This topic explains how to build and sustain an experimentation practice using LaunchDarkly Experimentation. A strong experimentation practice turns product decisions into measurable outcomes, reduces risk, and accelerates learning across your organization.
## Why invest in an experimentation practice
**Without a practice:** Teams ship features based on intuition. Some changes underperform, others cause regressions, and there is no systematic way to know which is which until revenue or engagement data arrives weeks later.
**With a practice:** Every significant change has a measurable outcome before full rollout. Teams catch regressions early, double down on what works, and build a compounding knowledge base that makes each decision faster and more confident than the last.
Without a deliberate practice, experimentation efforts stall after an initial pilot. The guidance in this section addresses the organizational, strategic, and operational foundations that make experimentation succeed.
**Your turn:** List your top business goals and your current experimentation baseline. This snapshot helps you measure progress as you build your practice.
| Business goal | How you measure it today | Experiments run in the last quarter |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
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## Focus areas
This section covers four focus areas. We recommend working through them in order:
- **[Building a culture of experimentation](./building-culture.md)**: Identify stakeholders, build awareness, gain leadership support, and scale beyond a single team.
- **[Problem-solution mapping](./problem-solution-mapping.md)**: Generate experiment ideas tied to business goals and convert them into testable hypotheses.
- **[Test planning](./test-planning.md)**: Write complete test plans with hypotheses, SMART goals, treatment designs, metrics, and risk assessments.
- **[Experimentation process design](./process-design.md)**: Define decision ownership, build a RACI, integrate with development workflows, and communicate results.
## Prerequisites
Before running experiments in LaunchDarkly, your SDK implementation must support Experimentation. To learn more, read *[Preflight Checklist](../sdk/preflight-checklist/index.md)*.