On this episode of Product Love, I sat down with Kristen Berman, the CEO, and co-founder of Irrational Labs. Irrational Labs is a behavioral science consulting and design group that helps marketers and product managers assess their products.
Naturally, we talked a lot about behavioral science. Understanding the customer comes with the product manager role, but applying a psychology lens will help unlock deeper insights.
Kristen shared a time where she worked on the Adwords product — admittedly, it’s a difficult product, and users tend to give up when something is hard to learn. So how could she change the mental model of a product that people could push through with onboarding?
The realization she unlocked was that most products are framed as one and done. If you do something, you should immediately get a benefit from it. She had to teach something else.
What ensued was changing the script at Adwords’ call center. Typically, they would answer the phone and say, “Welcome to Adwords. How can I help you?” Instead, it turned into, “Welcome to Adwords. Let’s put you on a 3-month expert program where we’ll spend 90 days mastering this.”
That increased retention.
If you want to know about how behavioral science can change the way you build your product, listen to the episode above.
