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Kristen Berman

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2022-10-02
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2022-10-02
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  1. “Yeah. 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.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, great question. So I met Dan around 2008, and if you don't know Dani Rarely, definitely worth at Google. And at that time, he had just written his first book, Predictably Rational. 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 ten 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 studied 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 community. And so starting working with Dan and we started and now 14 years later, this is what I do is bring product insights, bring.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So I think each product obviously will be different. 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 as showing people the benefit like how fast 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.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think we want to remove the field that was like an open text field. We're asking people an open-ended question and we improved conversion by 40% page over page. So for sure some questions are harder and you should not ask them. When questions are easier and it's a drop down multiple choice, this is when you should be trying it. But definitely the recommendation is not to ask 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 an open text field is just not an easy question.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Exactly, yeah. And I would say probably most teams can do this. You can replace the carousel. Like the carousel, you know, in 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.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Really drive conversion. We actually did something where we put a quiz on a partner's website. And it's Title Care, which is basically 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 frequencies of technology. And for people who completed a quiz, 53% of them went on to purchase versus 37% who didn't complete. So these type of questions can have a real impact.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “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 apartment you want? Do you want a studio or 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”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “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? Okay, so now you're thinking about my mother. 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.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “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 enough. You actually need to redesign your environment to change your behavior.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Home from work, you 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 stay adherent to.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Kind of the first line of defense in any problem solve 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 for 1K. 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 back-end 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 lift, you know, when you're coming.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Way too much work. 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 measure if they actually do it.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Experiment. This is with 10,000 people. 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 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. 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 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.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, great question. So, you know, 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 they're 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. 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.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “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. 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. Our 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.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “We started a lot of our work at Google. We were actually embedded within Google for around three years. I even had a bus path 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 shares by 24%. We worked with one medical on how to increase setting doctors' appointments right away during that 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 as well.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah. So Iration 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 Ari, 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.”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Economics says, look, people are rational. We make decisions with no emotion. We use lots of computational energy, weigh the pros and cons. 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. our 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”

    2022-10-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source