Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs)

Kristen Berman is the CEO and co-founder of Irrational Labs, where she helps companies like Google, Airbnb, PayPal, Microsoft, and LinkedIn improve their products and services through behavioral design research. She is also the co-founder of Common Cents Lab, a Duke University initiative dedicated to improving the financial well-being of low- to middle-class Americans. In today’s episode, Kristen shares the 3B Framework of Behavioral Design and uses real-life examples to illustrate what influences behavior change and the common biases that get in the way of building successful products. She also explains how to keep users engaged and how you can implement behavioral design research to drive innovation and growth. Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/using-behavioral-science-to-improve-your-product-kristen-berman-irrational-labs/#transcript — Where to find Kristen Berman: • Twitter: https://twitter.com/bermster • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristenberman/ • Website: https://irrationallabs.com/ — Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ — Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible: • Flatfile: https://www.flatfile.com/lenny • Whimsical: https://whimsical.com/lenny • Lenny’s Job Board: https://www.lennysjobs.com/talent — Referenced: Learn more behavioral science: • 3B Behavioral Design Framework https://miro.com/miroverse/3b-behavioral-design-framework/ • Irrational Labs newsletter, with latest BE and behavioral design insights: https://irrationallabs.com/newsletter/ • Join the Behavioral Design Online Bootcamp (use code “Lenny” for 10% off): https://behavioraleconomicsbootcamp.com/ • Get the 3B Framework: https://irrationallabs.com/3bs-download/ • Behavioral Design & Diagnosis Cheat Sheet: https://irrationallabs.com/download-behavioral-design-guide/ • The 16 Critical Cognitive Biases (Plus Key Academic Research): https://irrationallabs.com/blog/cognitive-biases-and-academic-research/ • Behavioral Game Design: 7 Lessons: https://irrationallabs.com/blog/behavioral-game-design-7-lessons-from-behavioral-science-to-help-change-user-behavior/ • Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions: https://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Decisions/dp/0061353248/ • Prolific testing platform: https://www.prolific.co/ • Kristen’s guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/people/23170097-kristen-berman • Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion: https://www.amazon.com/Influence-New-Expanded-Psychology-Persuasion/dp/0062937650 • The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good: https://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Economy-Liberty-Competition-Common/dp/0691156689/ • The Science of Change podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-science-of-change/id1587407079 • No Stupid Questions podcast: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ • Stream The Rehearsal on HBO Max: https://www.hbo.com/the-rehearsal • Chris York’s website: https://www.chrisyork.co/ - Case studies mentioned: • Budgeting fintech: https://irrationallabs.com/case-studies/budgeting/ • TikTok: https://irrationallabs.com/case-studies/tiktok-how-behavioral-science-reduced-the-spread-of-misinformation/ • One Medical: https://irrationallabs.com/case-studies/one-medical-case-study/ • Credit Karma: https://irrationallabs.com/case-studies/behavioral-design-credit-karma-money/ • TytoCare: https://irrationallabs.com/case-studies/tytocare-virtual-medical-visits/ • Kiva: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/the-deadline-made-me-do-it/ • When to Make Your Sign-Up Flow Harder: https://irrationallabs.com/blog/its-not-always-about-making-things-easier-when-to-make-your-sign-up-flow-harder/ — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) What is Irrational Labs, and what do they do? (05:45) What are behavioral economics and behavioral design? (06:50) The fintech budgeting experiment (10:46) What drives behavior change? (11:35) Why increasing friction can sometimes increase conversion (13:51) How to ask the right questions for user engagement (16:09) How Kristen got her start in behavioral economics (18:10) The 3B model of behavior change (20:37) Cognitive barriers (22:02) The importance of building products with immediate benefits to the user (24:20) How exploitation can occur (26:45) How to set customer-friendly incentives (29:15) How Kristen reduced the sharing of misinformation on TikTok (31:58) Tips for researching and solving problems (35:36) The One Medical case study (38:31) Rules of thumb for improving flow (41:46) What is right-for-wrong? (47:00) How to get started using behavioral design (49:33) The Behavioral Design Bootcamp (52:01) Lightning round! — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Economics says, look, people are rational. We make decisions with no emotion. We use lots of computational energy. Weigh the pros and cons. I mean, obviously, that's just not true. It ignores the whole field of psychology. And so in behavioral economics, you combine the field of psychology and economics and say, look, people make decisions with lots of emotion. We are present biased. We overweight our present selves. We follow social norms. But the good news is that we do these things in predictable ways. And once you understand how and why people behave, you can start to change it. And so behavioral science and behavioral design basically uses those insights on psychology to actually apply it within real world problems.

• 0:45Lenny Rachitsky?

  Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Kristin Berman. Kristin is the CEO and co-founder of Irrational Labs, where she and her team use behavioral science to help companies like Google, Airbnb, PayPal, Microsoft, Fidelity, and TikTok build better and more successful products. In our conversation, we cover a ton of real-life examples of product changes that her and her team helped craft that led to significant impact at the companies. We talk about what biases and psychologies they find most commonly get in the way

• 1:29Lenny Rachitsky?

  of people achieving what they want to achieve in your product. Her biggest surprises and insights about human psychology and how it relates to product design. A couple of real-life case studies, including her work with TikTok and the change they made in the product as a result. And so much more. I found this conversation super fascinating and super tactical, and I can't wait for you to hear it. And so with that, I bring you Kristin Berman.

• 1:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  Hey Ashley, Head of Marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?

• 2:02Speaker 02

  At least 40%.

• 2:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  And how many of them screw that up? And what happens when they do?

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common, considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.

• 2:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both signup conversion and increasing long-term retention. Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify, and Zora are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile. It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.

• 2:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/leni. This episode is brought to you by Whimsicle. When I ask product managers and designers on Twitter what software they use most, Whimsicle is always one of the most mentioned products, and the users are fanatical. Whimsicle is built for collaborative thinking, combining visual, text, and data canvases into one fluid medium. Distributed teams use Whimsicle for workshops, whiteboarding, wireframes, user flows, and even feature specs. And it includes thousands of built-in icons and a rich library of templates. See why product teams at leading companies call Whimsicle a game changer.

