
Loading summary
Kiana
I'm Kiana and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business, but Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like I can't stop. I'm addicted. Start your free trial@shopify.com at Strayer University,
Strayer University Representative
we help students like you Go from Will I To why not? For over 130 years, we've been innovating higher education to make it more affordable, accessible and attainable so you can reach your goals. Go from thinking can I? To Yes I can and keep striving. Visit strayer.edu to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and its many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.
Greg Kilstrom
Foreign.
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And now onto the show. When it's a struggle for marketers to
even keep up with the latest trends, are brands truly keeping pace with their customers or are they stuck playing catch up with outdated strategies and technologies? Agility requires a willingness to experiment or learn and adapt quickly. It also demands a deep understanding of your customer and the ability to anticipate their evolving needs. We're here in New York City at Opticon 25 and are going to talk about building an agile brand in the age of continual transformation and focusing on the power of experimentation, personalization and continuous improvement. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Muktada Miandara, Principal Digital Growth At Upbound Group. Muktada, welcome to the show.
Muktada Miandara
Thank you so much for having me.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Looking forward to having this conversation and great to be in person here at events like this. I love it.
Muktada Miandara
New York City.
Greg Kilstrom
I know, I know. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at upbound Group.
Muktada Miandara
Yeah, absolutely. So I am the principal of digital growth at the Upbound Group. I oversee a team dedicated to testing and CRO practice, essentially overseeing our two main lines of business, Rent a Center and Acima, serving customers in subprime and near prime credit score areas to help them get financing for the things that they need. So within that we have some very specific funnels that we have to optimize and personalize and a lot of regulatory and compliance based specifics that we have to be mindful of at all times. And it's a unique challenge having to sort of manage a team that's doing that every single day.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And I know you mentioned a couple brands that are part of Upbound Group, but maybe give us a little background on the brands like Rent a Center and others that you work with, as well as the overarching mission that drives the work.
Muktada Miandara
Yeah, absolutely. So upbound's mission statement is creating financial opportunity for all. So our goal always is to just create access for people to get the things that they need when they need them in a way that doesn't break the bank for them. At lower income levels, cash flow is more important than net savings, unfortunately, very often, and it's not great, but it's also kind of just what it is. So we offer opportunities to get the products that everybody needs. Furniture, appliances, large scale electronics for kids going to school, like laptops or iPads or whatever. And we do so in a way that's like an affordable regular payment as opposed to having to get, try to get approved for a credit card you're almost certainly either going to be denied for or you're going to get a minimal approval amount on. And so we, we provide access to thousands of dollars worth of durable goods by comparison.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, great. So we're going to talk about a few things here and I want to start with the testing and personalization journey that upbound has been on. And you've certainly Upbound has been recognized for its innovative use of optimizely for testing and personalization in general. Can you maybe take us back to, you know, early days of testing and personalization? What were some of the early, you know, initial challenges as well as some of the early wins.
