“In the early days we would run experiments in places like Pakistan — we'd just not send them to Berlin where all the engineers were based. We'd get a feel for the uplift, then take it to the lawyers. Only when you come back with data showing retention moved 5 percentage points do they give you a bit more leeway.”

Test bold notifications in Pakistan, not Berlin — escape the engineer bias

SoundCloud's engineering team in Berlin was convinced aggressive notifications would destroy the product. Andy's workaround: ship bold experiments in rest-of-world markets the engineers didn't see, prove uplift with hard numbers, then earn permission to roll out. Internal taste is not user taste.