• 3:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  Visit whimsical.com/leni to have my own templates added to your account when you sign up. That's whimsical.com/leni.

• 3:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  Kristin, welcome to the podcast.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Thanks, Lenny. Great to be here.

• 3:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's great to have you. You run something called Irrational Labs. And so to set a little context for folks, can you just talk about what it is you all do at Irrational Labs?

• 4:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Irrational Labs, we are a behavioral science consulting and design shop. So we think about all things behavior change. So we work on understanding psychologies that drive users and then designing and testing ways to change behavior and drive engagement. And I started it in 2013 with Dan Ariely, who's a famed behavioral economist. We started with just working with a handful of companies and now we have a team of 20 behavioral scientists working on behavior change across industries.

• 4:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  Can you talk about some of the companies that you've worked with, just to give some examples? And then what kind of stuff have you actually helped them with?

• 4:50Speaker 00

  We started a lot of our work at Google. We were actually embedded within Google for around three years. I even had a bus pass and we started their behavioral economics team. We worked with over 25 teams from like self-driving cars to YouTube. And so that was a big piece of the early work. And then recently we've done work with TikTok where we've tried to, it actually accomplished decreasing misinformation share by 24%. We worked with One Medical on how to increase setting doctor's appointments right away during the onboarding. And that worked and drove it up by 20%. We worked with Credit Karma on basically helping them increase setup for reoccurring deposits. We did that and increased it by 18%.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  So basically a variety of ways to drive behavior change. Done stuff with Intuit, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and obviously a variety of startups as well.

• 5:45Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow. Okay. We're definitely going to talk about some of those examples. I'm super curious to hear what you did with TikTok, big company and story these days. Before we get to that, what exactly is behavioral design? And can you just define this space for us?

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Let's start with what is behavioral economics? So basically, behavioral economics is a reaction to economics. So economics says, look, people are rational. We make decisions with no emotion. We use lots of computational energy, weigh the pros and cons. I mean, obviously, that's just not true. It ignores the whole field of psychology. And so in behavioral economics, you combine the field of psychology and economics and say, look, people make decisions with lots of emotion. We are present biased. We overweight our present selves. We follow social norms. But the good news is that we do these things in predictable ways. And once you understand how and why people behave, you can start to change it.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  And so behavioral science and behavioral design basically uses those insights on psychology to actually apply it within real world problems.

• 6:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  What are some of the biggest surprises or maybe unintuitive results that you've come across working with companies using these insights in behavioral design, behavioral economics?

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, great question. So, you know, one, one story that recently happened is actually a surprise that happened to the client. The partner was shocked and actually didn't surprise us. And so this was with a popular fintech app and their most requested feature was budgeting. So it came through all the support forums, interviews, felt like a table stakes feature. People wanted budgeting. And so if you're the PM there, you're probably like, you may talk to a few other users, you may get some confirmation, but you're likely building budgeting. And that's really where they were when we came and started working with them. We couldn't move them in another direction, but we did convince them to do an experiment. So we convinced them to test and there was three conditions.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  One was the control, which is just like telling people how much they spend. And the other two were variations on budgeting. So two different ways to do budgeting. So big experiment, this is with 10,000 people. So we can really trust the results and what happened? Nothing. So they were shocked. The team was shocked. Remember, this is like a big investment of time and effort. Took a lot of energy to build. Zero change in average spend. Zero change in spend variability. And so the question is like, why weren't we surprised? Why were they surprised? And so the, the thinking here is if you map out every single step that it takes to do this behavior and the behavior would be reducing your spend. It's pretty clear that budgeting just isn't going to pull the weight.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  And this is what we call a behavioral diagnosis, where you map out every single step. So you'd have to like, know what your budget is. You'd have to know where in the month you are. You'd have to make a plan to do it. You then have to do it multiple times during the month, like incredibly difficult to do this one behavior. And once you do that behavioral diagnosis and you map out, you try to understand what people actually do versus what they say they will do. And by doing that, it becomes wildly clear that we should all be skeptical that budgeting would actually work to change the behavior that you're trying to get to.

• 9:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, I'm also not surprised that that didn't have a big impact. I have so many apps with budgeting features and I've, I've tried many times to use them and it never sticks. It's like, yeah, I'm just gonna, it's too much work.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  It's way too much work. And so sometimes any kind of work that we put on the user, we should be skeptical. We have to really prove that it's worth their time and then, you know, measure if they actually do it.

• 9:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there a better approach to that specific problem that you've found? Or is that too broad of a question?

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Kind of the first line of defense in any problem solving would be, how would you make it easier for somebody to do? And so in the personal finance world, really the answer to most things is just default. So it worked for automatic enrollment 401K. The reason we have retirement savings in America is because people are defaulted into saving from their paycheck. So that would be first line of defense. Obviously difficult for product teams to execute on. Takes a lot of backend infrastructure. So if we're just solving the personal financial management style of like a budgeting alternative, we'd actually go to making it not just logistically easier, but cognitively easier. So we call them rules of thumb. Like instead of having to decide in the moment, do I do this thing?

• 10:14Speaker 00

  And you're weighing the pros and cons, you know, it's kind of typical econ, like how much is this $3 worth to me? You'd actually make a rule of thumb that says, do I do it or not? So instead of deciding, do you take a lift? You know, when you're coming home from work, you'd have a rule of thumb that says, I don't take lift on the weekdays. I take it on the weekends. Very simple now to actually make this kind of decision. It's a heuristic. It's not going to be perfect, but it's going to help you reduce your spend in an easier way, at least in a way that you'd stayed here in two.

• 10:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  That reminds me a bit of James Clear's is kind of idea of creating this identity for yourself where he's like, if you're like, I am a person that doesn't take lift on the weekdays. That becomes kind of this identity component and that makes it easier for you not to do that. Is that related?

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, basically, you know, sometimes we think behavior change is driven by our attitudes, our preferences, like, I really, you know, want to be a runner or like, I really like this thing. But in reality, our behavior is driven by what we do. So in order to change behavior, you have to do something different. It's not enough to have a goal objective to do it. And I think that's kind of maybe that's like the big annoying thing about the self-help industry. It kind of just tells you it's enough to have a goal. It's like, not enough. You actually need to redesign your environment to change your behavior.