Muktada Miandara
So I came out of College December of 2020, Mid Covid and I applied to be a UX designer at Rent A Center. And I did not get the job. And I got a call back instead saying, hey, you have like front end dev skills. Would you like to interview for this job called testing and tagging specialist? And I was like, I have no idea what that is. Sure, sure, what do I need? And she was like, okay, I can get you an interview with the hiring manager tomorrow. Do you know what Optimizely and Google Tag Manager are? And I said no, but I will on Monday. And now we're here. So when I joined, we had just signed on with Optimizely. We were literally in month one of onboarding. I think they had signed 45 days before I joined the company. We had switched over from, I want to say site spec. I never had the opportunity to work with that tool, but I don't think I can anymore. Right. So it was definitely a bit of a challenge where I'm coming in very green to like corporate space in general. And on top of that, this specific business model and workflow and process, I had none of that context. All I knew was I was a decent front end developer, a decent UX designer and a passable UX researcher. And that's really being generous to younger me. And the greatest challenge was we were an incredibly small team. We were our UX manager who is now our director of digital experience, My boss, Aaron, a designer who's infinitely. I get why she got the job over me. She's infinitely better at it than I am. To this day I look at how she designs and I'm just like, oh, that's what I was supposed to be doing. Got it. And then myself and we were three people and we had to start scaling, testing across what was originally just the Rent a Center brand because we had just acquired Asima. And so we weren't yet in a position where our orgs were interacting in a way where we could just step in and start telling people, we've got ideas for you. And there was a lot of relationship building that had to happen, a lot of communication and education on what it was we were even trying to accomplish. So there were a lot of times that I think some missteps early on were assuming that everyone would be excited about some numbers that we had to present and saying, but this is good for the business. And then being like, can you prove that really? And having to learn how to prove that and then how to make It. Other people's excitement driving it as much as our own. So. So that sort of rapport and that sort of process was probably the hardest part of the early building of the program. Scaling with like, additional resources or tools or impressions or technical expertise that all kind of. That naturally evolves over time. But like embeddedness within the organization, that's a challenge. And building that and finding the right way to do it to where people are not only supporting, testing and like test and learn processes as, as part and parcel of the way we work, but actively advocating for it themselves or asking for things to be tested, that was an evolution that we had to go through.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Yeah. So first, I love the initiative on your part of just like, hey, I'll, I'll, I'll learn it by Monday or whatever. Because I mean, I've been in that position too, you know, back, back in the day. So, you know, sometimes you just have to. Have to do that. And I mean, with things evolving so quickly, it's hard to. Nobody can know everything anyway, right?
Muktada Miandara
No, I mean, of course I was growing up, I was always the kind of person to, like, as soon as I found a piece of software or like a tool that I thought was interesting or like even growing up, like our vacuum started making a weird noise, I took it apart, fixed it and put it back together. Like, granted, they're meant to be taken apart. There are things I've taken apart I could not put back together. But it was the same thing. Like, as soon as I learned what the inspector tool was on a browser at the age of 12, I was in there learning what HTML was and over time making little websites. And then I was freelancing and it all just kind of like coalesced into where I am now. It's a very strange sort of. Looking back on it, the story makes sense, but at the time it was real chaotic.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. So the other thing that you brought up and kind of telling about the early days was just not only education on, you know, you're fairly fresh out of school and everything like that, but. And so there's some education on marketing and things, but also having to understand how the business really speaks and responds. And again, we can get some great. Whether those are like vanity metrics or whatever they are, like, we can get some things that are really good for a marketer, but to translate and to understand how to continually translate to that, to the business. I mean, what, what role does having like the right tool and the right platform, the right analytics and, and stuff help with that?
Muktada Miandara
Yeah, absolutely. So part of it is definitely aligning on the right outcomes. Right. Like the business has strategic goals, annually, quarterly, however you want to break it down. And if you're just testing in spite of that, cool. Not what we were looking for kind of vibes. Right. Whereas if the business says the top of funnels bleeding, we have to f. These are our key like inflection points and we need to raise these numbers by X percentage. All of a sudden you've got a plan and you can say, well now I know a project. Everything on a product page, we have to bump start order clicks by 12% relative 2% uplift. Okay, I know tactics for that and I can build a series of tests and we can look at the cumulative effect over time. And like all of a sudden you're speaking a language that is a lot more reassuring to people who are looking at those numbers from different perspectives where it is more translatable. And it really comes down to like there's a UX principle of storytelling. Right. It's about creating a narrative. Not, not a dishonest one, but one that translates what you understand is exciting into a way that it can be exciting for other stakeholders. And part of that has been working with, you know, strategic partners within optimizely strategy team or within our, you know, the friends we've made through coming to these events at road shows and various customer pop ups and things like that. Getting to know other people in the space and learning they've overcome similar challenges has been a massive benefit for us in formatting how we speak to people internally and where we bring in experts to say like, hey, they think what we're doing is really smart. So you should also. And look at them, there are, you know, however many billion dollar company, so you should also agree with them kind of thing, you know, like borrowing credibility almost.
