CRO Programme
Reset at
The Royal Mint
A fragmented, activity-driven CRO programme with no commercial framework was paused, audited and rebuilt — transforming experimentation from a testing function into a structured commercial growth engine using RICE scoring prioritisation.
About The Royal Mint
The Royal Mint is the official producer of UK coinage and one of the world's oldest and most respected mints — combining more than 1,100 years of heritage with modern manufacturing and a growing direct-to-consumer ecommerce operation.
Alongside supplying national coinage, the organisation operates a DTC ecommerce business spanning collectibles, commemorative coins and precious metals, serving both enthusiasts and investors. Strong brand equity and clear digital ambition — but ecommerce performance constrained by structural and operational challenges.
A CRO Programme Running on Activity, Not Outcomes
Despite having the infrastructure for experimentation in place, the CRO programme had stalled. Experiments lacked meaningful prioritisation — tests were often poorly scoped, inconsistently implemented, and evaluated without a commercial framework. The result was activity-driven optimisation with little measurable contribution to growth.
The ecommerce function also operated largely in isolation from commercial trading, limiting alignment with revenue, margin and trading priorities. CRO was running in a silo — which meant even successful tests weren't always commercially relevant.
Pause. Audit. Rebuild with Commercial Intent.
Recognising the need for a structural reset, I paused all live A/B testing to conduct a full audit of the programme — reviewing tooling, processes, experiment quality and decision-making frameworks. This created space to diagnose the underlying issues rather than continuing ineffective testing.
Reviewed all live and recent experiments for quality, commercial rationale and implementation integrity. Stopped everything that wasn't grounded in a clear commercial objective.
Introduced structured RICE scoring to evaluate all future experiments against commercial potential before they entered the backlog — ensuring resources focused on initiatives with the highest possible revenue impact.
Working closely with the CRO Manager, rebuilt the entire experimentation backlog around conversion uplift, average order value and funnel efficiency — not internal preferences or historic test patterns.
Strengthened collaboration between ecommerce, trading and development teams to ensure experiments were both commercially relevant and technically robust — closing the gap between CRO and the wider business.
RICE Scoring — What It Is and Why It Works
RICE is a simple but powerful prioritisation framework that forces commercial rigour onto every experiment before it gets a place in the backlog. It replaces gut feel and internal politics with a consistent scoring methodology.
The output is a single score for each proposed experiment. The backlog is ranked by score. High-reach, high-impact, high-confidence, low-effort tests go first. Everything else waits its turn — or gets dropped entirely.
CRO Embedded as a Commercial Growth Driver
Resources focused on initiatives with the highest potential revenue impact rather than incremental or low-value optimisations — a fundamental shift in how the programme operated.
Stronger cross-team collaboration between ecommerce, trading and development improved both the quality of experiment implementation and the speed at which winning tests were rolled into permanent site improvements.
CRO shifted from a siloed testing function to a core part of the ecommerce strategy — supporting data-driven decision-making and establishing a repeatable model for sustainable digital growth at The Royal Mint.
Ready to Start Growing?
The first conversation is always free. No pitch — just a clear picture of where your business is and what I'd focus on first.