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From Lab Bench to Product Bench: Experimentation in Product Development

experimentation in product development
Blog Author: Rina Alexin

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When you picture experimentation in product development, you probably don’t think of pipettes, enzymes, or Petri dishes. But as Dr. Christina Agapakis reminds us in the kickoff to Season 4 of Productside Stories, product teams and scientists aren’t as different as we might think. 

Christina—a synthetic biologist turned brand builder (Oscillator founder, former SVP of Creative & Marketing at Ginkgo Bioworks)—has lived both lives. She’s spent years in labs running experiments that fizzle out and years in boardrooms selling stories that shape billion-dollar biotech. Her verdict? Discovery isn’t a pipeline. It’s a glorious hairball of hypotheses, constraints, funding models, and collaboration. 

Sound familiar, PMs? 

 

Product Management and the Scientific Method 

The parallels are almost one-to-one. Scientists frame hypotheses, test them, analyze outcomes, and refine their models. Product managers do the same with customer problems, prototypes, and roadmaps. 

But here’s the kicker: the neat flowchart version of the scientific method is just as misleading as those “perfect” design thinking slides. In reality, both science and product discovery involve detours, dead ends, and uncomfortable ambiguity. 

Christina recalls teaching students who pointed out: “You’re not actually showing us how to do this. You’re just telling us to do it.” And she admits they were right. The hardest part isn’t drawing the loop. It’s navigating the judgment calls, the “this doesn’t feel right” moments, and the messy feedback that never fits the tidy diagram. 

That’s the heart of product management and the scientific method: both are experiments in understanding the unknown, one iteration at a time. 

 

Breaking Down Silos in Product Teams 

One of Christina’s most practical lessons is that silos exist in both science and product. In labs, there’s a wall between “pure” research and application. In product orgs, engineering, design, and marketing often run on separate tracks. 

The result? Friction, misalignment, and missed opportunities. 

Christina describes sitting in rooms with scientists, engineers, and marketers—all solving the same problem, but from completely different angles. What actually unlocked progress wasn’t better handoffs, but cross-pollination. The CRISPR expert and the microbial sequencing expert needed to be in the same conversation, just as PMs and customer success managers need to co-create solutions together. 

For product leaders, breaking down silos in product teams is less about reorganizing boxes on an org chart and more about creating shared language, shared constraints, and shared outcomes. Silos don’t vanish—you just stop letting them block the flow of insight. 

 

Failure as Data in Innovation 

If experimentation in product development has a patron saint, it’s failure. Christina puts it bluntly: most scientific experiments don’t “work” in the conventional sense. But disproved hypotheses still generate knowledge. 

The same principle applies in product. Too many teams still treat failure as wasted effort instead of data. The reality is, every dead-end prototype or rejected roadmap item adds to your collective understanding—of your customers, your constraints, your market. 

And the cost of avoiding failure is worse. As Rina Alexin (Productside CEO and podcast host) warns, entire teams have burned years building products that never got adoption—because they weren’t allowed to validate early and fail small. That’s not just a financial loss; it’s a people loss. 

Productside’s approach (and Christina’s scientific reality) are aligned: failure as data in innovation is the only way forward. The faster you collect feedback, the less painful it is. 

 

Staying with the Trouble in Product Management 

Christina brings in Donna Haraway’s famous phrase: “stay with the trouble.” In science and in product, the work is inherently messy. Retreating into sanitized frameworks or lab silos is tempting, but unhelpful. 

For PMs, staying with the trouble in product management means resisting the urge to oversimplify complexity away. It means sitting in the ambiguity, iterating in the real world, and leaning into the friction points where actual impact is forged. 

It’s not comfortable. But neither is ignoring reality until your “perfect” plan collapses in market. 

Funding, Constraints, and Who Decides What Ships 

One of the most fascinating parts of Christina’s story is her candid look at funding. In science, government grants, private donors, or research organizations decide what gets studied. In product, budgets, incentives, and investors decide what gets shipped. 

The similarity? Who pays shapes what gets built. 

That reality check is crucial for product leaders. Your roadmap doesn’t just reflect customer needs—it reflects financial pressures, institutional incentives, and sometimes even politics. Acknowledging that doesn’t make you less customer-centric. It makes you honest. 

 

Why Experimentation in Product Development Matters 

Don’t think about it as chasing perfect answers. It’s about: 

  • Running discovery as a loop, not a pipeline. 
  • Treating failure as data, not shame. 
  • Breaking down silos so knowledge actually travels. 
  • Accepting that incentives shape outcomes. 
  • Building stories that move execs, teams, and customers—not just tidy slides. 

Whether you’re managing microbes or managing metrics, the mindset is the same: experiment, stay curious, and stay with the trouble. 

Ready to Go Deeper?