Greg Kilstrom
So yeah, you know, another part of this too is, you know, you test and experiment to improve the thing that you're testing and measuring. But there's also kind of the. I don't know if it's the work, about the work or how you would call it, but there's also that continuous improvement of testing and learning and personalization in and of itself. How do you manage to do that and continually improve the way that you're doing these things?
Muktada Miandara
Yeah, I think like there's a very tactical improvement. You can achieve better technical expertise, more hands, better, you know, better process, like at the tactical level. But if you want to really improve a program, you have to work strategically, zoom out and start Thinking again, like aligning on the business priorities and the strategic business opportunities, building project plans that span a series of tests as opposed to, and making those, like if you say, have four key business priorities for the year, all of a sudden you can start building prioritization frameworks, you know, in combination with like a RICE framework or something like that. Because I think that works really well for experimentation because of the reach aspect of it. Because if you never, if you don't have good reach for an experiment, there's really like a lot less value to running it. Not to say that you shouldn't, just that its priority is inherently going to be lowered because the total impact will always be lower. So yeah, using prioritization frameworks alongside something like strategic opportunities or like okrs or something like that, that's a great way to say, like the business wants these three things. So if something you're requesting as a stakeholder falls in that bucket, amazing. It probably gets bumped up. But if you're asking for something outside of it, I'll still put it in the backlog, I'll still prioritize it. But you have to understand it might be a quarter before we get to it because A, resource constraints and B, it's just not as important right now. And that's okay. Doesn't mean it's not valuable, it's just not as valuable.
Greg Kilstrom
But in that context, everyone is. At least there's visibility on that.
Muktada Miandara
There's an accountability aspect to it and a transparency aspect to it that is more reassuring than just like ignoring a request or doing a poor job of it if you were to just like rush it through anyways. So that's part of it. And I think moving more strategically like that also helps you to, you know, lean into the statistical rigor a little bit because you've given yourself the breathing room to say, well, now let's go calculate mde, let's go look at our expected sample size, let's go look at the time we need to run this test and let's, you know, take time after the test is run to do a deeper post hoc analysis in our data warehouse and so on and so forth. Like you suddenly have given yourself the structure to do those things as opposed to having some amorphous timeline in which you might or might not have results. Right, and you might not have complete results in that scenario where you only tracked certain things and didn't remember to track others. And so in the optimizely summary, it's very hard to see what the movement was. And then you have to go put in a request to one of the analytics teams and they have a six week turnaround and whoops, your two week promise is dead in the water. So building trust by delivering on time, having results when you say you'll have them, or like educating people on the time it takes to have outcomes, because good analysis takes time. And so if you don't give it time, you're going to get bad analysis and nothing is going to harm your credibility more than if you come out with one set of results and then a week later your tune has changed and you're saying, well, actually, now that we've had time to dig into it, it's the opposite of what I first said. So, yeah, I think just the more strategically you can move, the more value you can output. In 2024, our team successfully managed to be like one of the number one win rates in Optimizely globally, which was an insane thing to find out after the fact. And we didn't intend to do it. We were down ahead. I had one less testing resource. We had been through a massive reorg and so we were just like, okay, if we're going to work on anything, it has to be the most important thing. We can't be working on anything spurious. So somehow that sort of conscious constraint of the macro situation led us to the best outcomes we had as a program ever.
Greg Kilstrom
So, yeah, I mean, it's amazing what you can do within constraints.
Muktada Miandara
Right?
Greg Kilstrom
So speaking of Optimizely, you know, we're here at Opticon here, you know, curious, just where does a platform like Optimizely fit into this? The strategy as well as the workflow?
