Smart Users

One of the most interesting things about games as a service and the new world of long tail video games is watching the interactions between developers and designers and the hardcore fans of a game. Pioneers in the space like Blizzard and Riot have taken their lumps and learned, often with a great deal of pain, what amount of communication works for them. Bungie, a more recent entrant into the space with their FPS / loot shooter Destiny, is once again taking a beating from their players because of the choices they're making with Destiny 2. The game's subreddit boasts more than half a million people who care enough about the game to subscribe to the forum, and by and large it seems they are *not* happy with the current direction of the game.

The interesting thing about the Destiny fanbase, and the hardcore players of just about any popular game these days, is that they're not short on ideas for how to improve things. There are plenty of hot takes, ad hominem attacks, and general shitposts, but there are also plenty of really well thought out, exhaustively researched, statistically-based threads analyzing everything from drop rates (how often you get cool new stuff) to power levels (how strong that stuff is relative to other stuff) and plenty more.

"Users don't know that they want" is an oft-repeated  axiom that has it's origins in the well-intentioned idea that users are experts in their problems but not in the solutions to those problems. Ideally, you are the expert, and you can synthesize the various problems, the poorly-formed lamentations, and the "how could you possible not realize that"s and spin them into some kind of product/design/engineering/service gold. Because you're smart. Because you have the benefit of a broad perspective and lot of inputs. Because you have the resources of an entire company (or just one really obsessed problem-solver) to bring to bear.

But here's the thing. Not all of your users are just bumbling around in the dark, yelling their frustrations into the void. Many of these folks aren't just passionate users and fans, they're also experts in their respective fields. In the world of video games or other consumer products that may not be super relevant. What does the hobbyist statistician know about your monetization model? What does the incredible artist understand about your development pipeline and all the debt lurking just beneath the surface? What does the plumber know about incentive systems and good feedback messaging? Maybe nothing. But they've spent hours and days of their lives with your product, and even if they aren't always exactly sure what keeps them coming back (especially if it's a B2B product and they don't have any say in the matter) they almost certainly know what makes them wish they never had to look at it again. They know what they don't want. Briefly, a incomplete list of things users almost certainly do not want:

• To be confused or made to feel stupid
• To be talked down to
• To have to repeat themselves
• To have to pay for things (with money, time, or attention) more than once
• To feel like they've lost, or never had, agency
• For anything to be more taxing (in terms of clicks, pages, sub-tasks) than it absolutely has to be

There are probably more, and as always there are times when's it reasonable or even desirable to break the rules, but in general just treat your users with respect. Remember: they're using your product, so someone made a good decision somewhere!

Destiny's live team, led by the seemingly tireless Chris Barrett, has the unenviable task of trying to clean up the abysmal mess that the game's directors left in their wake. The game seems to have been a financial and critical success for Activision and the folks leading the studio on the launch did right by their stakeholders, the executives and shareholders. That long tail may be looking a little scary right now, though. They're a visionary group of folks who firmly believed they knew what players wanted better than they did, and in some ways they were almost certainly right. However, that insight paved the way for hubris and turned millions of users against them, either through vocal complains or, worst of all, simple quitting the game.

The later chapters of Destiny 2 are still being written, but the message is clear: ignore your users at your own peril.

Always Answer

Job hunting is soul crushing. Everyone knows it. Even when it's by choice, it can still be a very humbling experience. Many folks looking for work have it much harder than I do, with much longer odds, and I'm thankful that I have the luxury of holding out for a position that I'm really passionate about.

Being on the market has made me think about a few things with much more frequency and clarity, and it's made me more sensitive to certain behaviors, especially my own.

When looking for a new job, whether its the next step on the ladder or a complete career shift, it will almost certainly involve talking to a lot of people. Not necessarily interviews or formal communication, just general conversations. You'll bump into people and do the  "What are you up to?"  dance. You'll tap your network for referrals or reach out to old friends to rekindle relationships in your new found free time. And yes, eventually you'll have Very Important Messages to send to people that may be able to offer you a job. And you know what? You're really, really going to want all of those people to answer when you call on them.

Answers don't have to be long, and they don't necessarily have to be what the person wants to hear, but I've resolved to always, always answer. A few promises to myself:

Next time a client or coworker reaches out with a question, I'm going answer it as quickly as possible. If I don't know the answer that's ok, but I'll be quick about saying so. Bonus points for pointing them in the direction of someone who can help.

Next time a long-lost friend reaches out to reconnect, I'm going to take them up on it. I may not know what will come of it, but I know what it will mean to them.

Next time someone needs a favor, I'll think twice before blowing it off. Just like in sales, "no" is still the second best answer you can get when asking for something. At least they'll know where I stand, and they don't have to waste any more time on a dead end.

