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Product Management vocabulary · Experiments & A/B Testing

Control group

Meaning in product management, with examples

nounCommon term

In product management, control group means: In an experiment, the group of users who see the current, unchanged version, so their results can be compared with the group that sees the change.

In Turkish: kontrol grubu

How it is used

Often simply called the control. Users must be assigned to the control group at random; otherwise the comparison is not fair. People say the variant beat the control or performed worse than the control.

Example sentences

  1. Half of new users are in the control group and keep seeing the old onboarding.

  2. The control group converted at 5.1% and the variant at 5.6%.

Common collocations

  • control group
  • holdout group
  • compare with the control
  • assign to the control group
  • A/B testAn experiment in which users are randomly split into groups that see different versions of a page or feature, so the team can measure which version performs better.
  • variantIn an A/B test, a changed version of a page or feature that is shown to some users and compared with the current version.
  • statistical significanceA sign that a difference between test groups is probably real and not just the result of random chance, judged against an agreed threshold.
  • baselineThe starting value of a metric before a change is made, used as a reference point to measure whether the change improved anything.
  • hypothesisA clear, testable statement of what the team believes will happen if it makes a change, and how it will know whether it was right.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Experiments & A/B Testing

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