• 11:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there any other examples of big surprises or intuitive results from work you've done?

• 11:40Speaker 00

  One big one is actually, and I'm sure people on the listening have worked on signup flows before. This is kind of a common question and challenge in product worlds. And the common thinking is, and most often correct, that if you reduce friction to the signup flow, your conversion will increase, right? This is kind of the law that we all live by. And yet there is one example, one time where this is just not true, that you can actually increase friction and increase conversion. So actually, Lenny, have I ever told you about my mother?

• 12:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Nope.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Okay, so now you're thinking about my mother.

• 12:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  Before you were not thinking about, there's nothing about my mother, but I just made you think about my mother by asking you a question.

• 12:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Son of a gun.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  So when you ask a question, you can insert an idea into someone's head. You can get them thinking about something different. And so in a signup flow. What would you want people to be thinking about? You probably want them to be thinking about the benefits that you offer. So if you ask them a question, they can think about the benefits. It's going to increase their motivation to get over the hump of the future friction you're going to put in front of them because now they understand the benefits. So as an example, if you go to apartment list, they ask you questions during the sign up flow that's like, what kind of apartments you want? Do you want a studio or a one bedroom, a five bedroom? Do you want a patio, a basement, a view? Now all of a sudden I'm thinking, I'm engaging with the benefit. I understand how much supply that they have.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  So if you like, you stitch fix or actually trunk club has come out and said they did this and it increased conversion by 133%. So asking these questions can really drive conversion. We, we actually did something where we put a quiz on a partner's website. And it's title care, which is basically a, a device that lets you remotely connect to a physician. It's a little bit hard to use, but we wanted to help people understand the device. And we asked them questions about their medical behavior, their frequency use of technology. And for people who completed the quiz, 53% of them went on to purchase versus 37% who didn't, didn't complete. So these type of questions can have, can have a real impact.

• 13:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  And so very tactically, the idea here is you add a step to your flow that asks the user some question that isn't actually something you need an answer to, but may get them to be more excited by finishing. Is that right?

• 14:04Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah. And I would say probably most teams can do this. You just, you can replace the carousel, like the carousel, you know, in something where it tells you the benefits, but we want people to actively engage with the benefits so that they're thinking about how you can improve and affect their lives.

• 14:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  So you said it's worked a couple of times. It probably isn't something that usually works as I experienced, like sometimes it may work, it may be worth trying, but usually probably won't work. Is that generally right?

• 14:31Speaker 00

  I think, you know, we once removed a field that was like an open text field. We're asking people an open-ended question and we improved conversion by forty percent page over page. So for sure, some questions are harder and you should not ask them. When questions are easier and it's a dropdown multiple choice, this is when you shouldn't be trying it. But, but definitely the recommendation is not to ask a, a hard question where people have to think about it. By the way, for the question that we did that was open text, the folks on the team thought that it was an easy question. But most questions when you're asking people kind of like an open text field is just not an easy question.

• 15:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  Right. Hate those open text fields. And then just one last, because I imagine people are listening to this like, oh, maybe we should run this experiment. Is the general best practice to ask a question that gets you to think about something that motivates you by finishing? What's like the rough mental model there?

• 15:25Speaker 00

  I, so, so I think it's each, each product obviously will be different. One example would be like, so if I'm a bill pay app, you could tell me that I could pay my bill once a week, every day, every month. I could time it. But a better approach would be to ask me, do you want us to pay your bills immediately? Or every week or every month? And so what you're doing there is engaging people in the setup and actually implicitly telling them, we can pay your bills immediately. So would think about kind of combining those two is showing people the benefit. Like how fast do you want us to pay your bills? Which gets you to think about how fast they are and the settings, which is actually like you're really doing something to help the app work.

• 16:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. Before we dive even deeper into more examples, I wanted to zoom out for a moment. And I'm curious, just how did you even get into behavioral economics? You said you worked with Dan Ariely. How did all this come about?

• 16:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, great question. So I met Dan around 2008. And if you don't know Dan Ariely, definitely worth it, Google. And at that time, he had just written his first book, Predictably Irrational. And I was a product manager at Intuit, working on QuickBooks Online. So first use customer discovery. And really after reading the book, hearing the talk, it's just like this light bulb went off and it was like. I'm like talking to five to 10 customers to inform a feature, a product, and try to come up with some like insight on human behavior. And yet there's this whole field that studies this, right, that has papers and thinking and studies why we behave the way we do. And so this was like, wow, I can't believe we're just missing out on it, the product

• 17:07Speaker 00

  community. And so started working with Dan and, you know, we started and now 14 years later, this is, this is what I do is, is bring product insights, bring behavioral insights to, to product teams.

• 17:19Lenny Rachitsky?

  And you said you were running an embedded team within Google to work on this sort of thing?

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so basically, Google was kind of our first mover in thinking about how important understanding behavioral science was to product and marketing development. And so it was Dan and I in the beginning and over the course of the three years, we hired internal Googlers, we brought in more people on our team and really kind of were an internal consultants where we'd be pitched to other teams, work with them from start to end on a project. And now Google has one of the bigger behavioral science teams that's out there.

• 17:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow. Okay. So you've worked with how many companies at this point, roughly?

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Hundreds. I mean, yeah, hundreds.

• 17:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. So there's hundreds of companies. There's also, I imagine, hundreds of these kind of biases and heuristics and kind of behavioral expectations of people. I'm curious of the work that you've done. What are the most common biases, heuristics of people that you find most useful in improving product experiences and product design? Like, what's kind of the handful that ends up being most useful?

