experimentation while working as a social media marketer. I was setting up Meta campaigns, testing ad creatives and copy, those were technically my first A/B tests, even if I didn’t call them that back then. I realized I loved the process of testing, tweaking, and trying to understand why certain versions performed better than others.
Then, when YourSurprise offered me the chance to become a CRO Specialist, I immediately said yes, it sounded like the perfect mix of strategy, behavior, and data. That’s when I really started to go deep. I took courses at CXL, and I was lucky to have mentoring sessions with Desiree van der Horst from Online Dialogue. She introduced me to the structured side of experimentation and helped me connect the dots between curiosity, psychology, and methodology.
She also told me I was good at it, and that maybe I should make it my full-time thing. Turns out, she was right. I fell in love with it.
How do you apply experimentation in your personal life? (what are you tinkering with or always optimizing?)
For me, experimentation is not just a work skill, it’s how I navigate the world. Being neurodivergent, I’ve always had to figure things out a bit differently. What works for most people often doesn’t work for me, so I’ve learned to treat life as a series of tests, with curiosity, not judgment.
Even in my relationships, I experiment with how I communicate, testing tone, structure, and even the wording of a message to see what creates the best connection. Living between cultures (Mexico and the Netherlands), I’ve also had to test what “normal” even looks like for me.
And of course, with my Akita, it’s a full-on experimentation lab. From the best training routines to which shampoo keeps his coat soft without overstimulating him, it’s all a cycle of observing, adjusting, learning.
So yeah, I guess I don’t “apply” experimentation to my personal life, I live it.
In the full interview you will also learn which developments Dorian excites in experimentation. How does she sees the field changing in the next 5 to 10 years? She also shares recommendations to someone who is looking to join the experimentation industry.
Job opportunities
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