Jake Duenckel — Growth & Experimentation

About

From the golf course to the growth team.

I'm part of the growth and experimentation team at Fanatics, where I help shape customer journeys and business decisions through data rather than guesswork. My work spans running A/B tests across the funnel and building the process, tooling, and prioritization frameworks that make testing a habit teams actually trust.

I didn't start in tech. My career began in golf — working the business side of the game and teaching — before I transitioned into a golf technology startup during COVID. That's where I found my passion for A/B testing and analytics, which eventually led me to Fanatics.

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Fun fact: I'm a WSET Level 2 certified wine enthusiast, currently working toward Level 3.

What I Do

Where I spend my time.

A mix of hands-on testing and the program-building work that makes experimentation stick.

01Homepage & Navigation Testing

Primary A/B test owner for Fanatics' homepage and navigation experience — the first thing every customer sees.

02Mobile App Growth Testing

Built and lead the experimentation function for the company's mobile app, including how tests get prioritized and reviewed.

03Pricing & Margin Testing

Lead testing on pricing changes across products and categories in support of the company's contribution-margin goals.

04Program Building

Treating experimentation as four pillars — process & governance, tools & data, people & skills, strategy & culture — so it's a mindset, not just a department.

05Hypothesis Rigor

Using structured frameworks (IF / BY / WILL / BECAUSE) so tests isolate one clear change — wins that are actually learnable, not just lucky.

06Cross-Functional Translation

Turning test results into decisions that leadership, marketing, and product teams can actually act on.

Core Strengths

What I bring to a testing program.

Built from experience running experimentation at scale — the skills more than the specifics.

Full-funnel experience

I run and contribute to A/B tests spanning homepage, navigation, product pages, and checkout — across both web and native app.

Program building

Built a testing function from the ground up for one of the company's growth initiatives, including how tests get prioritized, reviewed, and shipped.

Growth partner on high-impact work

Served as growth lead alongside product on a major personalization initiative, contributing the reach and business-impact modeling that helped the team size a multi-million-dollar opportunity.

Cost & impact modeling

Comfortable building the quantitative models that translate a test result into a real business tradeoff — used to help inform pricing and operational decisions.

AI-forward tooling

Built two internal tools using Claude: a browser extension that streamlines a manual, repetitive part of the team's testing workflow (now used daily by teammates), and a QA tool that checks test setup and configuration for errors before launch and flags bugs.

Judgment under pressure

Quick to flag when a "winning" result might be hiding a deeper problem — a data-quality issue, a margin tradeoff, a customer-facing bug — and comfortable recommending a hold over shipping on an incomplete read.

Track record of shipped impact

A consistent pattern of tests that graduate to production and move real business metrics, across navigation, content, and mobile growth levers.

Coming eventually

I'm developing a course on experimentation strategy, built from what I've learned running testing programs at scale. More to come.

In progress