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> ablation experiment

What is that? "Ablation" as in removal? Do they AB test removing new features just for data? ... and also monitor SM threads for feedback?

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Yes ablation as in removal. They then refer to using the 3% experiment to estimate out revenue loss, so it appears they were running an AB test where it was removed for 3% of users so they could understand the metric impact of removal. Part of being a decent PM is monitoring SM for any feature talk.

In AI research ablation experiments are comparative tests, but in one branch some feature is removed. Here the Chrome team is saying that removal of the feature (which the Ads team wanted) was instantly noticed by users.

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