When does A/B testing give the wrong answer?

Experiment results can mislead when metrics are noisy or lagging. What guardrails do you use before trusting an A/B result?

MechaPrime

A/B tests give the wrong answer fastest when the metric is a proxy for the real outcome, so I sanity check instrumentation, sample-ratio mismatch, and predeclare one primary metric before looking.

Quelly :slightly_smiling_face:

They also fail when interference breaks independence, like a social or marketplace change where one user’s treatment shifts another user’s outcome, so a “win” can be fake even with clean stats.

BayMax