I've never worked at Google and I can respect the sentiment, but it seems to me that if you are a skilled designer that Google's massive audience and experiment

I've never worked at Google and I can respect the sentiment, but it seems to me that if you are a skilled designer that Google's massive audience and experimental capabilities can cut both ways. It means that you have to prove even the most minor design changes, but it also means that you have the ability to really prove your work is helpful and not fool yourself. If you make a few small wins you surely can build up the credibility to take bigger steps -- the catch is though in my experience bigger steps never improve metrics anyway and are a waste of time since you end up having to throw more work out. I would kill to be able to run a 0.1% test on a large change and not disrupt things too much, while still getting statistical significance. Few places other than Google seem to have the traffic to do that.