Next time my mom calls, I'm seriously really going to pick up the phone. Seriously. On second thought, I'm just going to call my mom right now. You should too. I'm sure she'd love to hear from you, and I bet she'll answer.

Want to Learn How to be Effective on a Product Team? Work at a Restaurant.

Ok, maybe you won’t learn everything you need to know. You’re not going to pick up HTML and CSS in a kitchen, and they don’t care much about naming your PS layers behind the bar, but hear me out. If you’re part of a team, and especially if you’re responsible for managing any part of the that team, there’s a lot to learn from high-functioning restaurants.

What’s Your Job?

Think about it before you answer. At the restaurant, I was (mostly) a server. I relayed specials, took orders, filled drinks, and dropped checks. But that wasn’t my job any more than dicing vegetables or par cooking protein was the job of garde manger or the sous chef. Those were our roles. We all had the same job, and that was to execute and deliver a flawless dining experience for our guests. We each approached it differently, and we were each responsible for our own areas, but we had a common mission.

In the decidedly less stressful world of office life, the same is true. Regardless of your role, whether it’s engineering, sales, design, project management, QA, or anything else, try to take the long view. Your job is the same as everyone else on the team: ship. Ship on time, ship at or above expectations, ship at or under budget. Ship something that delights. We all contribute differently, but it helps to keep your eye on the big picture.

Empathy

Dealing with people, whether as a server or bartender or a salesperson or account rep, will make you jaded. After enough time in the weeds, it’s easy to slip into seeing people as numbers, seeing every interaction as a transaction. Resist this urge.

After a few years in the business, most of the restaurants I worked at were pretty upscale, which meant that other than a handful of regulars, many guests who were joining us were doing so for a special occasion. For me, it would be just another Tuesday, but for them, it might be their only night in the city without the kids, or a landmark anniversary, or a celebration of a big new promotion. Even if it wasn’t, they were about to spent $100+ on dinner, so why do anything other than try to make the experience as special as possible?

When people are interacting with your project or product, what state of mind are they in? Where are they coming from? Are they harried or calm? Is it an emergency or a casual encounter? Are they experts or first timers? How can or should you adapt? Putting yourself in the mind of your customer will help make sure you’re always at least trying to make the experience as enjoyable as possible.

Rapid Execution

There are few things as impressive to me as a restaurant firing on all cylinders in the middle of the dinner rush. On any given weekend night a restaurant with 60ish seats might serve 180–240 covers, or guests. Each of those guests, if the servers and bartenders are doing their jobs, might have two to three courses each, all ordered at different times and perhaps with modifications based on preference or dietary restrictions. It’s a madhouse.

When everything is going right, those courses are perfectly timed, with each new plate hitting the table moments after your previous course has been cleared and your silverware replaced. Your drinks are never empty, and somehow the bread basket is always full.

This level of execution is immensely difficult, and requires that the entire team has an understanding of the flow of the dining room, the fire times (cooking time required) for individual dishes, and the individual needs of each guest. Working well on a project team is no different, and when great teams get into a state of flow it’s a sight to behold.

Intuition & Delight

Even when things are going swimmingly, there are bound to be problems. A hair makes it onto a plate and out of the kitchen. A glass gets dropped. When was the last time you did something 300+ times in a day without a single mistake? The best folks on both side of the line will recognize small issues before they get too big, or see opportunities to go above and beyond before they present themselves naturally. A talented expo — the folks who run the line between the kitchen and the front of the house and make sure hot food is hot, cold food is cold, and everything gets to the right place — will see the orders coming in and know that the kitchen is about to get backed up and ticket times are going to run long, so she’ll alert the servers. A great bartender will notice the the couple at the bar are on a first date and send out a little something extra. A great host or manager will know that there’s a bunch of special events going on and its going to be a long night, so she’ll bring in something for the team. If I got a read that a table might be first timers or having a big night out, I’d make the big sell by asking them to leave their menus closed, ask them a few questions, and then order their entire meal for them, from apps to entrees, wine to dessert. It worked, usually.

People love to be delighted, but by its very nature delight is almost always a surprise. The only way you can delight people is with strong intuition, and the only way you gain that is through experience. Still, all of the best experiences, whether physical or digital, delight. How are you delighting your users and customers?

Testing & Iteration

That special you had last time you were at your favorite local spot? It was most likely one of two things, either “burn out” food — stuff that’s going to go bad soonish and needs to get sold — or it’s a new item that’s being considered for addition to the menu. Let’s focus on the second option.

If you were to go back to the same restaurant the next night, you might see the same special on the board, just with a different sauce or a slightly different preparation. The chef is testing, iterating. Is that protein better with root vegetables or cruciferous? A demi-glace or something more rich? Restaurants knew a long time ago what the tech world only came around to in the last decade or so — ship, then iterate, iterate, iterate until you get it right. The people will tell you what they want.

