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

1. 0:00 – 5:45

   What is Irrational Labs, and what do they do?

   1. KBKristen Berman0:00

      Economics says, look, people are rational. We make decisions with no emotion. We use n- 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, 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.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:45

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

   3. NANarrator2:02

      At least 40%.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky2:04

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

   5. NANarrator2:07

      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.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky2:26

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

   7. NANarrator2:41

      Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers, like Square, Spotify, and Zuora, 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.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky2:58

      If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Whimsical. When I asked product managers and designers on Twitter what software they use most, Whimsical is always one of the most mentioned products, and the users are fanatical. Whimsical is built for collaborative thinking, combining visual, text, and data canvases into one fluid medium. Distributed teams use Whimsical for workshops, whiteboarding, wire frames, 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 Whimsical a game changer. Visit whimsical.com/lenny to have my own templates added to your account when you sign up. That's whimsical.com/lenny. Kristen, welcome to the podcast.

   9. KBKristen Berman3:57

      Thanks, Lenny. Great to be here.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky3:58

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

   11. KBKristen Berman4:08

       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. Uh, 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.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky4:43

       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?

   13. KBKristen Berman4:50

       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, and actually accomplished, decreasing misinformation share by 24%. We worked with One Medical on how to increase doc- setting doctor's appointments right away during their 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%. So, basically, a variety of ways to drive behavior change. Done stuff with Intuit, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and obviously a variety of startups

2. 5:45 – 6:50

   What are behavioral economics and behavioral design?

   1. KBKristen Berman5:45

      as well.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky5:45

      Wow. Okay. We're definitely gonna 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?

   3. KBKristen Berman6:00

      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 n- lots of computational energy, weigh the pros and cons, um, and 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-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.

3. 6:50 – 10:46

   The fintech budgeting experiment

   1. KBKristen Berman6:51

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky6:51

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

   3. KBKristen Berman7:02

      Yeah. Great question. So, you know, uh, one-one story that recently happened is actually a surprise that happened to the client, the partner was shocked. It 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-in another direction, but we did convince them to do an experiment. So we convinced them to test and there was three conditions. 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?

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky8:03

      (laughs)

   5. KBKristen Berman8:03

      Nothing. (laughs) 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 p- gonna pull the weight, 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'd 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 and 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.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky9:03

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

   7. KBKristen Berman9:15

      It's way too much work. And so s- 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.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky9:26

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

   9. KBKristen Berman9:33

      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 s- 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 stuff 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? 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 Lyft, you know, when you're coming home from work, you'd have a rule of thumb that says, I don't take Lyft 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 gonna be perfect, but it's gonna help you reduce your spend in-in an easier way, at least in a way that you'd stay adherent to.

4. 10:46 – 11:35

   What drives behavior change?

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky10:46

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

   2. KBKristen Berman11:00

      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, uh, annoying thing about the self-help industry. It kind of just tells you it's enough to have a goal. It's like, it's not enough! You actually need to-to redesign your environment to change your behavior.

5. 11:35 – 13:51

   Why increasing friction can sometimes increase conversion

   1. KBKristen Berman11:35

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky11:35

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

   3. KBKristen Berman11:40

      One big one is actually, a-and I'm sure people on the- listening have-have worked on signup flows before. This is kind of a common question and-and challenge i- in product world, 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 ac- actually, Lenny, have I ever told you about-... my mother?

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky12:12

      Nope.

   5. KBKristen Berman12:13

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

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky12:15

      Oh.

   7. KBKristen Berman12:16

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

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky12:22

      Sign up again.

   9. KBKristen Berman12:23

      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 sign-up 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 gonna increase their motivation to get over the hump of the future friction you're gonna 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 apartment do 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. So if you, like, use 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 TytoCare, 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, so 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. S- so these type of questions can have, can have

6. 13:51 – 16:09

   How to ask the right questions for user engagement

   1. KBKristen Berman13:51

      a real impact.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky13:51

      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 about finishing. Is that right?

   3. KBKristen Berman14:04

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

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky14:22

      So you said it's worked a couple of times. This probably isn't something that usually works. Is that your experience? Like, sometimes it may work, it may be worth trying, but usually it probably won't work? Is that generally right?

   5. KBKristen Berman14:31

      I think... You know, w- we once removed a field that was like an open text field where you're asking people an open-ended question, and we improved conversion by 40% page over page.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky14:40

      Oh.

