Growth Notes

Resources & Communities

Tags: experimentation commerce index

Resources & Communities

Checked: 2026-08-17

Where the CRO, growth and design-engineering conversation actually happens — the books that don’t expire, the people worth following, the places to ask, and the primary sources to check before believing anything else.

Ordered by how fast each section rots. Books barely move. Communities and conferences move constantly — anything below “Publications” should be treated as a lead to verify, not a fact.

Books

The durable half of this note. Grouped by what they’re for rather than by discipline.

Experimentation and statistics

  • Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments — Kohavi, Tang & Xu. The canonical text. If you read one thing, this — notes
  • Statistical Methods in Online A/B Testing — Georgi Georgiev. Practitioner-focused, unusually rigorous on the maths most CRO writing skips
  • Experimentation Works — Stefan Thomke. The organisational case rather than the method
  • The Art of Statistics — David Spiegelhalter. The best general statistics book for someone who needs intuition rather than formulae
  • Statistics Done Wrong — Alex Reinhart. Short, and about the failure modes specifically
  • How to Measure Anything — Douglas Hubbard. Reframes “unmeasurable” as “not yet decomposed”
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow — Kahneman. Note the replication caveats on parts of it; still the reference point for the vocabulary — System 1 and System 2

CRO, persuasion and UX

  • Influence — Robert Cialdini. The source everything else paraphrases
  • Don’t Make Me Think — Steve Krug. Still the fastest useful book on usability
  • The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman. Affordances, signifiers, mapping
  • Forms that Work — Caroline Jarrett & Gerry Gaffney. Underrated, and forms are where ecommerce money leaks
  • Making Websites Win — Karl Blanks & Ben Jesson. Agency-flavoured but concrete
  • You Should Test That! — Chris Goward. Includes the LIFT framework
  • Predictably Irrational — Dan Ariely. Same replication caveat as Kahneman
  • Nudge — Thaler & Sunstein. Choice architecture, from the source

Analytics and data

  • Web Analytics 2.0 — Avinash Kaushik. Dated on tools, durable on thinking
  • Lean Analytics — Croll & Yoskovitz. Choosing the one metric that matters at each stage
  • Storytelling with Data — Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. Practical charting
  • The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — Edward Tufte. The reference

Product and growth

  • Inspired — Marty Cagan. Product discovery and team shape
  • Continuous Discovery Habits — Teresa Torres. The most practical research-cadence book
  • Escaping the Build Trap — Melissa Perri. Outcomes over output
  • Hacking Growth — Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown. The growth-team playbook
  • Obviously Awesome — April Dunford. Positioning, and better than the category deserves
  • The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick. How to ask questions that produce information

Engineering and performance

  • High Performance Browser Networking — Ilya Grigorik. Free online. The networking chapters are the best explanation anywhere
  • Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Martin Kleppmann. Not web-specific; the best systems book of the last decade — notes
  • Accelerate — Forsgren, Humble & Kim. The DORA research, and the evidence for continuous delivery
  • Refactoring UI — Wathan & Schoger. Design heuristics for people who write code

Design systems and front end

  • Design Systems — Alla Kholmatova. The one about the human side
  • Atomic Design — Brad Frost. Free online. The vocabulary most teams use
  • Inclusive Components — Heydon Pickering. Component-by-component accessibility
  • Form Design Patterns — Adam Silver. Accessible forms, worked properly
  • Laying the Foundations — Andrew Couldwell. Practical system-building

Pricing and copy

  • Confessions of the Pricing Man — Hermann Simon
  • The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing — Nagle & Müller. The textbook
  • Everybody Writes — Ann Handley
  • Nicely Said — Nicole Fenton & Kate Kiefer Lee. Interface copy specifically

Primary sources

The ones to check before believing a blog post. These are the least likely things on this page to be wrong.

Web platform

  • MDN Web Docs — the reference for anything browser
  • web.dev and Chrome for Developers — performance, Core Web Vitals, platform changes
  • Can I Use — support tables
  • HTTP Archive and the Web Almanac — what the web actually does, annually, at scale
  • CrUX (Chrome UX Report) — real-user data, and what Core Web Vitals assessments are based on
  • W3C / WAI — WCAG itself, plus the Understanding and Techniques documents

UK regulation

Worth knowing where these live, because vendor blogs get them wrong constantly.