Restaurants are these little microcosms. They’re fast moving, often thankless environments, and they’re a great way to get a look at all kinds of client interaction. Any time I’m interviewing for junior roles, I always love to see hospitality experience, no matter what side of the house they were on. Time served in a restaurant tells me this person has been through the ringer, and they probably have at least some idea of what to expect out here. Order up.

Further Reading

Looking for a deeper dive into how a hospitality mindset can change your outlook on business? Danny Meyer has you covered.

Hospitality not your thing? See how product teams are like raids in Destiny.

Delighting Users Right Out of Their Money

A few weeks ago my friend Andrew turned me on to the slick marketing site for Dimes. The site is well done and aggressively focused on the Millennial market with a dark aesthetic, liberal use of emoji, and a good bit of swagger in the copy. 

I’ve got a soft spot for really well done marketing pages, and whats more I’m really, really interested in the burgeoning finance startup scene. The rise of don't-call-them-roboadvisors like Betterment and Wealthfront has been a sea change for the staid financial advisor industry, I’m a (mostly) happy Simple customer, and I think companies like Even and Acorns are exploring some of the most important, impactful ways that we as people can put ourselves on better, more solid financial footing. 

The rise of intermediary layers, and I’m sure someone has coined a better name, is particularly interesting. Simple does this with my primary checking account now by acting as a great user interface for my day to day banking and saving activities, letting me set goals and providing powerful filtering features. Sure, there’s an underlying bank that actually handles my money, but I signed on with Simple for the extra interface layer they provide, not the features of the account itself. Even wants to do this for workers with uneven incomes by sitting on top of their existing accounts and leveling out cash flow paycheck to paycheck. Acorns rolls up your change to invest in fractional shares of mutual funds to encourage better investment habits, but again, it’s core selling point is the simple, beautiful intermediate interface it offers. Enter Dimes.

First, I should start by saying that I think Dimes looks beautiful and is full of really smart interactions. Kudos to whoever is running design over there, because not only have they nailed a great aesthetic and brand voice, I think they’ve also captured the elusive sense of delight that only the best interfaces manage to pull off. It’s in the little touches like the confetti when you hit a goal and the way your current “level” is displayed. And that’s the problem. Dimes looks good, but scratch the surface of the product a little bit, and things start to get a little scary. Let’s break it down.

Full disclosure: I am not a Dimes user, and all of my comments below are based on the information available on their site.

Features

Rewards Challenges

Cash back! Everyone loves it! Of course, you rarely get something for nothing, especially from businesses. Rewards programs are nothing new, and properly implemented they can be lucrative for both the businesses and the program members. 

Dimes' implementation follows a more recent trend of creating loyalty at the personal account level vs. with specific merchants. So, if you're picking up a latte on your way to work every morning and then grabbing the occasional weekend espresso at a spot in your neighborhood, Dimes will keep track of this aggregate spending and provide you with perks when you hit certain spending thresholds.

This is nothing new, really. Plenty of credit cards give cash back. Dimes takes it a step further with its Challenges, though, by providing an element of discovery and extra incentive to the process. Buy enough coffee and you might discover the Coffee Card Challenge, a quest to make a set number of coffee purchases.

Dimes needs to make money, and it's easy to imagine merchants paying a premium to be featured as part of a challenge, offering double credit for purchases or being shown on some kind of "partner map". Dimes calls this a "discovery" process, lending a bit of mystery and adding to the game-like nature of the whole thing.

Leveling Up

Here's where it really starts to get sinister. Dimes' reward program isn't just points and cash back, but also a tiered bonus structure. Borrowing even more liberally from the world of gaming, Dimes will dole out Dimes Points with every transaction, and also sets milestones to strive for. Just going off of the image on their site, these milestones might include things like:

1. Shopping in three different stores in one day
2. Completing a cashback challenge
3. Staying within your budget for two days in a row

Holy. Shit.

Giving credit where its due - staying within your budget is an admirable goal, and it's very cool that Dimes rewards that. Those other two, though. We've already talked about the Cashback Challenges. Nothing groundbreaking, but now they're further incentivized as part of a meta achievement structure.

Shopping at X stores starts to feel a little sketchy. For a product that bills itself as an "intelligent budgeting" tool, encouraging users to make transactions at multiple places is questionable. Don't get me wrong, on any given night out I'm probably dropping my card at at least three places... but not because I need to hit that one last checkmark in my "budgeting" tool to level up. Oh, and about that next level...

Yeah. Once I've spent myself up to the next threshold, I'm rewarded with... higher reward points when I spend money on the weekends and a not so subtle encouragement to spend more. Oof.