   7. KBKristen Berman14:41

      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 y- you should be trying it. But, but definitely the recommendation is not to ask a, a hard question where people have to think about. 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 with an open text field is, is just not an easy question.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky15:10

      Right, hate those open text fields.

   9. KBKristen Berman15:12

      Ah.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky15:12

       And then just one last, 'cause 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 about finishing? What's like the rough mental model there?

   11. KBKristen Berman15:26

       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 I would think about kind of combining those two as 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

7. 16:09 – 18:10

   How Kristen got her start in behavioral economics

   1. KBKristen Berman16:09

      work.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky16:09

      Awesome. Before we dive even deeper into more examples, I want 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?

   3. KBKristen Berman16:22

      Yeah, great question. So I met Dan around 2008. And if you don't know Dan Ariely, definitely worked at 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 him talk, it's just like this light bulb went off and it was like, I'm like talking to five to ten customers to inform a feature, a product, and trying 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 just like, "Wow, I can't believe we're just missing out on it as a product community." And so started working with Dan, and, you know, we started and now 14 years later, this is, this is, this is what I do, is, is bring product insights, bring behavioral insights to, to product teams.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky17:19

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

   5. KBKristen Berman17:22

      Mm-hmm. Yeah, so, so basically Google was kind of a 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 consultant 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.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky17:50

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

   7. KBKristen Berman17:55

      (laughs) I'd say hundreds.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky17:57

      Hundreds, okay.

   9. KBKristen Berman17:57

      I mean, yeah. Hundreds.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky17:59

       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,

8. 18:10 – 20:37

   The 3B model of behavior change

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky18:10

      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?

   2. KBKristen Berman18:21

      ... totally. And there are so, so many mistakes that humans make, and we can call them biases, heuristics. Our team uses psychologies, sort of the psychologies that drive us.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky18:29

      Mm-hmm.

   4. KBKristen Berman18:29

      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 users, 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, (laughs) 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. So companies are really good at outcomes, 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 log in. 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, 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 the first B. Second B, again, is, uh, probably pretty obvious and it's very critical, it's 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 fields. 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 preve- status quo, big one, it's just you do the same thing today that you did yesterday.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky20:36

      Wait-

   6. KBKristen Berman20:36

      And so your job

9. 20:37 – 22:02

   Cognitive barriers

   1. KBKristen Berman20:37

      is to... huh?

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky20:37

      ... can you talk about those three you just threw out there just briefly? I'm curious about those specific biases-

   3. KBKristen Berman20:40

      Yeah.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky20:41

      ... while we're there.

   5. KBKristen Berman20:42

      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 gonna come? And with this uncertainty, you're probably gonna look for other options. You're gonna 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, in healthcare where when you're very uncertain about something, you may not even go to the doctor or you may just make the decision.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky21:22

      Got it.

   7. KBKristen Berman21:23

      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 the ca- you don't really say "always" when you're talking about human behavior.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky21:34

      (laughs)

   9. KBKristen Berman21:34

      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'd done yesterday and the day before. And so when you're asking someone to do something different, which is what most product, 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.

10. 22:02 – 24:20

    The importance of building products with immediate benefits to the user

    1. KBKristen Berman22:02

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky22:02

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

    3. KBKristen Berman22:05

       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 biased, 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 gonna get their project done on time, you're gonna have a collaborative and communicative team that you're gonna want to be on. But one of the real reasons we may log a task is because of completion bias. 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.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky23:07

       Awesome. I, I definitely have completion bias. I love checking those fricking checkboxes.

    5. KBKristen Berman23:11

       Yeah. (laughs)

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky23:11

       I know Asana has-

    7. KBKristen Berman23:12

       Me too.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky23:12

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

    9. KBKristen Berman23:17

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

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky23:33

        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 sounds like the activation milestone is the way most companies think about that. Is that right?

    11. KBKristen Berman23:46

        Mm-hmm. Yeah, I would say the activation milestone... A- 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.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky23:59

        Hmm. Oh, about which behavior? And-

    13. KBKristen Berman24:01

        Yeah.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky24:01

        ... 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?

    15. KBKristen Berman24:11

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

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky24:18

        Awesome. Okay. So behavior,

11. 24:20 – 26:45

    How exploitation can occur

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky24:20

       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 gonna do anything hard right now if I'm not gonna make any money right now.