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Totally. And there are so, so many mistakes that humans make and we can call them biases, heuristics. Our team uses psychologies. What are the psychologies that drive us? And so to tackle this, our team basically has created a, a model of behavior change. We call the three Bs. And this summarizes the most important psychologies that drive user that are important to the product managers and the marketers. We've used this at Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn. So all the companies that we work with and they, they now use it. And so the first B, so three B framework, first B is actually not a psychology, but it is the most important part of behavior change. And it should kind of be obvious. Like if you think about behavior change, behavioral economics, it is behavior. In order to change behavior, you have to pick a behavior that you want to change.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  So companies are really good at outcome, but just not as sharp at picking the behavior. And when I say behavior, I mean, action, the thing that you want someone to do. By the way, the only wrong answer here is login. So it's really, it's not about logging in, it's about what you do after you log in. And when we're consulting teams, it'd be like, we need to get uncomfortably specific, we say, just really specific in the behavior. So example, if I'm Peloton PM and I'm working on the app, I would say something like, within seven days of somebody starting the app, they do two 10-minute workouts with two different instructors. Now, obviously, that is wildly specific and you'd probably be very happy if they did one workout with one instructor.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  But the reality is if you don't define that behavior you're going to change, you can't actually define the psychologies that affect someone's decision-making when doing that behavior. So that's a first B. Second B, again, is probably pretty obvious and is very critical, is just barriers. So we need to reduce the barriers to doing the behavior. And there are two types of barriers we, we look at. One is logistical. So this is just the stuff in our way, could be entering a credit card, could be any form field. And then the second is cognitive. So the cognitive barriers get in our way as well. These are things like uncertainty aversion, this is optimism bias, information aversion, right? These are the things that would prevent, status quo, big one. It's just you do the same thing today that you did yesterday.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  So your job is-

• 20:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  Can you talk about those three you just threw out there just briefly? I'm curious about the specific biases all over there.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  So uncertainty aversion, when something is uncertain or we're not. So I'll give you an example. If you're Lyft, there's logistical friction, which is wait time. But then there's also this uncertainty of is it going to come on time? When is it going to come? And with this uncertainty, you're probably going to look for other options. You're going to open up Uber and say like, maybe it'll come faster. And so when there is uncertainty in our life, we either look for other options or we just don't make a decision at all, right? This is, by the way, very big in healthcare, where when you're very uncertain about something, you may not even go to the doctor, or you may just make the wrong decision.

• 21:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Got it.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  And same with status quo effect, where, you know, we kind of underlying status quo effect is this idea that we always take the path, not always, but majority of it, you don't really say always when you're talking about human behavior. Human behavior is very complex. But more often than not, we take the path of least resistance. So we do the thing that's easiest. And typically, the thing that's easiest is the thing that we've done yesterday and the day before. And so when you're asking someone to do something different, which is what most products, especially startups, are trying to do, you actually have to increase, you know, their motivation or make it easier, reduce the barriers to get them to do that. And so status quo effect is a big, big one that folks are fighting.

• 22:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. Thanks for sharing those. We can, let's keep going.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  Cool. So the third B is benefits. So this is where you want to increase the, not just benefits, but the immediate benefits of doing something. So we are all present bias, which means we prioritize our present self over our future self. So there are plenty of reasons that somebody, your customer, your user should take an action, but you actually have to give them a reason to take an action today. So as an example, if you're Asana and you're trying to get someone to log a task, the right thing for them to do is log the task because it's going to get their project done on time. You're going to have a collaborative and communicative team that you're going to want to be on. But one of the real reasons we may log a task is because of completion bias.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  We want to see the checkbox. We may log it because of social desirability bias, where other people see that we're getting our work done. There's a notification that goes to my teammate when I complete something. So these are the immediate benefits that we have to build into products and features to drive, to drive use.

• 23:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. I definitely have completion bias. I love checking those freaking checkboxes.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  I know Asana has, is famous for that little unicorn confetti thing, right? For like making you feel really good when you complete something.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, I don't know how much emphasis to put on these kind of like, you know, confetti stuff. I think the idea of being done is that that psychological understanding that you've completed it, confetti or not, is very powerful.

• 23:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love confetti. Okay, so just to recap, there's the three Bs, behavior. What is the behavior you're trying to change? And the way you described it, it sounds like the activation milestone. Is the way most companies think about that, is that right?

• 23:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say the activation milestone and the novel thing here is just getting really specific about this behavior, so much that if you're not arguing with your teammates, you're doing it wrong.

• 23:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, about which behavior? And I imagine this often comes similar to the activation kind of moment. It comes back, working backwards from what is most likely to keep this person around long term, kind of to keep them retained, right?

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And yeah, so what correlates with retention and what provides kind of an immediate value to them by doing this behavior?

• 24:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. Okay, so behavior, then barriers, how do you break down barriers, logistical and cognitive, and then benefits? And the point about being an immediate benefit is a really interesting one, because yeah, it may be like in a year from now, I might earn some money, but I'm not going to do anything hard right now if I'm not going to make any money right now.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  Exactly. And so this is a tough one, because we want to believe that people really do and use our product for the end benefit, but we really need to give people the reason to do it today.

• 24:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. I want to dive into a couple of case studies of companies that I know you've worked with. Maybe before that, I thought it'd be good to ask this question about just like the dark side of this stuff. I imagine people often worry about, hey, are you just tricking people into doing things they don't want to do? That's not good. How do you think about that kind of line?

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a great question. I think the answer to this really, with many things in life, comes down to incentives. So what are the incentives of the product teams, of you, your manager, the team working on this? I like to say kind of, we are what we measure, and it really matters what you measure. So I'll give you a personal example. Lending Club a while ago hired me to increase their conversion flow for borrowers. So there are lending. App and they wanted to get more borrowers in the flow. The novel thing here was that they would pay me a lot of money. If I hit bump, it was like a five point bump. And zero if I didn't hit anything.

• 25:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  That was the, that was your incentive structure.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Right. So my incentive structure was to increase the conversion flow. And over the course of working with them, I became a predatory lender. I was suggesting things that the legal team was like, no, Kristin, of course you cannot do that. And setting some contacts, I was at that time leading a Duke University lab called Common Sense Lab. It was focused on low to moderate income Americans, thinking about their financial health, building savings apps for them. So here I am, this kind of like do good, nonprofit, very focused on financial health of Americans. And my other hat was Predator Lender for Lending Club, right?

• 26:34Speaker 00

  And so it's really about the incentives that we're giving ourselves and our team that will drive how anything is used. Much less behavioral economics or these tactics, but generally what's the success of your team.

• 26:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  You may not have a clear answer to this, but any advice for setting those incentives correctly? Anything you've seen work well?

