 Hello everybody. Nice to see you this morning. Thanks for getting up. So I want to start with a quick show of hands. How many of you in your work care about retention or struggle with retention? Raise your hand. Okay, me too. And as we get further and further into our worldwide digital transformation, retention only becomes more and more important. Why? Why do we care so much? Well, it takes time and money to acquire customers, right? If they don't stick around, all of that is set on fire. It goes to waste. Nobody in the world sets out and says, I'm going to build a leaky bucket. That's what I'm going to do. But it happens a lot. How many of you have ever worked on a product that was a leaky bucket that struggled with retention? Right? We don't want that to happen. Why does it keep happening? That's what I'm going to talk about today. And I'm going to show you a few counter-intuitive tricks to help you not only fix the problem when it happens, but avoid it in the first place. First, a little about me so you know where this info is coming from. I have an eclectic background as do many people in the gaming industry. I worked at Sun Microsystems helping basically bring the Internet to life. Then I worked for Paramount and Viacom, the media conglomerates working with brands like MTV, Nickelodeon, Star Trek to bring them onto the worldwide web. I then launched my own company doing social game design and online community design. And I had a number of amazing clients where I was on the original design team. There's a game called Ultimate Online. It's pre-world of Warcraft and I helped bring that to life. Anybody heard of eBay? Worked on eBay's early systems including the reputation system. Anybody heard of The Sims? Not as many, interesting. It's the biggest selling PC franchise of all time. Netflix? Anybody heard of Netflix? I helped Netflix solve a wicked hard retention problem that all their metrics couldn't fix. Happify, digital mental health app, covet fashion, breakthrough hit, mobile fashion game, Tonal, which is like Peloton for weight lifting. It's an intelligent home gym. Replica, an AI mental health chat bot that's recently been in the news. Not for great reasons. Also did a VC-backed startup with my partner. And wrote a couple of books, the latest of which game thinking I'll be sharing some principles from you today. But that's my background and I've worked with a lot of products and games that drove long lasting retention. But I've also worked with so many startups and game studios and big corporate innovators who struggled with retention, who couldn't crack it. Why? Why is it so hard? Well, it's one of the hardest things in tech. Very few people actually do it. Very few products. So we really want to study the ones that do. At first, it seems like it's not that hard. It seems like, yeah, I can just track and reward behavior, do some gamification like these approaches, which I'll talk to you about in a moment. Shouldn't be that hard. That should work. But it turns out that those mechanics backfire over time for psychological reasons that you're going to understand by the end of this talk. Now, Replica, the AI chatbot that's now quite popular but struggled at first, they found this out the hard way. They imagined an always on AI friend. You could talk to any time. This is five, six years ago before the current AI boom. They raise a lot of money from top tier VC's. They had a huge launch with millions of downloads. Seven months later, they were really struggling with low retention. They built a leaky bucket, even when they tried not to. So they thought, oh, well, we have an engagement issue. Let's add points and badges. That seems good. So they tried that. But not only did it not help their long term retention, it gave them an initial boost, but then their monthly actives went down. Has anyone ever had that happen with gamification? You see an initial boost of your stats, but long term retention goes down? Anybody? Yeah, I have too. So you find out, you think, oh, it's going to work. It doesn't work. So why? What are the top three mistakes that brilliant entrepreneurs and product leaders make that you can learn about and avoid? Number one, misunderstanding customer motivation. So let me break this down. Motivation is the driving force that explains human behavior. What explains our observable behavior? Well, it's complex, but motivation is a big part of it. And there's a key question in psychology, which is nature or nurture. Are we shaped by innately who we are inside? Or are we just a product of our environment? So brief tour of the history of the psychology of motivation. It actually goes all the way back to Aristotle, but Skinner in 1938, B. F. Skinner created operant conditioning which is the nature which says that behavior is shaped by your environment and you can control almost anybody by the stimulus and the way it's delivered in the environment. That's behaviorism. Then later on we had Maslow's pyramid of needs. Anybody heard of Maslow's pyramid of needs? Awesome. Right, so that's a few years later and the human insight here is that you can't fulfill the higher order needs like self-actualization. When you're hungry and don't have shelter, your country's being bombed. The lower order needs will take precedence and that was the