    2. KBKristen Berman24:36

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

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky24:47

       Awesome. I wanna dive into a couple case studies of companies that y- 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 wanna do? That's not good." How do you think about that kind of line?

    4. KBKristen Berman25:06

       Yeah. It- it's a great question. I think the- 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, kinda, we are what we measure. And, it really matters what you measure. So, I'll- I'll give you a personal example.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky25:27

       Yeah.

    6. KBKristen Berman25:28

       LendingClub, a while ago, hired, uh, me to increase their conversion flow for borrowers. So they're a 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 a bump, it was like a five-point bump, and zero if I didn't hit anything.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky25:47

       That was the-

    8. KBKristen Berman25:47

       Or if I, if I didn't hit-

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky25:48

       ... that was-

    10. KBKristen Berman25:48

        ... if I didn't hit-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky25:48

        ... that was your incentive structure.

    12. KBKristen Berman25:50

        ... if I didn't hit the click.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky25:50

        Wow.

    14. KBKristen Berman25:50

        Right? So my incentive structure was to increase the conversion flow. And over the course of working with them, I became a predatory lender.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky26:00

        (laughs)

    16. KBKristen Berman26:00

        I was suggesting things that the legal team was like, "No, Kristen. Of course you cannot do that." It, uh, setting some context, 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 saving apps for them. So here I am, this kinda like do good, non-profit, very focused on financial health of- of Americans, and my other hat was predator lender for LendingClub, right?

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky26:34

        (laughs)

    18. KBKristen Berman26:34

        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 ha- the success

12. 26:45 – 29:15

    How to set customer-friendly incentives

    1. KBKristen Berman26:45

       of your team.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky26:46

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

    3. KBKristen Berman26:52

       Yeah. I think for us, there's two tips. One would be to set the incentive on the behavior, 'cause 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 on 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 a annual or even longer outcome, you're gonna be looking out for the best interests of the company and the consumers in a little bit different way.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky27:39

       Awesome. For the LendingClub example, what did you end up doing in the end, by the way? Did you just like, "Nah, let's not do this"?

    5. KBKristen Berman27:44

       I can't actually reveal-

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky27:45

       (laughs) Okay.

    7. KBKristen Berman27:45

       ... the intervention that we did, but I did miss it, so there was a five point, by the way, point, not percentage, bump, which is a lot, and we got 4.5.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky27:54

       Uh-huh.

    9. KBKristen Berman27:54

       So we almost hit it, but you know, it's a cliff. It doesn't work that way. So-

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky27:59

        You almost sold your soul for that bump, and you didn't- you didn't get there.

    11. KBKristen Berman28:02

        I know. (laughs)

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky28:02

        Seems like the right choice.

    13. KBKristen Berman28:03

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

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky28:22

        Okay. Awesome. 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 100 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. You can also leave any time, and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from. Check out lennysjobs.com/talent.

13. 29:15 – 31:58

    How Kristen reduced the sharing of misinformation on TikTok

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky29:15

       So there's two companies that you worked with that I use, and I'm curious what you did for them and how you worked with them. One is TikTok, and then the other's One Medical. And so, it'd be cool to just-

    2. KBKristen Berman29:26

       Yep.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky29:26

       ... 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.

    4. KBKristen Berman29:32

       Great. Yeah. So TikTok is obviously 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 can take that, and the first thing that we did is, we kinda 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've said likes, you know, we could've said comments or general engagement, which, you know, is a broad thing, but we narrowed on decreasing the shares. So when you're actually going to see a misinformation video, we wanna decrease the number of people that share it. So that was the first step. And the second step is this, you know, three B 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-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky30:36

       Put up barriers.

    6. KBKristen Berman30:38

       ... 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.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky30:50

       Hmm.

    8. KBKristen Berman30:50

       So now you're getting in the elevator, you're annoyed, it's harder to use the elevator, and people went to the stairs.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky30:55

       16 seconds, interesting number.

    10. KBKristen Berman30:57

        16 sec- ... We can't wait 16 s- ... That is actually kinda long though. You're s- you're standing there-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky31:01

        So long.

    12. KBKristen Berman31:01

        ... twiddling your thumbs.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky31:02

        I'd use the stairs, yeah.

    14. KBKristen Berman31:03

        Yeah, yeah. And so that's kinda 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 click 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, a prior decision and question their, their self. And so with that, both those things, the label on the video and the pop-up reduced shares by 24%.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky31:43

        Wow.