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think for us, there's two tips. One would be to set the incentive on the behavior because the behavior is going to align more with the customer outcomes than the active use or the retention. And of course, and I'm not suggesting we don't measure active use and retention and these things. You should definitely measure them, but setting the incentive and the KPI and the product and the marketing team on the behavior is going to result in a more customer friendly product and outcome. And then second would be increasing the duration of the incentive. So if you're trying to hit a quarterly outcome, you're likely going to do things that will impact the short term. To give that a bump, if you're trying to hit an annual or even longer outcome,

• 27:34Speaker 00

  you're going to be looking out for the best interest of the company and the consumers in a little bit different way.

• 27:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. For the lending club example, what did you end up doing in the end? By the way, did you just like, ma'am, let's not do this?

• 27:44Speaker 00

  I can't actually reveal the intervention that we did, but I didn't miss it. So there was a five point, by the way, point not percentage bump, which is a lot. And we got 4.5. So we almost hit it, but you know, it's a clip. It doesn't work that way.

• 27:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  Almost sold your soul for that bump and you didn't, you didn't get there.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  I know.

• 28:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  Seems like right.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  It was a good lesson in incentive design. And by the way, at that point, lending club was offering good rates to, to borrowers. So there was efficacy in the idea of it, which is lending clubs lending to people who have lower FICO and, and with better rate. And yet you still want to have, you know, you don't want to become the predatory lender in that situation.

• 28:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. Awesome.

• 28:25Lenny Rachitsky?

  Are you hiring or on the flip side, are you looking for a new opportunity? Well, either way, check out lennysjobs.com/talent. If you're a hiring manager, you can sign up and get access to hundreds of hand curated people who are open to new opportunities. Thousands of people apply to join this collective and I personally review and accept just about 10% of them. You won't find a better place to hire product managers and growth leaders. Join almost a hundred other companies who are actively hiring through this collective. And if you're looking around for a new opportunity, actively or passively, join the collective. It's free, you can be anonymous and you can even hide yourself from specific companies.

• 29:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  You can also leave anytime and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from. Check out lennysjobs.com/talent. So there's two companies that you've worked with that I use and I'm curious what you did for them and how you worked with them. One is Tik Tok and then the other is one medical. And so it'd be cool to just

• 29:26Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 29:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  hear what you did for them, what they wanted your help with, and then just kinda what you took away, how it went, all that.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Great. Yeah. So TikTok is obviously a, a, a big platform and with any big social media platform, they have misinformation on it. So this is not just a problem with TikTok, Facebook and Twitter have it and misinformation is, is growing. And so they asked us to help decrease the spread of misinformation on their platform. So there's lots of ways that we could take that. And the first thing that we did is we kind of do with any companies, think about what is the behavior that you want to change. And so we narrowed on decreasing shares. So we could have said likes, you know, we could have said comments or general engagement, which, you know, is a broad thing, but we narrowed on decreasing

• 30:11Speaker 00

  the shares. So when you're actually going to see a misinformation video, we want to decrease the number of people that share it. So that was the first step. And the second step is this, you know, 3B model, how do we think about the barriers? And so, you know, with TikTok, the thing that you want to do is get people to do something less, right? When you want to get somebody to do something more, you make it easier. When you want someone to do something less, you make it

• 30:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  Put up barriers.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  Put up barriers. Yeah. Actually, a nice example of it, there's a, an elevator study where basically you want people to use the stairs. And so what the researchers did was make the elevator door close 16 seconds longer. So now you're getting in the elevator, you're annoyed, it's harder to use the elevator and people went to the stairs.

• 30:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  16 seconds, interesting number.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  16 seconds, we can't wait 16 seconds. That is actually kind of long though. You're, you're standing there, it's feeling your thumb.

• 31:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'd use the stairs.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And so that's kind of what we did for TikTok, which is basically you're in a very hot state. TikTok is a very fast platform. And so we just slowed people down. So two things, there was a label on the video, which is kind of classic in the misinformation world where you tell users that it's unverified information. And the second thing was once you clicked the share button, we popped up something that said, are you sure? And this was basically slowing people down, so logistical friction and actually cognitive friction, because we're asking people to reconsider a prior decision and question their self. But so with that, both those things, the label on the video and the pop-up reduced shares by 24%. And these are tactics that Facebook and Twitter are also using to slow people down.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  This was actually one of the first, though, published studies that showed that this drove down misinformation.

• 31:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  Can you talk a bit about how you came to those two conclusions? I know you work really closely with the product team and there's this whole process you go through. How do you come up with these ideas? How many ideas did you test? Is there anything more you could share around that?

• 32:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's actually a pretty involved process. So first, we did a literature review, which is basically saying like, look, we're not the first people to think about this. Let's talk to the experts and understand what has worked and what hasn't. So with that, actually, one of the insights was that reminding people about their value of accuracy. So most people want to be accurate. Most people actually don't want to share misinformation. And so if you can remind people the point of sharing, by the way, it doesn't work if you remind people before or after, like it's at the point of sharing that this is unverified information. Studies have shown that this could decrease share. So we took that piece. We also took this, you know, like the hot and cold state literature that says if you actually don't want to get someone to do something, how do you intervene? So we did this literature review.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  We came up with a hypothesis and we had probably 30 different ways to implement this because the hypothesis is just a starting point. And then we put it into quantitative research. So we actually put five different versions of the pop-up in front of over 1,000 users, which, you know, we got users from Prolific, which is a platform where you can easily test things.

• 33:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  Prolific?

• 33:10Speaker 00

  And we didn't measure, yeah, we didn't measure the idea of like, do people like this? We measured a condition against another condition. So relatively, what condition is more likely to work than the other condition? And that would increase our intuition that it would work in market. We're not saying that, you know, studies outside of the product are. And all be all, but it's going to drive our intuition up a lot more.

• 33:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  For the research that you did, I imagine that's a lot of the value that you and your team bring to a group. For folks that are just on their own, maybe, is there any advice for how to like find research on problems you're trying to solve?