insight in Maslow focusing psychology back on internal needs and drives away from the external behaviorists. Then self-determination theory. Anybody heard of self-determination theory? So a few less people, but now this is later, 1985, and this is really what shaped a lot of UX practice and product design is the idea that humans have three internal drives that we need to fulfill to be happy to function optimally. The first is autonomy or choice and this is the desire to be self-directed to feel like we're in control of our own destiny. For example, there is a study where managers who offered autonomy support, helping employees make progress on what they cared about, had better job satisfaction and overall better performance. The second of the triad of self-determination theory is mastery or competence which is the urge to get better at something we care about. For example, there was a study with hospital janitors and some of them weren't so happy but some of them were always seeking and finding areas of personal mastery and they were engaged and happy at work. And then there's purpose or relatedness which is the desire to be part of something larger than ourselves. And you hear this in gaming a lot. I'm sure some of you have experienced this yourselves. People say, you know, I came for the game but I stayed for the people, for the relationships that I formed in the game. Anybody ever had that experience with a game? Yeah, me too. Big time. So motivation is not one or the other. Motivation is a result of internal state plus environmental conditions. Now I want you to ground yourself in that and keep that in mind when we talk about how to drive retention. The other insight, and it took me a long time to understand this which is why I'm sharing it with you, is that motivation is not one size fits all. Self-determination theory says there's three drives. That's true. But that doesn't mean that every one of those drives applies to every situation. There's a model that comes actually out of marketing analytics called VALS, Values in Lifestyle, Stanford Research Institute. And this model says that there are three main motivational paths that people tend to follow and be lumped into. And these three motivational paths, once you know them, you can't unsee it and you will be able to debug so many product retention issues. Let me show you how it works. So case study. Recently I had a client who had a political fundraising app and this was to help, in this particular case, Democratic politicians in the U.S. raise funds for their campaigns. The app was targeted at grassroots donors, not the big ass donors, but the grassroots donors, $20, $30, who really cared about causes. The founding team was, this was a year and a half ago, so the founding team was bullish on NFTs. They all were excited about NFTs. They had their NFTs in their profile pictures, remember that. And the whole app had an underpinning of NFTs. So the platform idea was we're going to raise more money and help politicians raise more money by letting their grassroots donors collect and display NFTs, a.k.a. digital collectibles. And people are going to love that. It will help them raise more money. So the target audience, we tested this idea. They didn't care. They didn't care about NFTs. They didn't want to show off their NFTs. And so there was a huge mismatch between what this person had already built this team and what their target audience cared about. And they were quite puzzled until we dove into VALS. The VALS model explains this. In the VALS model there are three different drivers. People are driven by ideals, by achievement and status or by self-expression. Believers, that's one way to call them, are people that are driven by primarily by ideals and principles. Strivers are driven by achievement and status. And makers are driven by self-expression and the joy of creating. Think about the people you work with. Can you start to kind of divide them into these categories? Right? There's a test you can take to see which one you are. I'll reveal which one I am at the end of the talk. Okay, so what's going on here? Well, people that like to collect NFTs, like my client and his investors, are generally achievers. They're status and achievement oriented. They're very motivated by say a leaderboard or by showing or a Rolex, that kind of thing. But the grassroots donors, they're idealists. They're believers. They're motivated by principle and purpose. And that's why they didn't care about showing off their NFTs. So, this helped the team pivot to targeting the NFTs at the politicians, but hiding them from the donors and just hiding that they were digital collectibles. So, they pivoted their whole sort of UX layer. So, what's the lesson here? When it comes to motivation, don't assume validate. And once we did that, the company was able to stop the leaky bucket and fix their attention problems. Mistake two, even brilliant entrepreneurs make, they build a flat re-engagement loop. So, I'll show you what I mean by re-engagement loop and by flat. Has anybody read this book, The Power of Habit? Yeah, it's a really good book. Talks about keystone habits, habit stacking, which I'm going to talk about in a moment. But he also introduces this chart. This is operant conditioning. This is literally a definition