Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've probably done testing and found that for some significant percentage of married couples, seeing their spouse's posts caused them to reduce their Facebook usage. So unhappy marriages are ruining it for everyone. I feel like the general trend of UI simplification and a/b testing everything has companies chasing after anything that will push their general metrics up in the short term, at the expense of slowly di…
I guess A/B testing will tell you if the horse will become faster if you change from iron shoes to carbon fiber ones. A/B testing won’t ever get you a Tesla from a horse.
Right. But if you were already selling Teslas, and along came a smooth-talking product designer with a dream to "improve" it by building a horse instead, A/B testing would make sure that change never saw the light of day.
A/B testing is not a way to get out of having to come up with good ideas yourself. It's a way to validate that your ideas are any good in the first place before betting the whole company on them.
A/B testing is most critical when evaluating big changes to a product, because those are the changes most likely to completely blow up the business. Otherwise it's left up to the opinion of the highest paid person in the room, and people are notoriously bad at guessing how customers will respond to change.