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I would say basically if you're looking at a new problem, it's very tempting to talk to five users in the beginning. We would basically say, look, go spend a day on the internet, Googling to see what else has been done. And Google Scholar is a great place to start. Like hot tips would just be making sure you're searching the right keyword. So if you're looking at something in healthcare, you'd want to know what are the buzzwords for chronic care? And things that would actually drive you to a meta-analysis that would summarize what's already been done. So Google Scholar, great place to start. And then coming up with these hypotheses and putting them to test, you never, we never do a study, a UX study, where we're just showing people one thing.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Because they could really like it or hate it, but they could really like or hate all the designs. We have no idea. So when we're doing this, we always present multiple options and then relatively look for which one is going to, to drive the behavior we're intending to change.

• 34:44Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there a reason you did UX oriented test versus testing the product? Is it just because they weren't ready to build an experiment in product yet?

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, we actually only got two conditions in product, which for us is, we would like more. And it was, you know, we don't know if we're going to get a second bad at this. So we said, well, two conditions plus a control. But what should those two conditions be? So for us, it was like, we want to make, we want to derisk the launch as much as possible.

• 35:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. And is that feature in the product today?

• 35:13Speaker 00

  It is. Yes, it is in the product. And yeah, they've, they've done more global launches as well.

• 35:19Lenny Rachitsky?

  Sweet. I'm clearly not sharing much misinformation because I haven't seen it yet.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  You may not be searching the right thing. So if you search medical COVID politics, you may, you may get it.

• 35:32Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, boy. Here's the becomes the decline of me. Okay, so next case study that I thought would be fun to talk about is One Medical, which I'm a happy customer of. What did you do with them?

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. So we worked with One Medical to basically One Medical asked us to increase engagement. This is a classic question. How do you increase engagement in a product or a service?

• 35:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  Engagement, meaning just using it more often?

• 35:56Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. But the real, that's the real question is what does engagement mean? Actually, a fun exercise that people could do with their teams is if you ask everyone on the team what engagement means separately, you can compare answers and most likely, people are saying different things. And if you guys can't agree internally on what to do or what engagement means, it's very difficult to build a product by which your users understand what to do.

• 36:19Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yep.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. So after lots of debate, we came up with a key behavior to target, basically, somebody setting up a doctor's appointment right after signing up for One Medical. And this is really important because more likely than not, you're going to sign up for One Medical, six months later, you're going to get a fever and get sick. And are you going to remember this app that you signed up for six months ago? Probably not. You're going to do the same thing you did before, which is call the doctor that you've normally gone to. So really important for One Medical upfront during onboarding to set the mental model of what they can be used for and going to that doctor's appointment. So then we looked at the barriers. One of the barriers, like who is going to be your provider, your doctor?

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Like picking somebody is hard. Finding a time, an appointment time is hard. You know, we're all busy people. How are you going to fit it in? Knowing actually what One Medical can help you with, also difficult, like what, what is this company or thing? And where should I, what should I go to them for? And then the benefits, right? What are the benefits? And the benefits for using One Medical is you get your questions answered immediately. It's very simple, but you can really get your health questions and issues addressed. And so the simple intervention we did was just during onboarding, we asked people a few questions about their health, mental, sleep, physical. We then recommended a provider. So instead of having lots of choice, decrease the choice, recommended them one provider, told them why.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  And then recommended appointment times and limited the amount of appointment times. It was for tomorrow. We recommended a virtual appointment. So it'd be a quick thing that you could do from your home. And then that intervention, like the onboarding intervention increased bookings by 20% during onboarding.

• 38:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  Of appointments?

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Of appointments. Yep. Yeah. Onboarding.

• 38:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  I don't know if I went through that when I joined One Medical.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  This is recent. Yep.

• 38:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, cool. Yeah. By the way, One Medical is awesome. As you're talking, I'm thinking just if you could think about what are like the five most commonly successful changes to a flow? One, right now, you just shared was reducing options, which is interesting. And then another you mentioned earlier is just like reminding you of maybe what you're going to get out of at the end. I don't know. Is there anything that comes to mind of like, here's like a subset of things that seems to often work when you're trying to improve, say, activation or conversion of a flow?

• 38:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I would caveat all this with like, behavior is contextual. So, you know, why we are religious about testing is because it's hard to drag and drop from different content. So I'd caveat it with that. And of course, there are, there are some rules of thumb. So one thing really is about showing people the benefit right away. So really not under or overestimating that people understand the benefit of your app. And so how do you get them to experience it immediately? So that's one. And then the other is really just the, you know, reducing, I hate to sound so simplistic, but this is, you know, a lot of it is about making things easier logistically and cognitively,

• 39:27Speaker 00

  and making the benefit much more clear, salient. We say moving it from abstract to concrete. Like, you really want to move something, you know, from the world of, people can't really imagine how it'd fit in their life, to how does it actually fit in their life? And, and keeping them going, you know, if, if it's a long signup flow and people need to drop out, how do you send them reminders to pull them back in? And then when they are back in, land them on the spot that they were at. So Wealthfront has said, you know, one of their key insights was when people dropped out of the flow. You know, normally, they would just put people back at the beginning. It's really frustrating. If you can put people back where they landed, they're more likely to continue.

• 40:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  That makes sense. Reduces barriers. I'm learning. So there's two really interesting things you just said that I'd love to dive into a little bit. One is showing the benefit of something right away. Is there anything, is there an example of that that comes to mind where you did that and it worked out really well? Like, what's an example of showing a benefit?

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. So actually, benefits can be, there's two ways to do benefits. One is the actual one that a consumer has. So, right, Asana and the collaborative communicator versus maybe one that's more immediate. And so when we're thinking about more immediate benefits, this could actually be things like social norms where you're telling people, everybody else is doing something. And to them, the benefit of doing this is following the herd. We all like, by the way, don't like to think that we're part of the herd, but we all, we all will succumb to this at some point in our life. And so, you know, one example is where we worked with a company called Study. And this was a fintech app and we're helping people to sign up or sync their bank account.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Syncing their bank account is a required step in any kind of fintech app and yet so difficult, big drop off point. And just by reframing the choices of getting someone to think about completing a step, you know, versus the benefit that would come to them after. So the benefit of syncing their bank account was actually huge. You'd get to see your income. You're really actually changing someone's financial picture by doing it and they're signing up for it. They know it. But the small immediate benefit is how you're framing each step. Each step is going to give you the immediate benefit. So for this one, it was a completion bias thing again, where people are motivated to complete something. Sometimes we, you know, we'll do an error message if it's really important for the app to work.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  And again, that's not, you shouldn't do that all the time, but if it's really important, the benefit is actually decreasing that error message on the screen. We call this right for wrong, doing the right thing for the wrong reason, where the right thing may be completing the flow, but the wrong reason is seeing that error message go away. Again, I would use that with caution. People will not use and love your app if you're putting error messages all over it.