of how operant conditioning Scinarian that I told you about recently, how it works. There's some routine and you reward the routine in order to shape behavior. Okay, so we'll come back to that. Now, anybody read this book, B.J. Fogg's Tiny Habits? Yeah, also really good book. So, there's a lot of smart thinking here. Talks about, you know, again this is pretty basic getting things done territory. To tackle something big, break it down into smaller pieces. And he has this habit card, tiny habit card. Now, I want to take a look at this. There's an anchor moment. We'll come back to that. That's good. Then there's some tiny behavior. And then there's a celebration which is a reward to get you to do the behavior more. That's, if you do that over and over again, that's a habit loop. But it's also a flat habit loop. Meaning, it doesn't change over time. Behavior reward, behavior reward, behavior reward. That's literally the definition of a flat habit loop. So, let's talk about the downside of rewards. In particular, external rewards like this model. Why not just use them? Replica said, I'm going to just do external rewards. But it didn't work. Why not? Well, this guy, Alfie Cohn, wrote a book about parenting called Punished by Rewards. That's got a lot of clues and also a lot of coverage of research that shows you why rewards can be backfired psychologically. And this is really it. They take away from being in the moment and enjoying whatever you're doing. They focus you elsewhere. For instance, there is a very well known study, and this has been replicated. They took kids who loved to read on their own and also didn't. And they paid them to read per page. And after a month, the study stopped. And all the kids who had loved reading on their own didn't do it anymore. Because they had learned that this isn't something you do for pleasure. It's something you do for a reward. Anybody read this book? Drive? Everybody should read this. This is such a good book. He really covers the modern research of why external rewards backfire. And this is one of the insights. Goals people set for themselves are usually healthy. But if they're set by someone else, they're not. Can anybody remember back to what I said about those three self-determination theory drives? Does it remind you of one of them? Autonomy. It's about autonomy. And in this book, Dan Pink details seven problems with rewards. They extinguish your internal motivation like those kids reading. They can diminish performance on certain tasks. They crush creativity. They get you very focused on the achievement. They can crowd out good behavior particularly in online games. Oh boy, have I ever seen that. They can encourage cheating. That's called gaming the system. The bigger the reward the more people are going to game the system because they're human. They can become addictive, hello gambling, especially when you use variable reinforcement rewards, which is a certain reinforcement schedule. And they can foster short-term thinking. Now I'm not saying you never use external rewards. I'm a game designer for goodness' sake. It's the way you use them. That's the key. How do you avoid these problems? If I take away your rewards, what do you have left? Skill building feedback. So I want you to think feedback versus rewards when you're building products and see what happens. What's skill building feedback? Well let's break it down. How does it work? So to introduce skill building feedback, start with the idea of a mastery path. Which is just all that means is that your product experience gets better as your customer becomes more skilled. Okay? Let's talk about Slack. How many people are familiar with Slack? Okay, a lot of people. Or any other similar tool. Microsoft Teams, Discord, etc. So you start with Discovery, which is how you find out about it. Discovery often happens socially with Slack. Your friends are using it. Your teammates are using it. Then you move on to learning, onboarding. That's where you learn the ropes. And Slack helps you learn with a friendly bot who teaches you the basics. And then you go into the multiplayer environment where your friends are or your colleagues are, much like many online games, teach you the basic before you go into a multiplayer combat environment. Habit building is different than onboarding. Habit building, think day 21, day 30. What's a session like? Well, pretty much you're reading and responding to messages. That's what you do in a session, right? But it gets better and better because you can customize Slack more and more as you learn to use it. And then mastery, which is more of a vector than a destination, keeps going with Slack. Once you've gotten used to Slack and customized it, you can launch your own channel, you can program up a bot, you can iterate your app into the ecosystem, you can keep going toward mastery. But what about skill building feedback? It doesn't have to be complicated. That's why Slack's a really good example. So you zoom in on this middle stage habit building in the mastery path and you say, okay, what's going on there? And what is Slack doing that makes it work so well? Well, this is what a habit loop that has skill building feedback and it looks like versus a habit loop that's like a skinner box that's just behaviorist. There's a