    16. KBKristen Berman31:43

        And these are tactics that Facebook and Twitter are also using to slow people down. This was actually one of the first published studies that showed that this, this drove down misinformation.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky31:51

        Can you talk a bit about how you came to those two conclusions? I, I know you work really closely with the product team and there's this whole process

14. 31:58 – 35:36

    Tips for researching and solving problems

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky31:58

       you go through. How do you come up with these ideas? How many ideas did you test? Is there anything more you could share on that?

    2. KBKristen Berman32:03

       Yeah, it's actually a, 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 at 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 wanna get someone to do something, how do you intervene? So we did this literature review. We came up with a hypothesis, and we had probably 30 different ways to implement this, 'cause a 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, a platform where you can easily test things-

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky33:10

       Hmm, Prolific, cool.

    4. KBKristen Berman33:11

       ... and we didn't measure-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky33:11

       I'll look into that. I haven't heard of that.

    6. KBKristen Berman33:12

       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, end all be all, but it's going to drive our intuition up a lot more.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky33:34

       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?

    8. KBKristen Berman33:46

       Yeah, I mean, uh, 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 keywords. So if you're looking at something in healthcare, you'd wanna 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 the hypothesis and putting them to test, you never ... we never do a study, a UX study, where we're just showing people one thing, 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 the, which one is going to, to drive the behavior we're intending to change.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky34:44

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

    10. KBKristen Berman34:52

        Yeah, we actually only got two conditions in product, which for us is w- we would like more and it wa- ... You know, we don't know if we're gonna get a second bat at this. So we said, "We'll do two conditions plus a control," but what should those two conditions be? S- so for us it was like we wanna make ... we wanna de-risk the launch as much as possible.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky35:11

        Awesome, and is that featured in the product today?

    12. KBKristen Berman35:13

        It is, yes.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky35:14

        Amazing.

    14. KBKristen Berman35:14

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

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky35:19

        Sweet. I am clearly not sharing much misinformation because I haven't seen it yet. (laughs)

    16. KBKristen Berman35:25

        It be- ... You're- you may not be searching the right things. So if you search-

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky35:29

        Okay, gonna, gonna try this out.

    18. KBKristen Berman35:29

        ... "medical COVID politics," you may, you may get it.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky35:32

        Oh boy, here's the ... becomes the decline of me.

15. 35:36 – 38:31

    The One Medical case study

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky35:36

       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?

    2. KBKristen Berman35:44

       Yeah. So we worked with One Medical to ... Basically, One Medical asks us to increase engagement. This is a classic question, how do you increase engagement in a product or a service, right? So-

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky35:53

       Engagement meaning just using it more often?

    4. KBKristen Berman35:56

       Right, exactly, but the real ... that's the real question is, what does engagement mean?

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky36:00

       Mm-hmm.

    6. KBKristen Berman36:00

       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.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky36:10

       Mm-hmm.

    8. KBKristen Berman36:11

       And if you guys can't agree internally on what to do or what engagement means, it's very difficult to build a product about which your users understand what to do.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky36:19

       Yup.

    10. KBKristen Berman36:20

        Yeah. (laughs) 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 gonna sign up for One Medical, six months later you're gonna get a, a fever or get sick-And are you going to remember this app that you signed up for six months ago? Probably not. You're gonna 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 in going to that doctor's appointment. So then we look to the barriers. What are the barriers, like who is gonna be your provider, your doctor? Like picking somebody is hard. Finding a time, an appointment time, is hard. You know, we're all busy people. How are you gonna fit it in? Knowing actually what One Medical can help you with, also difficult. Like w- 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 a- 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, 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.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky38:06

        Of appointments?

    12. KBKristen Berman38:07

        Of appointments, yep.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky38:08

        Oh.

    14. KBKristen Berman38:08

        Yeah.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky38:09

        With this-

    16. KBKristen Berman38:09

        Onboarding.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky38:10

        Oh. (laughs) I don't know if I went through that when I joined One Medical. I-

    18. KBKristen Berman38:13

        This is recent, yep.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky38:14

        Okay, cool. Yeah. By the way, One Medical's 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.

16. 38:31 – 41:46

    Rules of thumb for improving flow

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky38:31

    2. KBKristen Berman38:31

       Yep.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky38:31

       And then another, you mentioned earlier, is just, like, reminding you of maybe what you're gonna get out of it 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?