• 42:16Lenny Rachitsky?

  That makes sense. I think you mentioned this. So I haven't mentioned, but you wrote a guest post for my newsletter. It's one of the most read. Post of the newsletter on just using a lot of the, yeah, I don't know if I told you that.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 42:29Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. And it's about using these insights to improve conversion in general. So we'll link to that in the show notes. And I think in that post, you mentioned this concept of right for wrong. It might be worth spending a little more time on this, just like, what does that mean? And what's, what's an example of that?

• 42:42Speaker 00

  When we think about right for wrong, we're helping people again, do the right thing. So this is a behavior that they want to do, but the reason is actually probably not related. So if you think about just, you know, vaccines and what we saw here, like the reason to get a vaccine is to help my neighbor and prevent them from getting sick. And yet, what happened? We gave people donuts, give people free pot or marijuana. There were lottery tickets in Ohio. So this is the right for wrong idea where you're really substituting. By the way, there's one, one of the bigger voting interventions is just having pizza show up at the poll line. Right? You're motivating people to go vote, not because they want to contribute to democracy,

• 43:24Speaker 00

  but because there's pizza in the poll line. So at some level, we're, we're pretty simple human where we want an immediate benefit. Clubhouse actually was an interesting example of this at some level where you saw two levels of status in Clubhouse. There were the people who were friends with the people on stage and then there was everyone else. And so that was like a motivator to be friends with more people and start following people so that you could be in that little, you know, bucket of friends with other people. So we're giving people kind of some other reasons to do a thing that they may want to do, but they don't necessarily have the motivation to do it right away.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  If you think about Peloton, you know, yes, I want to work out. Yes, I want to have a healthy person. But maybe I want to go to the class because the instructor making me a shout out. Or there's some streak that I'm trying to continue. Right? So there, right for wrong here is like, the real reason to work out is to improve my physical health. But wow, I just want that instructor to give me a shout out.

• 44:29Lenny Rachitsky?

  So the key there, just to kind of come back to the dark side of some of the stuff is you want to make sure the, the end mean is, is good. And and right.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah. And so again, all these things, you know, the possibility of using anything for negative outcomes exists. And really, it's about the incentives is what is your incentive to drive the customer benefit? And that's really where we say you have to be measuring the customer outcomes. You have to be focused on the customer outcomes. And you know, some of the toughest teams we have understanding this are nonprofits. So we worked with one company a while ago, we tried to get them to add a deadline because they were trying to help people sign up for interviews. So like, they were basically filtering people before Staples would get them for an interview. So they do the interview prep, they'd help them show up for the interview. But the reality is that like, sometimes people miss this

• 45:21Speaker 00

  stuff. It takes a long time to get to the interview. And so our push to them was to add a deadline to help people show up. Sometimes we say deadlines are a gift, right? You're just helping people kind of prioritize this. And they said, no, absolutely not. We cannot add a deadline. This is just too hurtful. And the reality is when you add deadlines, and we've done this in multiple companies, where you add a deadline, more people do the thing, right? Because you're helping kind of create the right for wrong reason, giving people the wrong reason to do the behavior that they actually want to do. We added a deadline to Kiva Flow for when their borrowers were signing up and we increased their conversion. So obviously, you can use this in ways that are unintended, and it

• 46:05Speaker 00

  really has some upside to help people.

• 46:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  I imagine you're building kind of this just like toolbox of ideas that end up working often at Flow. I know you said that you can't just copy and paste. Rarely is it just like, oh, this worked at 10 other companies, it'll probably work here. But that's kind of a cool thing that your team's probably doing, just making this big list of like, here's 10, 20 things that we could start with these ideas and talk about them.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, there is, you know, once you understand the psychology of human behavior, you really start to understand and see patterns. We started with the idea that behavioral economics shows that people act in irrational ways, but we do it in predictable ways. And so once you start understanding this, you can really start designing for the behavior change at this kind of predictable level.

• 46:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  For a product team that's listening to this, and they're like, oh, we, we can't work with you guys right now. We, we can't afford it. We don't have time, just like generally, but I want to think about this stuff and maybe implement it on my team. What would you suggest to say a PM leading a team that wants to implement some of these principles?

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would probably start from the process angle. You know, we have the three B framework, which again, the most important step is defining the behavior. So if you were to do a workshop with your team on what is the uncomfortably specific behavior that you want to change? And you align everyone to this, it's going to be much easier for you to change that behavior. Because the psychology that drive that behavior will be a better conversation and more obvious. So first and starting with the behavior, to get everyone in a room, do a small workshop. The second would be the behavioral diagnosis. And this is the toolkit in behavioral science where we study not what people say they will do, but what they actually do. And so the behavioral diagnosis, it's like a journey map on steroids where you're really trying to map

• 47:52Speaker 00

  the steps that get people to the behavior change. And again, just doing this, teams have light bulbs. And this is one of the main things that we work with teams on. We help them do the behavioral diagnosis to have those light bulbs. And then we, you know, help diagnose and design the intervention.

• 48:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Can you talk a bit more about this behavioral diagnosis step? Like what actually happens there?

• 48:11Speaker 00

  There's kind of two steps. One, you can outline the full kind of high level flow where you're saying, you know, maybe there's 50 steps in getting to the behavior. And you can do this before they hit your product too. But when we're working with just like a very kind of, we want to help a team grow their product versus develop a new product. If it's just about growing and improving the current product, we'll do a deck of 200, 300 slides of screenshots where it's just very detailed analysis of the steps that it takes to get to the behavior change. And then we overlay the psychologies that are driving people at each step. Right? This actually takes a really long time, but the light bulbs of like how you actually get to that behavior.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  As I said, behavior change isn't easy. You know, it's, it's complex, it's hard, it's noisy. And so you have to understand the steps that, that get you there before you're trying to change it.