trigger which is the beginning of BJ Fogg's model and every model. There's some trigger that gets you, that reminds you to use the app, right? We'll talk about Slack's trigger in a minute. And often it's FOMO, like what am I team doing? If you live in Slack, you need to get in there to see what's happening. And then there's an activity that you repeat over and over again. In Slack, like with most social media, it's read and respond to updates or messages. But then after you've read and respond to messages there's some feedback. Slack does something really interesting. When all your updates are read, you get one of many different whimsical notes with a little signature and acute saying and that's Slack's trademark, that kind of copy. But think about it for a minute. Slack put art and copy editing resources into making a bunch of different responses to the simple piece of feedback you've read all your updates. Why do you think that is? Think about it. It's because it's the most important thing if you're using Slack to know if you've read all your updates. Right? It's the bit of information you need and you see it over and over again and they did this so it wouldn't get boring. But did they gamify it? Is their points and badges? No. It's game like in a sense but it supports the main reason that you're there. That's the key. And then for deepening your investment and making progress, you customize your channel and build other things. Again, there's no visible gamification. There's just the product getting better and better the more you use it. So if you want to fix your leaky bucket, think feedback, not rewards. Think about how you can deliver skill building feedback to the main reason people are there to help them get better at something they care about. Now, mistake three, failing to habit stack. Okay, what is habit stacking? First of all, what's a habit? A habit is a behavior or an activity that someone does repeatedly in their life. Could be daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, occasional. But that's what a habit is. So an anchor habit is something you do regularly that's existing. And you'll see the term anchor habit throughout the habit building literature. Habit stacking is attaching a new behavior to this existing habit. Right? So the anchor habit is get your coffee, sit down to work at the beginning of the day, log in. Okay? How many people have that anchor habit? Or your tea or your chai? Right? Okay, slack. Log in the slack, see what my team's doing. That's habit stacking. Anybody have a dog? Anybody have a dog they walk? Yeah. So you walk the dog, right? It's something you have to do regularly. Well, what do you do? I felt like I didn't have time to listen to podcasts. Boom. Habit stacking. What about commuting to work if you have a commute? A lot of people do Duolingo or something else while they're doing that. It's Friday night. What am I going to do with my teammates? Rock Band, which is a multiplayer game I worked on years ago. It's exactly the perfect thing to do with your teammates. So habit stacking is attaching a new habit or a new behavior to an existing habit. James Clear, who wrote, I think, the absolutely best book on habit building called Atomic Habits, reminds us about the internal motivation. We see behavior. We see how people behave. But what people are not really after is they're not after the habit. You're not after reading and responding to messages that lack. You're after the good feeling where your body relaxes and you know you're on top of your team. You know you're on top of your work. That's what you're after. And when you keep that in mind with your customers, it's going to help you drive retention. So think about it. Which challenge would you rather take on as a software developer? Do you want to try to get the customer to build a brand new habit? Or do you want to try and help them improve an existing habit? The latter is much, much, much easier. So replica I told you the story of replica and their failure with gamification. But they ended up succeeding by focusing in on solving anchor habits. And they also ended up focusing on young adults struggling with mental health because they had too broad an audience. Once they focused on these young adults struggling with mental health, here's one habit that we learned about in research. It's 1 a.m., my mind's spinning, I can't sleep. Replicas perfect, it's a chat bot, it gets to know you, it understands you, it, you know, says nice things to you. It really works right in that habit. Here's another one. I'm feeling blue but I have a meaning coming up. I need to change my state, I need to change my mood. Replica, habit stacking. And it was when we were able to do this that the numbers started going up into the right. So, quick recap. If you want to drive fast, you need to do the fasting retention. Here's the mistake and then what to do instead. Instead of assuming you know your customer motivation, assuming they're like you, validated up front, figure out that they might not be like you or they might, but test it. You will save yourself time and money. Instead of building a flat habit loop and just using rewards and micro behaviors, introduce skill feedback, think about what does my customer want to get better at. How can I provide feedback that