    4. KBKristen Berman38:44

       Yeah. I- you know, uh, 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 contexts. So I'd, 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 I'd say that, that's one. And then the other is really just the, you know, reducing... R- r- I hate to sound so simplistic, but this is, you know, a lot of it is about making things easier logistically and cognitively and making the benefit much more clear, salient. We say moving it from abstract to concrete. Like you really wanna move something, you know, from the world of people can't really imagine how it would 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 sign-up 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. That's really frustrating. If you can put people back where they landed, they're more likely to continue.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky40:11

       That makes sense. Reduces barriers. I'm learning.

    6. KBKristen Berman40:14

       Exactly.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky40:14

       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 s- did that and it worked out really well? Like, what's an example of showing a benefit?

    8. KBKristen Berman40:27

       Yeah. So actually benefits c- can be, there's two ways to do benefits. One is the actual one that a consumer has, so, right, Asana and the, like, 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 d- 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 lives. And so, you know, one example is where we worked with a company called Study and it's, was a fintech app, and we were helping people to sign up or sync their bank account. 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 this small immediate benefit is how you're framing each step. So each step is gonna give you the immediate benefit. So for this one, it was

17. 41:46 – 47:00

    What is right-for-wrong?

    1. KBKristen Berman41:46

       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, 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.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky42:16

       That- (laughs) 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 posts of the newsletter on just-

    3. KBKristen Berman42:25

       Cool.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky42:25

       ... using a lot of th- Yeah. I don't know if I told you that. (laughs)

    5. KBKristen Berman42:28

       (laughs) Yeah, that's awesome.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky42:29

       Yeah, and it's about using these insights to improve conversion in general. So we'll link to that in the show notes.

    7. KBKristen Berman42:34

       Great.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky42:34

       And I think in that post, you mentioned this concept of right for wrong. 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?

    9. KBKristen Berman42:42

       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 when you g- gave people donuts, gave people free pot or marijuana. There were lottery tickets in Ohio. So this is the right-for-wrong idea, where you're really substituting... And by the way, there, there's one, one of the bigger, uh, voting interventions is just having pizza show up at the poll line, right? You're motivating people to go vote, not because they wanna contribute to democracy, but because there's pizza in the poll line. So at some level, we're, we're pretty simple humans where we want an immediate benefit. Um, you know, 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 wanna do, but they don't necessarily have the motivation to do it right away. I- if you think about Peloton, you know, yes, I wanna work out, yes, I wanna have a, a healthy person, but maybe I wanna s- go to the class because the instructor may give me a shout-out, or there is some streak that I'm trying to continue, right? So the 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.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky44:29

        So the key there, just to kinda come back to the dark side of some of this stuff, is you wanna make sure the, the end mean is, is good and, and right, whatever that means.

    11. KBKristen Berman44:38

        Exactly, yeah. And so, again, all these things, you know, the possibility of using anything for negative outcomes exist, 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, uh, you know, uh, some of the toughest teams we have understanding this are nonprofits. So we worked with one company a while ago, and we tried to get them to add a deadline, because they were trying to help, uh, people sign up for interviews. So, like, they were basically filtering people before Staples would get them for an interview. So y- they'd do the interview prep. They'd help them show up for the interview. But the reality is that, like, sometimes people miss this 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, 'cause 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 kinda create the right-for-wrong reason, giving people the wrong reason to do the, the behavior that they actually want to do. We added a deadline to Kiva's flow for when their borrowers were signing up, and we increased their conversion. So obviously, you can use this i- i- in ways that are unintended, and it really has some upside to help people.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky46:07

        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.

    13. KBKristen Berman46:27

        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, at this kind of predictable level.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky46:47

        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 wanna think about this stuff and maybe implement it in my team,

18. 47:00 – 49:33

    How to get started using behavioral design

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky47:00

       what would you suggest to, say, a PM leading a team that wants to implement some of these principles?

    2. KBKristen Berman47:06

       Yeah, I would, I would probably start from the process angle. You know, we have the 3B 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 psychologies that drive that behavior will be a better conversation and more obvious. So first is starting with the behavior, so 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, I, it's, it's like a journey map on steroids, where you're really trying to map the steps that p- 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, h- help diagnose and design the intervention.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky48:07

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

    4. KBKristen Berman48:11

       There's kinda two steps. One, you can outline the full kinda high-level flow, where you're saying, you know, maybe there is 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 wanna 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 beh- 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.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky49:04

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

    6. KBKristen Berman49:15

       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 hump?

