What if your dashboard is lying to you? 📊❌

In this episode of UX Stories, host Lihong Hicken sits down with Aaron Montana, Head of Experimentation & Product Analytics at LaunchDarkly, to explore the real intersection of engineering, A/B testing, and user research — and why the future of testing might include machines testing for machines. 🤖

Whether you're a product manager, engineer, or UX researcher, this conversation will challenge the way you think about features, data, and what it really means to understand your users.

🕐 TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – Welcome & Introduction

01:20 – What a dashboard can never fully explain 💡

02:05 – The role of human curiosity in experimentation

03:05 – What is LaunchDarkly and who uses it?

03:27 – Why feature flags are the best foundation for A/B testing

05:45 – Bridging the gap between engineers and marketers

08:25 – Quantitative vs. qualitative: what's the right sequence?

09:25 – How to design a research study from scratch

11:15 – Qualitative finds problems; quantitative solves them

15:48 – The psychological challenge of killing your own feature 😬

18:45 – Why high-velocity teams are already running experiments — just badly

22:14 – Vibe coding vs. vibe testing: the speed gap 🚀

24:50 – Is qualitative research becoming too expensive?

26:20 – Synthetic data and AI panels — promise vs. reality 🤔

28:08 – Early-stage vs. late-stage testing: when to use AI

30:00 – Are we about to test for machines, not humans? 🤯

32:31 – The future: machines running experiments for machines

💬 If technology is the rain and our ecosystem is a garden — more jobs, more testers, more ecosystems to validate. 🌱

Like, Subscribe & hit the 🔔 if you're building products and want to ship with confidence — not just speed.

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