helps their skills get better and helps them accomplish what they're here to accomplish. Instead of asking your customers to build a brand new habit, see if you can study their existing habits and habit stack what you're doing on top of an anchor habit they already have. That is probably the single smartest and most effective retention tactic you could ever have. So, I want to give you a quick bonus tip to help you understand as software developers why this is important and how to do it. Because a lot of times we're like great, I get it. How do I do it? So, I introduced this idea of discovery through mastery. This mastery path and your customer goes on that journey when they're using your product. But we ourselves, we're builders. We build products. So where do we start? We start somehow with an MVP, an alpha, a pilot, whatever it is. And that's where you want to start not in onboarding where most people do, but with the learning loop. The skill building habit loop. And have just enough onboarding that you can test that. Then as you get toward beta and you're developing and getting closer to launch, you want to refine your onboarding and continue refining that loop. When you get close to launch, that's when you ramp up discovery. How people find out about it. The language, the copy, the visuals. You don't need to refine it that much earlier. And it's when you're into expansion that you really get into adding more mastery. Which is a mistake that a lot of people that are new to games make. They think, oh, I'll design all these levels and all this mastery. And in fact, our game designers do that stuff later. They really focus early on on getting that habit right. Why am I showing you this? Because I'm answering the question of why so many people struggle with retention. They don't do this. They don't focus on what is it someone's going to do over and over and over and over again. And how can I make that experience great? And if you don't make that mistake and you focus like that, you will win. So if you like this and you would like some more resources that are practical and will help you apply these ideas. We have an innovators quiz. You'll get a free cheat sheet and tips to help you be a better product developer. And you can also find out more about everything we do. Get on our mailing list and explore our training programs where we help people like you implement these tactics in their product teams. So thank you very much. And I hope you have lots of questions because that's my favorite part. It's hearing from you. Very good session, Mary. Sorry, Amy. Thank you so much. If you could go back to your previous slide. Okay. I'm having a little trouble hearing. Can you hear me now? This one? Yeah, no. Yeah. Could you please explain this with an example of how do we start with a habit building and then onboard a person or people to this and then launch the product. So usually we start with an idea of a product and then onboard person and then think about how he does the work or how he uses it. But this looks a little different. So could you please explain it? Very different. Yeah. Thank you. That's a great question. So I'll give you a couple of different examples. I'll give you an example of how to do it from the ground up. And I'll give you an example of how to do it when you're fixing an existing product. So a really good example of doing it from the ground up is rock band. And the core activity in rock band that you do over and over and over again is you play a song with your friends. It's a multiplayer music game. So when we were building rock band, we spent at least six months just working on getting that song to feel correct because it was hard. And tuning the multiplayer experience, tuning the feedback. What I said to my boss at the time because I was much less sophisticated than I am now, I said I want to design the avatars. I want to design the mastery systems. Like we had all these ideas about that. I wanted to work on the tutorial, the onboarding. And my boss said, no, you are not going to work on that. And I said, why? And I stamped my foot. No, I didn't really, but metaphorically. And he said, because if we don't get this loop right, none of that stuff matters and we're not going to put money and invest in that. Because it won't, it doesn't matter. And that was the big lesson is, and I'm sure you all have seen this in your own work. If that habit loop isn't working, if there isn't something that pulls people back and gets them to use it again and again and gets better over time, nothing else really matters. You're just going to have a leaky bucket. So that was an example of how to do that from the ground up. And there were a lot, I help clients do that now, right? So now here's a really interesting example, Netflix. Because you guys are familiar with Netflix, I think. So Netflix had a two month big drop off at one point where they just had like a cliff of retention at two months. And nobody could figure out why. They had the best data instrumentation in the world every page. They had like all the data you could want about what was happening. But they couldn't figure out why they were dropping off. So what we did was recruited people and then studied their use. And we found out why they were dropping off. Things weren't clear to them. There