Muktada Miandara
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so there are so many tools, obviously, and some of them are getting cannibalized and gobbled up like others by others. But Optimizely has been kind of like less just a tool or vendor and more of a partner kind of from the beginning. And that has been the defining aspect of the relationship we've built over the last four and a half, five years. And so if it weren't for that, maybe by now we would have optioned another tool. Right, because like, yes, you guys are ahead of the curve on the tech and ahead of the curve on the product offering. Although I do know for a fact our SMO department sometimes is just like, that's a big line item. Do you guys need that still? Are you sure the sourcing team will just like every now and then check in and be like, so what are we feeling about optimizing we're like, absolutely. Gotta keep it. Leave us alone. So, yeah, Optimizely's role in the growth of our team and the growth of our business has been profound. That partnership, the strategic partnership in particular, to help us get access to the resources who can help us learn how to do what we do better, smarter, or validate that what we're doing makes sense and is the smart thing to do. Like that. That's been very, very helpful. You know, testing is a niche space. You can work on it for years without meeting someone else who does it, and just in a vacuum think, God, I don't know anything. I don't know what's going on. I don't know how to make it happen. The first time I came to Opticon or went to, like, an Optimize the customer pop up and I spoke to other people in the space, I was like, oh, I'm good at this. People liked what I was saying because they thought that was smart, and that means I'm good at this. And I did not have that validation before because nobody in my company knows exactly what it is we're doing besides us. So it can be a very validating thing. And so that partnership, that validation, and then the continued innovation, it's what keeps positioning Optimizely as, like, a continued partner for us.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, and to your point, it's, you know, beyond the technology, there's not only the partnership with Optimizely, but also the internal. I mean, you know, you said you've been through reorgs, you started at least with a small team and stuff like that. What are some of the, like, organizational factors, factors that you feel have been crucial to success?
Muktada Miandara
Initially, it's our C level that we rolled up into, was very passionate about the idea of being able to prove outcomes. And so without her support, 100%, we would not have gotten as far as we did. So she's no longer with the company, but she was absolutely vital to saying, don't do that. Let's test it first. Right. And then, because she was over all of marketing and all of our creative services and stuff, she was very in our copywriting teams and everything. She was very open to us kind of poking our nose in other people's corners. Like, I reached out to our email team and I was like, hey, I know you guys do a B testing on email subject lines. Could you also tell me, like, what other a B testing you're doing so I can line up the content on the site and personalize those journeys? A Little bit. What do you think? Would that be cool? And they're like, what does that even mean? Like we only really care about the click through rate opens. And I was like, no, no, no. You understand the we, the value is right. You understand the dollar value happens on the web. So if you're not like you can get them there and if they don't stay, it doesn't matter. So can we make them stay now? That's the question. And you know, that's part of that education and Rapport piece I was kind of talking to earlier. Similar with like our, our like paid media teams or our SEO teams being like, you guys are doing a lot of work to get people to click links. I can get them to stay. That's important. Should we focus on that? But she helped kind of that, that C level support helped pave that path. Because you know, some of these, some of These teams are 50 years old. They're, they're very embedded in the ways that they do things. Even if they've transformed in the last 20 years for the web, it's an old business, it's, it's slow to change in that way. Organizationally, the operating model is not quick to evolve. So having someone so high up just say no, we're changing the way we do things to make a little bit more value out of it.
Greg Kilstrom
Well, and that's, I mean, to me and what I've seen, you know, that's so critical that there is that top down support because I mean, there's a lot of things, I mean, you mentioned the silos, which, you know, classic challenge for a lot of organizations. But also, you know, we're talking about experimentation and by nature, not every experiment achieves the exact thing that you wish that it would. Right. So in other words, you know, some people call that failure. I call it learning. Right.
Muktada Miandara
So how does learners not losers.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, you know, how does that, I mean it sounds like a lot of it is, you know, top down leadership by example and things like that. But you know, how does upbound group as an organization foster that culture of continuous improvement?