• 49:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow. That sounds really useful. So you go through the product, make a screenshot of every little step and then connect what barriers keeping them from progressing. Is that roughly right?

• 49:15Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah. So maybe in a health app, it's information aversion. They don't actually want to see their test result. That, you know, that's a step. And then we attach that psychology to that step. And now we can have a brainstorm about, well, what would help decrease information aversion to get them over the next time?

• 49:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  What's cool about this is like, you could just, as a team, you have all these things you're trying to improve, all these flows and steps and things like that. And basically, these psychologies, as you call them, are useful to just like anything you're trying to optimize. I imagine there's just like a list on Wikipedia of all these human psychologies and biases. I imagine a better way to learn about this is to take your course. But maybe it's a good time to just chat about the course that you teach versus, you know, coming in-house and working with the team. Can you talk a bit about that? Or, or is it the same thing? Maybe I'm not.

• 50:03Speaker 00

  No, that, that's, that's perfect. Yeah. So we have a, thanks for the tea, Lenny. Appreciate it. We have a, a bootcamp course, which basically is a self-paced online course that you can go in and understand. And that's all, a lot of our case studies, many of that I didn't talk about here. And we walk you through the process, right? And you'll have a initial call with us. There's a Slack group, there's office hours, really trying to help people go through the process of behavioral design yourself. And it, it really brings these concepts to life and helps you apply them to your, to your product. So I think starting with that bootcamp is a great place for designers, product managers, marketers, researchers to start. We also, we can, I can

• 50:48Speaker 00

  send you this, we have a sweet 16, like some of the 16 biases that we, you know, that we refer to most. The three Bs is an easy way to evaluate a, a product if you're just starting. But as you get deeper, these different psychologies will pop up.

• 51:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. Please send that and we will link to it in the show notes. Just a couple more details on this course. How fun do you run it? How long does it take generally for folks to take?

• 51:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. So once a year, we'll do a cohort course that's a little bit more in-depth. But the, the best way is this kind of self-paced course. It's a eight-week. Course and we give you a month extra to go through it. There's 16 modules and there's homework throughout it that you can post in Slack and get feedback from behavioral scientists. So a pretty kind of interactive course, but you can go through it on your own and, and even share with, share with your team. We do group things, so we'll do like a team of 10 and then we can give you a private office hour where we just riff with you on your, your product challenges.

• 51:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. And folks can find that at irrationallabs.com. Is that right?

• 51:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks again for this. Yeah, rationallabs.com is, is this, is the spot. And if you, probably signing up for our newsletter is also, uh, we publish all of our research there and other kind of fun behavioral insights.

• 52:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  Sweet. Well, with that, we've reached our exciting lightning round. So I'm just going to ask you a bunch of quick questions, whatever comes to mind. Fire away and we'll just go through them real fast. Sound good?

• 52:11Speaker 00

  Great.

• 52:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, cool. What are two or three books that you recommend most to other people?

• 52:16Speaker 00

  I would be remiss not to say particularly irrational. I think this is a great starter book for people getting interested in the field. Influence is also a great starter book for people getting interested in the field. Many times you read Influence and you change your career. It's a really powerful, powerful book. And then it undertalked about one is I love the author, Robert Frank. He wrote Darwin Economy and he talks more about kind of status and social norms and how this drives a lot of our, our behavior. So I'd recommend Robert Frank as an author in Darwin Economy.

• 52:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  What's another favorite podcast other than the one you're currently on?

• 52:51Speaker 00

  Science of Change is my actual podcast. So a little self-promotion. We interview product leads and talk about what they've done in their product. And then the other one is No Stupid Questions. So this is by the Freakonomics, Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth come together and just answer questions about behavior change.

• 53:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  What's a favorite recent movie or TV show?

• 53:13Speaker 00

  So I love The Rehearsal. This is, yeah, so it's basically where you, Nathan Fielder is rehearsing life. And I think, you know, sports is so obvious. You want to practice. I just started ping pong lessons actually. And like, I'm doing the same stroke for the, for an hour. But like in life, we don't rehearse as much. Like, you know, we, I don't write an email a hundred times and then practice sending it. And so I think there's probably an opportunity for us all to learn some lessons from that.

• 53:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  Have you seen Nathan for You, his other show?

• 53:44Speaker 00

  I have. Yeah, the rehearsal was just so compelling. And I'm not usually somebody who watches media, so this was like mind blowing. I loved it.

• 53:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  I actually like Nathan for you better.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting. Okay, I'll give another.

• 53:57Lenny Rachitsky?

  What a weird show, but I love it. Okay, next, what is a favorite interview question that you like to ask?

• 54:03Speaker 00

  So interviews for, I'll take this as interviews for people when we're hiring. I would caveat to say, so interviews, actually, we know, don't predict job performance. So very little to no evidence and say, interviews will predict how I perform on the job. And so, yeah.

• 54:19Lenny Rachitsky?

  Just kidding.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  So we use skilled assessments and trials as ways to predict job performance. But interviews are good at predicting affinity and culture fit. And so if you want to ask a question about that, you know, one of my favorite questions is just, what is a personality trait that defines you? So really, one that you are, feel the strength, but that also, you know, can be seen as something you're working to improve. You know, so for me, I may be confident, but that may mean that I'm not listening. And so we have really strong personality. People are really quick at answering this question. They really know the thing that they do good, but also could hurt them. And I find that it helps understand a person's a little bit easier and faster.

• 55:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  Last question, who else in the industry do you most respect as a thought leader?

• 55:08Speaker 00

  So I don't know if people will know him, but Chris York. So he is a behavioral scientist, designer, just really, just know, I would go to Chris and ask him a question. And he has done a full research, just accidentally, you know, in the last year, and done full research on the question and has a very thoughtful answer. And yeah, Chris York wins for me.

• 55:32Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. Haven't not heard of him. We'll look him up. Kristin, thank you so much for being here. I feel like you're going to change a lot of people's behaviors. You're going to break barriers for a lot of products. And there'll be many benefits that come out of our chat. Thank you again for doing this.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Wonderful. Thanks for having me, Lenny. This was super fun.

• 55:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.