were some trust issues going on with the feedback they were getting. This was years ago. Netflix looked very different. And they had a big problem with feeling like there was sort of a big brotherish aspect to it which is like, okay, you're recommending these movies but I don't know why. And it makes me feel like, are you data mining me? What are you doing? So we stepped back and created a model for a re-engagement loop. The day 21 experience. And this was a two month, so like a 60 day model. Okay, you're 21 days in. What are you doing? What is your experience there? What pulls you back? And we had a breakthrough when we analyzed and modeled it that way. And the breakthrough was, oh, well people are coming back to Netflix and obviously they want to watch something. You know, they want to watch something. But they watched something before. Like they had watched something a few days ago or whatever. And we had learned that people had a trust issue knowing where the recommendations were coming from. So we created a re-engage just on like sketches, like storyboards. This was an idea for a re-engagement trigger where you come back to Netflix and one trigger was come back to Netflix and rate the stuff you just saw. Like you just watched X, Y, Z movie. This is before Netflix had enough data in their algorithms to do more AI rating. So it says, come back. Okay, you've come back and rate this movie. So come back and rate the movie. And then we unlocked the next recommendation. When you rated it, oh, you rated that. Because you rated that four stars, we think you'd like this. So we associated the recommendation directly with an action they took so that it would explain to them why they got the recommendation. And that was one of several things we introduced and it solved their retention problem. I know that was a long explanation. I don't know if you followed that. But my point is even if you've got a product already out there and you're struggling with retention you can pull back and model what's the habit loop. What is it people are doing and put it in a context where you know about what the people are struggling with and solve your problem better than thousands of data points. Did that answer your question? Okay. Who else has a question? I do. I mean you have a PhD in behavioral neuroscience. I'm sorry, I can't. You have a PhD in behavioral neuroscience. Yes. What would be your advice for what would be your advice for novices like us if we want to explore that science. Or if you want to learn about behavioral product management, what kind of... What advice do I have about learning about behavioral neuroscience? Yeah. Applying behavioral science in data activity. I'll tell you literally the best piece of advice I have from that. Really understand the scientific method. So as, what's your name? As he mentioned, I have a PhD in behavioral neuroscience and an undergraduate in experimental psychology. So I shared a lot of psychology with you today. Behavioral neuroscience is the connection between what's going on in your brain with serotonin and dopamine and all that stuff you hear about and behavior. So I'd say one of the biggest things I got out of getting that PhD is I see through most of the bullshit stuff about dopamine and you hear about this all the time. Oh, gamification and dopamine. It's just bullshit. It really is. It's such a complex. What's going on with our neurotransmitters in our brain are so much more complex than it's dopamine. So one thing I can share with you is take a skeptical eye when you see pop neuroscience. Now some of it is also very solid. Like for instance there's a lot of neuroscience literature and I've looked at it to make sure the studies make sense. Showing you how powerful meditation is for mental health. It literally changes your brain structure if you do it over many years. So that's real science. That's good. But what I mean about the scientific method is I think the thing that probably distinguishes me from a lot of other product leaders game designers, coaches is that I really understand the scientific method which is running controlled experiments to find out if you're right or wrong versus running experiments to prove your ideas right. And how many of us run gradual sprints or experiments or whatever to prove an idea is right versus being open to being wrong. A lot of us. So I think the most useful thing I can communicate to you about behavioral neuroscience is to approach what you're doing in product development with the rigor of the scientific method. Does that make sense? And I think that that has been what has turned around a number of products that I've worked with and in order to do that you have to be willing to be wrong. And so that's a whole another thing because that means you have to be in an organization that lets you be wrong. And I bet a number of you maybe don't feel so comfortable with that being wrong loudly and publicly in your organization but it turns out that figuring out how to be wrong on the way to being right is the secret of applying the scientific method. Thank you. Can't hear you. Hi. Thanks for the perspective on quite a few of these things and it was enlightening in many ways. Thanks for that. In my role I get to talk to a lot of product leaders including the business which is