Muktada Miandara
We are very oriented on the customer and whenever we start seeing that there's a discrepancy between what we intended and what the outcome is, questions start to get asked. And so one of the easy ways to answer that question is to say, well, let's do some research, let's run some analytics, let's look at some heat maps, let's run a couple tests. It's become part of the language, right? And it didn't always used to be that way, but like, even without now this sea level that we used to roll up into part of the process, the next evolution of getting people on board from the top down has been getting back to that sort of education piece, executive education, almost to be like, here is what we're doing, here's the incremental revenue impact. Here is why this is important. This is what happens if you annualize that data and here's like the curve, the drop off or whatever. Like, you know, getting into the math of it all and saying like, hey, I know you're a cfo. Let me tell you why this is good for you. Like, I can pad your bottom line basically and help account for some stuff that you weren't planning to have in the bank at the end of the year. That's great for the ebitda, that's great for our margins, that's great for our eps. So like, you know, creating that, that rapport and helping people feel more comfortable with the risks that you're taking by saying, look, one in five tests is going to win. So that means 80% of the time I'm striking out, but I'm also helping the business decide what not to do. And that's huge because imagine if we committed $1 million of developer hours and like AI credits to this project and at the end of it we lost money. 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, so there's, there's, I think there's a few different avenues to like getting that kind of support and to creating that culture. One of the things we do a lot is also running a lot of like, workshops. We do like ideation brainstorming workshops with stakeholders very often where we bring in like a product team and we say, hey, and they're designers as well and whoever else, and we say, hey, this is your flow. You know it better than we do. You know the, your product analysts know it better than just like others in the company do. Where do you see the problems? We've laid the flow out on a whiteboard here. Let's just start marking things we could try based on the notes you have about what's not working. And that's always been very successful for filling out a backlog of test ideas. And we don't even have to do that work ourselves anymore. And then we just go through and align it to strategic Goals and fill out priority based on reach and impact and move forward. And it's great.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I love it. So, you know, we've heard a lot, you know, several great announcements here at Opticon, lots of trends and technologies to talk about what's on your mind, you know, what are you excited about and, you know, in terms of some of the upcoming trends and technologies, the big
Muktada Miandara
buzzword in 23 and most of 24 was personalization. So we did lean in on that. We've successfully stood up some personalizations and are building more of a program that's a little bit more autonomous, that does that kind of as we take tests and segment the results and understand more about different cohorts taking that and automatically personalizing as like iterations of existing tests on the broader audience. So that's one aspect that we've been working on, and part of that is the data architecture for customers, getting those data attributes around customers, building a universal customer profile that is enterprise and applicable at the individual business level. That's a huge challenge that I think we're beginning to undertake as an organization. And it's very well informed by some of the work we've done in personalizations to understand what attributes matter for serving up experiences. So that's been top of mind. But nowadays, I think with the resource constraints, with the macroeconomic situation, with budgets being cut everywhere, people getting laid off across various industries, I think more and more people are looking at how fast and how smart we can work. And obviously the other buzzword of the last three years has been AI. And so one of the opportunities and one of the innovations that we're really hoping to lean further on is the advancement of the Opal tool. Opal AI. We were like in the alpha and the beta for Opal as well, and been working with the product team there to better productize it to some degree with like onboarding and building instruction sets that are contextual to the business and stuff like that. It's been, it's been helpful. There's a lot of scut work that, like, if my team members weren't building slides, I could ask them to build more tests. If they weren't writing documentation for Confluence, they could build more tests. That's the end of it is like, we could build more tests. And then even when they're busy, if I could work with agents to build tests and qa. What I've written, like, I lead a team. I have people reporting up to me and I report out to other people, but I am still stuck as an individual Contributor very often, despite being, like, more of a strategic and program and people leader, I have to drop all that, put on my coder hat, sit down and build. So there's weeks where my boss will be like, so, did you get that racy done? And also, do you have the Q4 roadmap and this and that? And I'm like, no, I was building tests so that we meet our Q3 stuff. So I can do that, but I have to stop building then. So what do we do? Trade off? Can we hire people? What's up? And when? The answers are resounding, no. What do we do? And so the hope is supplement with AI as much as possible. And it looks like some of the stuff coming from Opal is definitely going to be of use there.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we'll have to. We'll have to talk about that next year when we talk about how it goes.
