Human-Centered

A tiny experiment in behavioral economics

    An illustrator friend was telling me over dinner recently how she was struggling to put together her portfolio. As anyone who’s ever had to create one knows, it’s a big, complicated effort. There’s lots of strategizing about the story you’re trying to tell, lots of visual design to create new samples, and a lot of revising old projects to bring them up to your current standards. So it wasn’t surprising that she was running into trouble motivating herself, day after day, to keep working on what can seem like an endless uphill climb. 

     A few weeks before that dinner I had seen Dean Karlan, professor and development economist at Yale, speak at a conference called PopTech. Amongst other things, he spoke about using economic incentives to change patterns of motivation - decreasing the cost of virtue and increasing the cost of vice. His personal example: making an agreement with a friend to hand over $100 if he ordered dessert, thus increasing the price of dessert to $108 from $8. 

     So while we were at dinner, that talk was still floating around my brain, and I decided to see if we could make something concrete out of it. I asked if she’d be up to put money on the table. She said a friend had offered to make a contract already - if she didn’t finish a portion of the portfolio in the allotted time she had to hand over cash. According to her, it didn’t work in practice. The friend didn’t force her to give up the money when it came down to it, and the whole thing felt awkward. 

      We decided to try a different, more direct approach:

• she paypal’ed me $100 immediately 
• if she finished in five days, I’d paypal her back $125 (I figured $25 was worth an interesting experiment for a friend)
• if within a week I’d return $110
• for every five days after the week was up she’d lose $10
• On the sixth late day, it would all be forfeit (any money that she didn’t get back was supposed to go to charity). 
                   

     The results, in her words:

A few things [happened] — I really accepted the deadline as a real thing and not something I could violate (like a weak agreement with myself). Once I believed I would certainly be getting a finished piece at the end, it made me excited to get started.

A few times I hit a wall or got discouraged that it wasn’t looking good, which is what always happens, and that’s where I usually give up and start over or start a new project or just go watch tv.  But since I really wanted to get it done by Friday, I forced myself to push through those blocks. I didn’t have time to start over so I needed to be more decisive and resourceful. So that was different this time.

Another interesting result was that even though I had less time to finish the work (less than with no official deadline), I mixed in lots of skill building activities like plein air painting, watching art tutorials and learning new tools.  I’ve been meaning to do more of that, but since it was less important than portfolio work, I put it off.  This week I felt more free to do those things.

       Large, unstructured, intimidating, deadline-free tasks can be the enemy of forward progress. And as we procrastinate, as we watch ourselves fail to get things down both large and small, it can be hard to get out of the negative spiral. I think what mattered most here wasn’t the money, but the fact that there was a structure and a social commitment, that I was more deeply invested in her success or failure, that she owed something to not just herself, but someone else, and that there was a clear metric of what we both set as the goal. 

And just in case it wasn’t already clear, she finished the three pieces we agreed to in just five days. 

Product as a collaborative, service role

     I’ve been doing more product management than design lately, which I generally enjoy, but it’s also a very different role within a team than what I’m used to. Primarily, I’ve been struggling with the disjoint that can arise between product management, design, and engineering, or to put it another way, product management cast as an overseer/director and design/engineering as “maker” roles.

     One facet of this - there’s a common concept within some project processes of a PM-type as “product owner”. Basically the one who lays claim to what this thing we’re making should be, and who dictates whether the current form has or has not yet actualized that. The way the rhetoric around this goes (and this is not inherent in everyone or even most people who do agile, just in some of the theory), product manager generates stories, implementation team makes them happen, loop back to product manager who then accepts or rejects said stories. 

     That’s all well and good at a large company, where there’s a ton to oversee and direct and work may be more planned. But at a startup, I don’t think it should be that way. I think the product manager, designer, engineer should all be sitting next to each other, specs should happen beforehand as well as on the fly, design should inform product, product should inform engineering, and feedback shouldn’t wait till the next sprint review. If there are positive relationships among the team, this shouldn’t be a problem and no one should be stepping on anyone’s toes. 

     Basically, I prefer to work as a PM the way I’d work as a designer. Collaboratively with my teammates, iteratively as we make new discoveries, and flatly, as we all share equal ownership in shipping an awesome product. In my mind, I prefer to recast the PM not as an owner, but as a service role, providing direction and support when needed, getting tactical things in order, listening to problems and solving them if possible, and if there’s nothing else to do, getting his/her hands dirty in design and engineering. I recently saw a quote from a speaker at Pop!Tech that captured this notion well for leadership, but I think it applies to all forms of management, coordination, and team direction:

 ”The first job of a leader is to define reality, last to say thank you and, in between, to be a debtor and a servant.” — Max DuPree