driving the entire product. So I'm having a lot of trouble understanding you. I'm sorry. Maybe you could say it and somebody else could help me but I want to answer your question. Yeah. So maybe I'll try again. In my role I get to talk simultaneously one way or the other to product leaders and product management on one side. The business which sells the product and the team which develops the products right. And one of the things that they struggle continuously with is something called as alignment. You know everybody talks about alignment. And we have these fancy frameworks OKRs, North Star Metrics, all of those. And for a couple of slides you also spoke about you know driving product teams through something which is being pushed top down. Right. And which is the most easiest thing to do. OKR is just trickling down. What is your perspective on how to bring about alignment when usually such is the idea around in the organization. So this gets into building faster and better versus building the right thing. Right. Because very often in organizations with OKRs they're about execution versus so outputs versus outcomes. I think that language has been used a lot. In terms of getting well in terms of getting alignment there's a lot of issues there that I didn't touch on today. Right. That I'm not going to address but what I talked about today everything we're talking about here is about how you figure out the right thing to build versus the way you build it. It's about building the right thing. Which it doesn't matter how fast or how smart you are or how agile you are if you're building if you're not building the right thing. And very often in an organization they don't do it this way right. Your orgs probably don't do it this way. So they may not be building the right thing they may just be as you said things come down from the top it's like do this and how do you deal with that. So realistically I'll tell you what I see working in organizations like that well first I'll tell you what doesn't work. What doesn't work is to try and transform the whole org with this new approach all at once. Like I don't know if any of you ever did like the scrum thing where it was like okay everybody scrum there's a training everybody in the company come now we're all doing scrum right I've had that in several companies. It doesn't really work and this doesn't work either top down coming in top down. What works is you find one project and you get permission to apply this to one project and you get a stakeholder who's an executive or an influential person in the company to be your sponsor. So all you need so here's the recipe for transformation that works if you heard what I said today and you're like I want to try that I think that might work that's a different way I really want to see if we can get good results with it all about results if there's not real results it doesn't matter so if you want to try it you pick a project to apply it to that's as likely as possible to work don't pick a project that's unlikely pick low hanging fruit one project and get a sponsor someone who maybe wants this kind of transformation to have someone who's been saying hey guys we need to try something different that's your sponsor and then you keep them in the loop and you get results on the one project and once this is what I've seen in companies once there's a project that got good results everybody wants to know how they did it and then you get the pull of more people adopting it for example this happened recently at General Motors. General Motors is a large US based auto manufacturer and a mid level manager from their product innovation department took our training program which is called the game thinking master class you guys can read about it on my site and he took it with another team member but he was the lead and he was like oh my god this is transformative and he told everybody and they're like yeah yeah yeah that sounds great so he picked a project worked on it with his colleague got it through and then got it green lit based on the strength of their results got more funding for the project internally now he's spreading game thinking throughout their entire innovation org but it's a year later but it's because they got results on a project and he had a sponsor he had one sponsor at a higher level who carved out enough time for him to do the project so did that answer your question and have you seen that same sort of dynamic happen yeah hi wonderful talk I think there was so many takeaways as transformation consultants and coaches sitting here in this room one question I had was from the valves model which you were talking about one is which you were going to answer towards the end which of those are you one of the question and the other question is that a lot of us are working where there's a lot of change management which is happening and not only at the product side the valves model I felt when I was looking at it would help but also to know about people because transformations are 90% people and 10% work so can you give some insights on how we could use some of what we see here even in our mini in change management if that's a great question so I'm happy to answer which valves type and I but before I do do you have a guess I just want to yeah I was thinking makers