Muktada Miandara
Yeah, absolutely.
Greg Kilstrom
That's great. So, as we wrap up here, just a couple things for you again. It's always great to come to these shows and then talk with other people. I know you mentioned that as well. It's nice to be able to just share knowledge with other people. Kind of in the trenches, so to speak. What's been a highlight of Opticon 25 for you so far?
Muktada Miandara
It's probably that over the last several years, I've been building a lot of relationships with people in the industry. So coming back to that, like, getting to see everyone see what they've accomplished, every time I see someone has a different title on their badge than last year, I'm so excited to see it. That's been huge. Like, getting to know my fellow customer advisory board members. I just became legacy this year, several of them as well. And so just kind of realizing, like, oh, we've been, you know, we've been at this for a few years, all of us kind of in the trenches together, figuring this stuff out. And that camaraderie is very fulfilling. And, like, even yesterday, we were out till like, 11 at night, just at dinner, talking. And it's so rare again to find people in this space to who know exactly what you're talking about, the challenges that you face. And so it's very rewarding to get to catch up with them, connect with them, share ideas with them. And so that's been a highlight, that and some of the product announcements. And so always happy to hear about those things.
Greg Kilstrom
Nice, nice. Love it. Well, one last question for you before we wrap up here. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Muktada Miandara
I think constantly challenging myself to explore new ways of doing things. I try not to assume that just because I've been doing it one way that that's the right way to keep doing it. And as we continue to hire, you know, team members who come in and have new ideas like yes, currently I'm the foremost expert on testing in Upbound. That does not mean I'm the smartest person doing testing at Upbound, and I don't want it to mean that I don't want that to stay that way either. Like right now it's true in that I'm one of the only people who does that. Therefore by default I am the foremost expert and the smartest person doing that. I really love other people to come in who are smarter than me so I can tell them, amplify their voice, help their ideas today become mainstream. So I think that's a huge part of it is leaning on people who know what they're talking about or who have really good ideas, creative thinking skills, critical thinking skills, like challenging myself to think more and think harder all the time. So yeah, I love that.
Greg Kilstrom
Well again, I'd like to thank Muktada Miandara, Principal of Digital Growth at upbound Group, for joining the show. You can learn more about Muktada and Upbound Group by following the links in the show notes.
Thanks again for listening to the Agile brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.com that's G R E G K-I H L S T R O M.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co. Op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and Stay Agile.
Strayer University Representative
The agile brand. At Strayer University we help students like you go from Is it possible? To Anything is possible by offering access to up to 10 no cost gen Ed courses so you can reach your goals affordably and fast. Visit Strayer Edu to learn more. No cost genites provided by Strayer University Affiliate Sophia Eligibility rules apply. Connect with us for details. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chef and has many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.
Instacart Narrator
Instacart makes grocery shopping easier. And just because you're not doing the shopping yourself doesn't mean you don't care how it's done. With Instacart Shopper notes, you can get particular about what you want right in the app, like rotisserie chicken that's extra crispy steak with marbling the Romans would have loved, and lettuce you'd actually pick yourself. Just leave a note for your shopper so they can get it right for you without having to ask. That way you can get groceries just how you like. Download the Instacart app and shop today.
Episode #735: Creating a Winning Personalization and Testing Approach with Muqtadaa Miandara, Upbound Group
Publish Date: September 17, 2025
In this episode, host Greg Kihlström interviews Muqtadaa Miandara, Principal of Digital Growth at Upbound Group, live from Opticon 25 in New York City. The conversation is a candid, tactical, and strategic deep-dive into how Upbound Group has built a successful culture and practice around experimentation, personalization, and continuous improvement—specifically for brands serving subprime and near-prime customers, like Rent-A-Center and Acima. Muqtadaa shares personal career stories, lessons learned from Upbound’s testing and CRO journey, how organizational buy-in and the right technology (notably Optimizely) fuel their approach, and where AI and emerging trends are directing the future.
