Podcast Summary: "Creating a Winning Personalization and Testing Approach"

The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
Episode #735 | Guest: Muqtadaa Miandara, Principal Digital Growth, Upbound Group
Date: September 17, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode explores how Upbound Group has built an award-winning approach to testing, personalization, and continuous optimization in digital marketing. Principal Digital Growth leader Muqtadaa Miandara joins Greg Kihlström live at Opticon 25 in New York City to discuss scaling experimentation, overcoming organizational and technical hurdles, the interplay of AI and data, and building an agile culture rooted in cross-team transparency and top-down support.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Upbound Group Background and Mission

• Brands Represented: Rent-A-Center, Acima (serving subprime and near-prime credit sectors)
• Mission: “Creating financial opportunity for all."
  • The group provides access to essential durable goods (furniture, electronics, appliances) with affordable payment options, giving financial flexibility where traditional credit is inaccessible.
    (04:00–04:22)

2. The Early Days: Challenges and Wins in Experimentation

• Team Formation: Muqtadaa began as a front-end developer with no formal background in testing (Optimizely or GTM), highlighting rapid learning and adaptability.
  • “Do you know what Optimizely and Google Tag Manager are? I said no, but I will on Monday, and now we're here.”
    —Muqtadaa (04:50)
• Initial Challenges:
  • Starting with a very small team (three people)
  • Building credibility and relationships across business units
  • Translating marketing/testing wins into business outcomes intelligible to other stakeholders (05:30–07:38)
• Key Insight: Early struggles weren’t just technical—success hinged on education, cross-functional advocacy, and making testing relevant to business goals.

3. The Language of Business Value

• Translating ‘Marketing Metrics’ to Business Results:
  • Aligning experiments to strategic business objectives (e.g., “bumping start order clicks by 12% relative uplift”)
  • “There's a UX principle of storytelling... It’s about creating a narrative—not a dishonest one, but one that translates what you understand is exciting into a way that it can be exciting for other stakeholders.”
    —Muqtadaa (09:18–11:01)
  • Leveraging relationships with Optimizely and peer companies to borrow credibility

4. Evolution of the Testing Program & Continuous Improvement

• Strategic, Not Just Tactical, Improvement:
  • Using prioritization frameworks like RICE to align test backlogs with company OKRs
  • Visibility and transparency in prioritization builds trust across teams
  • “If you don’t give analysis time, you're going to get bad analysis, and nothing harms your credibility more [...].” —Muqtadaa (13:00)
• Results:
  • In 2024, Upbound achieved “one of the number one win rates in Optimizely globally,” largely due to focusing on critical priorities during resource constraints.
    (15:13)

5. Organizational Factors & Culture

• Strategic Partnerships:
  • Optimizely is viewed as a “partner” more than a vendor, providing validation, industry benchmarks, and technical support.
    • “Testing’s a niche space. You can work on it for years without meeting someone else who does it. The first time I came to Opticon... I was like, oh, I’m good at this.” —Muqtadaa (16:23–18:15)
• Top-Down Support:
  • Strong C-level advocacy was vital—enabling cross-team work, breaking down silos, and pushing for “proof-oriented” culture.
    • “She was very open to us kind of poking our nose in other people’s corners...Some of these teams are 50 years old... Organizationally, the operating model is not quick to evolve.” —Muqtadaa (18:39)
• Learning from Failure:
  • “Learners not losers.” —Muqtadaa, on experimentation culture (20:53)

6. Fostering a Culture of Continuous Improvement

• Customer Orientation:
  • Using data, research, and testing to address business discrepancies and improve experience, not just metrics.
• Executive Education:
  • “Here’s what we’re doing, here’s the incremental revenue impact, here is why this is important… I can pad your bottom line, basically.” —Muqtadaa (21:11)
• Cross-team Workshops:
  • Frequent ideation workshops with product, design, and analytics teams to co-create test ideas and foster buy-in (23:11)

7. Trends & The Future: Personalization & AI

• Personalization:
  • Using test segment results to create “autonomous” personalizations across audiences
  • Building a “universal customer profile” is both a challenge and an opportunity for future growth (24:01)
• AI and Scalability:
  • Constraints on hiring prompt Upbound to advance AI agents (Opal AI) to automate repetitive work, enabling more test velocity.
    • “We could build more tests. If I could work with agents to build tests and QA what I’ve written...when the answers are a resounding no [to more hiring], what do we do? Supplement with AI as much as possible.” —Muqtadaa (24:50–26:56)

8. Industry Community & Learning

• Opticon as a Knowledge-Sharing Hub:
  • Camaraderie among experimentation professionals; deep value in sharing ideas with peers facing similar challenges (27:14)
  • “It's so rare to find people in this space who know exactly what you’re talking about...” —Muqtadaa

9. Staying Agile—Team and Personal Growth

• Continuous Challenge:
  • “I try not to assume that just because I’ve been doing it one way, that's the right way to keep doing it... currently I’m the foremost expert on testing at Upbound. That does not mean I’m the smartest person doing testing at Upbound. And I don’t want it to mean that.” —Muqtadaa (28:18)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Do you know what Optimizely and Google Tag Manager are? I said no, but I will on Monday, and now we're here.”
  —Muqtadaa Miandara (04:50)

• “Testing’s a niche space. You can work on it for years without meeting someone else who does it. The first time I came to Opticon... I was like, oh, I’m good at this.”
  —Muqtadaa Miandara (17:56)

• “Learners not losers.”
  —Muqtadaa Miandara (20:53)

• “If I could run like a dummy version of it and prove no one's going to click that thing to enter this new flow, maybe we don't do it in the first place. So…I'm also helping the business decide what not to do. And that’s huge.”
  —Muqtadaa Miandara (21:50)

• “Currently I’m the foremost expert on testing at Upbound. That does not mean I’m the smartest person doing testing at Upbound. And I don’t want it to mean that. I really love other people to come in who are smarter than me...”
  —Muqtadaa Miandara (28:18)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• Background & Mission — 02:29–04:22
• Early Challenges & Formation of Testing Practice — 04:50–08:39
• Aligning Experiments to Business Goals — 09:18–11:01
• Strategic Improvement & Prioritization — 11:27–15:13
• Importance of Organizational Factors and C-level Support — 18:39–20:49
• Creating a Learning Culture & Handling Failure — 20:53–23:44
• Personalization & Use of AI Tools (Opal AI) — 24:01–26:56
• Knowledge-Sharing and Community at Opticon — 27:14–28:09
• Staying Agile, Enabling Team Growth — 28:18–29:16

Summary Takeaways

• Building a successful personalization and testing practice relies equally on technology, cross-team trust, clear business alignment, and robust internal education.
• Strong C-level backing and openness to experimentation (including learning from failed tests) are vital for transformation within historically siloed or legacy organizations.
• AI and automation are increasingly pivotal for sustaining velocity when growth outpaces hiring and budgets.
• Community engagement—within and beyond one’s organization—nurtures innovation and personal development.

This summary covers all key content and insights for those unable to listen to the episode, presenting actionable lessons and memorable moments in the original voices and spirit of the conversation.