bingo yeah I'm a total maker I'm and I know that because when I'm not building my hands kind of get itchy like I want to build something I want to make something I'm a musician on the side I'm just that kind of person right and we all know people like that how many of you identify as makers how and how many of you identify as achievers strivers how many of you identify as idealists driven by principles interesting distribution right there's no one right one but once you it's really interesting to understand this and then just bring it to your everyday life when you're dealing with your colleagues at the next family gathering you know so yeah I'm a maker and once I understood that I could design for somebody other than myself a big part of the power of knowing this about yourself is then you can go oh not everybody's like me okay not going to assume everybody's driven like I am so some ideas about how to apply these to transformation I think that almost all of these ideas you could apply to I'm really talking about product development here right because that's my expertise but you're talking about people development right transformation is as much people development so when you're developing people a good rule of thumb which is woven throughout this is understand their existing habits understand what motivates them like when you're if you're dealing with digital transformation there's a lot of different people you're dealing with but there's definitely going to be stakeholders right that you have to deal with and then also team members so take the time to interview them enough that you could understand oh I think I understand what this person is driven by and if you here's another technique that works really really well it has to do with applying the scientific method to your assumption so a lot of times there's a problem and you know we identify the problem with metrics and we say okay we need to solve the problem here it is here's how the metrics are not where they should be we need to move them but sometimes the problem isn't what you thought it was and that happens a lot and so one of the things that you can use a technique you can use from all of this is what I call the day in the life interview which is pretty you know this goes back to basic user centered design for the last 30 years which is really understand somebody's existing context and how they're navigating that context so when you're trying to understand team members that you're helping do transformation do some day in the life interviews where you get them to tell you in detail about how they solve specific problems in their day and be really aware of the assumptions you have going into the conversation and treat it like an assumption meaning go into the conversation with clarity of I think this but I'm not sure so I'm about to go get data that could tell me if I'm right or wrong and then be really open to being wrong I'll give you an example so I was told by a colleague of mine who works at AWS Amazon's back end services and they had a hospital they were deploying AWS at and there was a problem with the way that they were reporting what was going on on the floor the way nurses were reporting what was going on on the floor and so they asked Pavel my friend and his team to design and implement a new interface to make it easier for the nurses to enter the information because the information wasn't getting in but then he went and interviewed the nurses about their day and it turned out the reason the information wasn't getting in had nothing to do with accessibility it had to do with the way their schedules were and the way they were deployed on the floor and they literally couldn't get to the thing in time and so writing a new interface would have zero impact and he didn't know that until he dug into these day in the life interviews where he really understood not just that one moment that was impacting the metrics but all the things leading up to it. Did that make sense? Yes. So understanding that is incredibly powerful and keep an eye out for anchor habits you can improve. If you want digital transformation to happen and people to adopt it see if you can get them to make an existing habit better rather than trying to build a brand new habit Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? Actually more of an observation or the realization continuing from what Parul said that I see a lot of how this can be used in transformation and two things I'm realizing from what you said one is it's important to understand the pain maybe in discovery what is the pain that people are feeling and that's one important piece to address here and the example you gave about Netflix because I watch Netflix and I've experienced this that when it shows these recommendations you watch this before so we recommend similar things so that is the question of addressing the open questions that people have in their minds so I mean thank you for this because I'm having an entirely new realization of how to go about a transformation make sure it addresses all these things. Thank you. I'm so glad I see the little light bulb above your head burning there Thank you for the lovely audience and thank you Amy for the such a thought-provoking thoughts with us and with that we are winding up this video. Thank you.