 

There's nothing inherently wrong with what Dimes has going here, and aggregate user purchase data is a a treasure trove of information that other much larger companies are looking to crack as well. Like I said at the top of the post, I think what really sets Dimes apart is how well they nail the delight aspect of the experience. Dimes isn't for me, but I want to use a product that is this cool and well integrated into my existing behaviors... I just don't want it to be a trojan horse designed to delight users right out of their money under the guise of making better decisions.

Make Good Decisions Delightful

Human beings, and especially those in Dimes' target market, are empirically bad at managing their finances. Now more than at any other time in history we have the tools, techniques, and data to make a meaningful impact on peoples' spending behavior right when it matters. We can get you at the point of purchase, or the moment money enters your account, or through automatic geofencing and location data, or any number of other crazy ways that weren't imaginable just a few decades ago, and Dimes is a glimpse at how we can do it in a way that truly delights. There's so much innovation happening around how we interact with, save and spend our money, lets keep it focused on reinforcing positive behaviors instead of figuring out the coolest way to incentivize damaging ones.

Principles

A while back, I stumbled across Stewart Butterfield's Rules of Business on Medium. At the time we were having a lot of conversations about company vision and values at O3 World, and it got me thinking about my own personal guiding principles. Over the course of a weekend and a few bourbons I put my own manifesto on paper. Here's where I ended up.

ALWAYS ASK WHY

Then ask again.

There's plenty of writing out there about the 5 Whys methodology. As members of a solutions-oriented teams, we're all biased towards action. We see a problem, we have an idea for a solution, and we execute. That's cool, but a couple of extra minutes of front to peel back the onion a bit can often lead to deeper insights and make sure time isn't wasted solving the wrong problem altogether. My favorite why is usually "Why is this even a problem in the first place?"

TRUST YOUR GUT

But always show your work.

I owe this one to the two founders of O3. One has a strong bias for going with his gut, making decisions on instinct and appreciating the same thing in the people who work for him. Fortunately, his instincts are often dead on. The other is a more quantitative guy, and though he has a good gut as well, the easiest and most effective to make your case to him is with numbers.

The tricky thing about this one is that you have to show your work a lot in the beginning, but once you've proven your intuition is sound, you can often skate by without the proof to back up your claims. You have to actively resist this for your most important decisions. Do your diligence. Even if it isn't required, be ready to show the work.

PEOPLE ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT DATA POINTS

Pay attention.

I love data, numbers. They're easy to deal with. They organize well. If you look hard enough, you can probably find numbers that tell you what you want to hear. People are different.

When I was doing biz dev, we'd sometimes find ourselves in a situation where the person on the other side rejected our proposal because of the final number. Look a little harder though, dig a little deeper, and it often became clear that the real sticking point wasn't the number, it was something related to the person - how the project (or price) would make them look to their boss, what it meant for their department headcount, etc. The same is true when doing validation or user testing exercises. Scour your engagement and conversion numbers, but make sure you keep an eye on the people themselves, too. They'll tell you more than the numbers ever could alone, and you should act on that knowledge quickly. Tim Cook has his own take on this.

TRY TO MAKE IT EASIER FOR EVERYONE

Including yourself.

Which leads us to number four. This one I adopted straight from Butterfield's piece because it struck such a chord with me. It also builds on the other points above. Showing your work? That makes it easier for other people to understand your decision making process, which makes it easier to either move forward or deliver a valid critique. Paying attention to people and not just numbers makes it easier to facilitate progress and equip your team with the tools they need. This is a good guideline no matter the size of the issue, from wide reaching business strategy to UX decisions to how long that email you're writing should be.

Justin Handler, a project manager I had the great fortune to work with for a few years, was incredibly good at this and really proved the value over and over again. Get an emailed question you have the answer to? Respond immediately. Trying to set up a meeting? Send specific dates and times, not open ended requests. Team struggling with a specific issue? Move mountains to remove blockers and open the way. Specific task hanging over your head? Make your own life easier and just fucking do it.

ALWAYS FOLLOW THROUGH

And do it as quickly as possible.

The best teacher I've ever had was fond of telling me "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" ... usually right after I finished explaining how I really wanted to turn my assignment in on time, but aliens had kidnapped my dog who had eaten my homework. He was right, if not entirely original. People will judge you by what you do. For them, for the company, for yourself. If you commit to something, do it. 

The corollary here is that when you say you're going to do something, there's almost never a reason not to do it as quickly as possible. No one ever got fired for exceeding expectations. If you for some reason you really, truly can't follow through? Own up to it as quickly as possible, and be honest about it. Silence is worse than failure.

This is the one I struggle with the most, since I default to wanting to make everyone happy and say yes to everything, whether I have the time (or desire) or not. Taking on more and not following through, or not following through fast enough, can be more damaging than just saying no in the first place.

EVERY JOB HAS YOUR SIGNATURE ON IT

Write pretty.

Because dammit, what's the point of doing anything at all if you aren't going to do it well?