19. 49:33 – 52:01

    The Behavioral Design Bootcamp

    1. KBKristen Berman49:33

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky49:33

       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,

    3. NANarrator49:53

       (laughs)

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky49:53

       ... so it's, maybe it's a good time to just chat about the course-

    5. KBKristen Berman49:56

       Yeah. (laughs)

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky49:56

       ... that you teach, eh, versus, you know, coming in house and working with a team. Can you talk a bit about that? Or, or are those the same thing? I'm... Maybe I'm not yet sure.

    7. KBKristen Berman50:03

       I- No, that, that's, that's perfect. Yeah. So we have a... Thanks for the tee up, Lenny. Uh, (laughs) appreciate it. We have a, a bootcamp course which basically is a self-paced online course that you can go in and understand. It has all, a lot of our case studies, many that I didn't talk about here, and we walk you through the process, right? And you'll have an intro 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, and we can, I can send you this, we have a sweet 16, like some of the t- 16 biases that we, you know, that we refer to most. The three B's is an easy way to evaluate a p- a product if you're just starting. But as you get deeper, these different psychologies will pop up.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky51:02

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

    9. KBKristen Berman51:10

       Yeah. So o- once a year we'll do a, 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, it's a eight-week course and we give you, uh, a month extra to, 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.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky51:46

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

    11. KBKristen Berman51:49

        Yeah. Thanks again for this. Yeah.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky51:50

        Rational labs. (laughs)

    13. KBKristen Berman51:51

        Yeah, irrationallabs.com is, is the, is the spot. And if you... Probably signing up for our newsletter is also a move. We publish all of our research there and other kind of fun behavioral insights.

20. 52:01 – 56:14

    Lightning round!

    1. KBKristen Berman52:01

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky52:01

       Sweet. Well, with that we've reached our exciting lightning round.

    3. KBKristen Berman52:04

       Woohoo.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky52:05

       (laughs)

    5. KBKristen Berman52:05

       Ah.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky52:05

       So I'm just gonna ask you a bunch of quick questions, whatever comes to mind. Fire away and we'll just go through them real fast. Sound good?

    7. KBKristen Berman52:11

       Great.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky52:12

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

    9. KBKristen Berman52:17

       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. (laughs) It's, it's a really powerful, powerful book. And then an under talked 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 would recommend Robert Frank as, as an author and, and Darwin Economy.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky52:48

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

    11. KBKristen Berman52:51

        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. Steven Dubner and Angela Duck- Duckworth come together and just answer questions about behavior change.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky53:11

        What's a favorite recent movie or TV show?

    13. KBKristen Berman53:14

        So I love The Rehearsal.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky53:15

        Mm-hmm.

    15. KBKristen Berman53:16

        This is-

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky53:17

        I can see you loving it.

    17. KBKristen Berman53:17

        Yeah. So it's basically where you, Nathan Fielder is rehearsing life... And I think, you know, sports, it's so obvious, you wanna practice. I just started ping pong lessons actually and, like, I'm doing the same stroke for the ne- 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.

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky53:41

        Have you seen Nathan For You, his other show?

    19. KBKristen Berman53:44

        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, I'm, I loved it.

    20. LRLenny Rachitsky53:52

        I, I actually like Nathan For You better. So fo-

    21. KBKristen Berman53:54

        Oh, interesting. Okay.

    22. LRLenny Rachitsky53:55

        Yeah.

    23. KBKristen Berman53:55

        I'll, I'll, uh, give another-

    24. LRLenny Rachitsky53:57

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

    25. KBKristen Berman54:03

        So i- 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 that, say, interviews will predict how I perform on the-

    26. LRLenny Rachitsky54:17

        Sh-

    27. KBKristen Berman54:17

        ... the job. And so, yeah. (laughs)

    28. LRLenny Rachitsky54:19

        Just kidding.

    29. KBKristen Berman54:20

        So we use, you know, skills 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, a personality trait that defines you?" So really one that you are, feel the strength but that also, you know, can be seen as, 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, I find that it, it helps understand a person s- a little bit easier and faster.

    30. LRLenny Rachitsky55:04

        Last question. Who else in the industry do you most respect as a thought leader?

Episode duration: 56:14