[specialist]

Terrific criticism. Rings true. I've never done it (directly). Only watched teams and teammates get sucked into that void. Sadly, they eschewed most of your list.

I do know that Google strategically used A/B testing to determine the precise shade of corn flower blue for some UI widgets.

> Run usability tests.

Maybe the point of A/B testing is to avoid all that battle tested and validated '90s era process and methodological nonsense.

(As though a design could stumble thru a solution space to some local maximum. Like an optimization problem.)

I also kept thinking of that SQA cliché "You can't test your way to quality."