The Behavioral Product Manager
The behavioral product manager integrates lessons from behavioral studies and economics into the product design and into the methodologies used to building one.
This notion is promoted by Irrational Labs and is inspired by the works of known behavioral economists such as the Nobel Laureates Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman, and in the past several years most notably Dan Arieli.
I think the clearest distinction between the traditional product manager and the behavioral product manager is that the traditional product manager’s premise if that users are rational and that they approach a product with a clear goal in mind, while the behavioral product manager knows people are irrational and therefore builds the product around these irrational behaviors.
For Example, let’s take online learning (a relevant example for these times of Corona). Traditional Product Managers has KPIs they defined and are designing the product to meet them — such and such registrations, such and such courses bought etc. A Behavioral Product Manager understands that people are very likely to register and sign up for a course but find it extremely difficult to follow through with the course itself, and design the product not to get as many sign ups as possible but to get as many people to actually take the course.
A behavioral design will encourage group registrations or an automated sharing mechanism to let all your friends know you enrolled to that course. When you are part of a group or know your friends are watching, you are much less likely to skip the course you just signed up for.
Another difference, relating to the one we just discussed is shifting the focus from short-term to long-term goals. Let’s take eCommerce for example, when you’re focused on the short-term goals your key factor is conversion — how to I get as many people to make the first purchase? Ask anyone in retail — not only online — and they’ll tell you that this is what coupon, vouchers and special offers are for. But when you neglect the long-term goals you forget to measure the lifetime value of the customer and very soon you realize you’re spending a lot of money to get those users to shop and they never come back, causing you to lose money on the unit economics. Believe me, I was there and made these mistakes. Millennials (who are very sharp on their feet) know how to take advantage of this behavior by adding items to their basket but not checking out, knowing that sooner or later they’ll receive an email giving them a discount voucher to encourage them to check out.
A behavioral product manager will focus on creating value throughout the shopping experience, making it worthwhile for shoppers to shop with a particular brand, even if the price is not the cheapest.
A behavioral product manager will focus on creating value throughout the shopping experience, making it worthwhile for shoppers to shop with a particular brand, even if the price is not the cheapest.
This brings me to the next point, of what KPIs are you measuring? This is super important since the KPIs you set for your product will determine what the product will encourage users to do, and this may end up not being in their favor.
For example, if you measure usage metrics (e.g. logins, pageviews, time on site, etc.) you will eventually end up encouraging users to spend time using your product instead of extracting value from it. If your product is aiming to save people time and or make their work more efficient, you need to ask yourself whether spending time using your product achieves this goal or actually distracting them from their work and actually makes their day less efficient.
A behavioral design for such an example can be your inbox. A lot of management consultants are advocating disconnecting from all distractions during work, even from work-related stuff. Many managers have decided to check their email twice — in the morning and in the afternoon — and in between they don’t let their inbox distract them from working.
Now, if I were a traditional product manager for an email provider I would simply have said, great, just don’t look in your inbox during the day and viola, problem solved.
A behavioral product manager, on the other hand, will acknowledge it is enormously difficult to refrain from sneaking a peek into your inbox all day and work around this human imperfection by designing a feature to block all incoming emails between say 8am and 4pm. All incoming emails will wait in a hidden queue somewhere and be sent to your inbox only on those designated hours, keeping your inbox empty in between so even if you can’t help but sneaking a peek, you won’t see anything.
The differences between traditional product manager and a behavioral product manager can manifest in the many areas of product management. Take copy for example, one of the mistakes I used to make when just starting as a product manager was leaving copy to the end. Only after the product or feature was fully designed in terms of behavior and user interface, we sat down to write the copy to help drive the desired behavior. Today I know that copy is an essential part of the user experience design and goes a long way with setting the mindset and framing the experience in such a way to allow for the behavior change to succeed. Same thing goes for when in the process you get the customer support team in on your next product or feature. A behavioral product manager knows that the support team is a key factor in your product by being the direct link between your product and your users/customers, the information they can provide is invaluable and they should be regular participants in the product design meetings.
There are many more attributes for a behavioral product manager such as ditching personas for testing, relaying on data to drive product decision etc. I encourage all product people, juniors as well as experienced managers (maybe even more so), to look up Behavioral Product Management and make sure they update their methodologies to align with behavioral best practices.