[03:05–04:57]
Notable Quote:
“At lower income levels, cash flow is more important than net savings... So we offer opportunities to get the products that everybody needs... in a way that's like an affordable regular payment as opposed to... a credit card you’re almost certainly either going to be denied for..."
— Muqtadaa Miandara [04:03]
[04:57–08:14]
Notable Quote:
“The greatest challenge was we were an incredibly small team… All I knew was I was a decent front end developer, a decent UX designer and a passable UX researcher… The hardest part was embeddedness within the organization…”
— Muqtadaa Miandara [05:25]
[09:54–11:37]
Notable Quote:
“If the business says, ‘the top of funnel is bleeding, we have to fix these…’ all of a sudden you’ve got a plan… you’re speaking a language that is a lot more reassuring.”
— Muqtadaa Miandara [09:54]
[12:03–15:49]
Notable Quote:
"Building trust by delivering on time, having results when you say you'll have them, or… educating people on the time it takes to have outcomes, because good analysis takes time."
— Muqtadaa Miandara [13:35]
[15:59–18:03]
Notable Quote:
“Optimizely has been kind of like less just a tool or a vendor and more of a partner from the beginning… That partnership, that validation, and then the continued innovation, it’s what keeps positioning Optimizely as a continued partner for us.”
— Muqtadaa Miandara [16:10]
[18:27–20:13]
[20:58–23:32]
Notable Quote:
“One in five tests is going to win...but I’m also helping the business decide what not to do. And that’s huge because...if I could run a dummy version and prove no one’s going to click that thing...maybe we don't do it in the first place.”
— Muqtadaa Miandara [21:40]
[23:32–26:38]
Notable Quote:
“There’s a lot of scut work that… if my team members weren’t building slides, I could ask them to build more tests… when the answers are resounding no [to new hires], what do we do? And so the hope is supplement with AI as much as possible.”
— Muqtadaa Miandara [25:18]
[26:44–27:57]
[27:57–29:04]
On the value proposition in Upbound’s market:
"We provide access to thousands of dollars worth of durable goods by comparison."
— Muqtadaa Miandara [04:03]
On early program challenges:
“Scaling with…technical expertise…naturally evolves. But embeddedness within the organization, that's a challenge.”
— Muqtadaa Miandara [05:25]
On prioritization and transparency:
"If something you're requesting as a stakeholder falls in that [strategic] bucket…amazing. If not…you have to understand it might be a quarter before we get to it…It’s just not as important right now.”
— Muqtadaa Miandara [12:03]
On the impact of experimentation:
“One in five tests is going to win. But I'm also helping the business decide what not to do…It's huge.”
— Muqtadaa Miandara [21:40]
On AI’s practical upside:
“If my team members weren’t building slides, I could ask them to build more tests…So the hope is supplement with AI as much as possible.”
— Muqtadaa Miandara [25:18]
On staying agile as a leader:
"Currently I'm the foremost expert on testing in Upbound. That does not mean I'm the smartest person doing testing… I really love other people to come in who are smarter than me…"
— Muqtadaa Miandara [28:06]
The conversation is practical, humble, and honest. Muqtadaa emphasizes candidly that much of the work involved is about continuous education (of oneself and others), transparency, storytelling, and wrestling with resource constraints. Success at Upbound has depended less on breakthrough technology and more on strategic alignment, organizational advocacy, pragmatic prioritization, and collaborative, customer-centric culture. Looking forward, Upbound is doubling down on AI and data-driven personalization—while never underestimating the power of peer learning, community, and staying curious and intellectually agile.
For listeners wanting actionable insight and real-world context on building a test-and-learn culture in complex environments, this episode offers a rare, detailed look at both the 'how' and the 'why.'