  • ICO — UK data protection and PECR guidance
  • CMA — consumer protection, pricing claims, drip pricing
  • ASA / CAP — advertising codes

Vendor documentation

  • Shopify.dev and the Shopify changelog — Shopify
  • Adobe Experience League — Adobe Experience Cloud
  • Google Search Central, GA4 and Google Tag Manager docs

Research

  • Baymard Institute — large-scale ecommerce UX research. Paid, and the best money in this list
  • Nielsen Norman Group — usability research, long-running
  • Microsoft ExP publications — Kohavi and colleagues; the experimentation papers everything cites
  • Engineering blogs — Netflix, Airbnb, Booking, Spotify, Meta. Where real experimentation practice gets written up
  • arXiv — stat.AP and cs.HC for the underlying methods

Publications and blogs

  • CXL — the highest-volume serious CRO writing
  • Smashing Magazine — front end, design systems, accessibility
  • A List Apart — long-running, lower volume now, high signal
  • GoodUI — tested patterns with evidence attached
  • Growth.Design — case studies as illustrated teardowns
  • Simo Ahava’s blog — the definitive source on GTM and measurement implementation
  • Analytics Mania — practical GTM, tutorial-heavy
  • CSS Wizardry — Harry Roberts on performance
  • Adrian Roselli and Sara Soueidan — accessibility, deeply
  • Josh Comeau — CSS and front end, exceptionally well explained
  • Lenny’s Newsletter — product and growth

People

Long-running voices rather than a follow list. People change roles and platforms; the names are stable, the links aren’t.

EXPERIMENTATION   Ronny Kohavi · Lukas Vermeer
                  Georgi Georgiev · Craig Sullivan
                  Chris Stucchio · Andrew Anderson

CRO / UX          Els Aerts · Karl Gilis
                  André Morys · Talia Wolf
                  Rishi Rawat · Peep Laja

MEASUREMENT       Simo Ahava · Avinash Kaushik
                  Julius Fedorovicius

PERFORMANCE       Addy Osmani · Barry Pollard
                  Harry Roberts · Jake Archibald

ACCESSIBILITY     Heydon Pickering · Adrian Roselli
                  Sara Soueidan

DESIGN SYSTEMS    Brad Frost · Nathan Curtis
                  Dan Mall · Alla Kholmatova

Communities

The section that decays fastest.

  • Measure Slack (measure.chat) — the largest analytics and measurement community. The experimentation channels are the active ones
  • Experiment Nation — CRO and experimentation community with a Slack, newsletter and job board
  • CRO Hacks — Slack, CRO-focused
  • MeasureCamp — a free community-run unconference series rather than a forum, running in many cities. Consistently the best-value event in this list
  • Reddit — r/analytics, r/webdev, r/PPC. Variable, occasionally excellent
  • LinkedIn — where most of this industry’s public conversation moved. Low signal-to-noise, high reach

Conferences

  • Conversion Hotel (Texel, Netherlands) — small, three days, high reputation
  • Emerce Conversion (Amsterdam) — CRO and analytics
  • Conversionboost (Copenhagen) — CRO and experimentation
  • Optimizers Conference — formerly Experimentation Island, two editions a year
  • Future of Experimentation (Porto) — invite-only working sessions
  • MeasureCamp — many cities, free, unconference format
  • brightonSEO (UK) — large, with CRO and analytics tracks
  • Marketing Analytics Summit
  • SmashingConf and performance.now() — front end and web performance
  • State of the Browser (London) — small, browser-focused

[CHECK: dates, locations and whether each ran this year. Conference schedules change annually and several in this list have renamed at least once.]

Courses

  • CXL Institute — the main paid CRO training route
  • Reforge — growth and product, expensive, strong network effect
  • Analytics Mania / MeasureSchool — GTM and measurement implementation
  • Frontend Masters — web development
  • Baymard — ecommerce UX, tied to their research

What I expect to be wrong

Written down so the next revision has something to check.

  • At least one community above has gone quiet or moved platform since this was written
  • Several conferences will have renamed, merged or stopped. This has happened repeatedly in this space
  • Some people listed will have changed roles or stopped publishing. The names remain useful as search terms regardless
  • The blog list is the weakest section — it reflects what was worth reading rather than a survey, and personal blogs go dark quietly
  • Books are the safest section and should need almost no revision

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