Review

I made product management my profession, I’ve long been a fan of Behavioural Economics and Atomic Habits is one of my favourite books, so I was always going to like this book. It builds on prior theory, but the authors contribution is to present a few easy to follow frameworks to apply behaviour change principles to product management. Given most product outcomes are reliant on changing people’s behaviour, this is a worthwhile read for anyone building products.

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Hooked

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• To effect change is to effect behaviour change
• Choice architecture or behavioural design is about designing environments to influence our choices and actions.
• We’re limited beings in attention, time, willpower etc
• Because of that our brains have shortcuts to economise
• System 1 reactive thinking is blazingly fast and automatic, but we’re generally not conscious of its inner workings.
• System 2 deliberative thinking is slow, focused, self-aware, and what most of us consider “thinking.” But it’s severely limited.
• Habits and biases exist because of these fundamental limitations
• Biases and Heuristics

Status quo bias	generally people will stick with the status quo
Descriptive norms	we follow what others are doing
Confirmation bias	we seek out, notice, and remember information in line with our existing thinking
Present bias	we give undue attention to the present and over value things we get now
Anchoring	we make judgments that are relative to a reference point
Availability heuristic	we believe things that happened recently are more likely to occur
IKEA effect	when we invest time and energy in something we tend to value the resulting item or outcome more
Halo effect	if something is good in one dimension, we’ll assume it’s good in others

• Habits free up mental space by outsourcing control to behavioural cues in the environment
• Habits are built through repetition: whenever you see X (a cue), you do Y (a routine)
• If there’s a reward (or random reward) the subconscious makes the connection stronger
• We can address the intention–action gap with the CREATE framework
• A Cue, which starts an automatic… intuitive Reaction, potentially bubbling up into a conscious Evaluation of costs and benefits, the Ability to act, the right Timing for action, and the overwhelming power of past Experience s
• You can use CREATE in reverse to replace a habit or stop a mental shortcut
• Avoid the Cue, replace the Reaction, rethink the Evaluation, or remove the Ability
• The 6 mental processes (detecting a cue, reacting to it, evaluating it, checking for ability, determining if the timing is right, and interpreting it all through the lens of our past experiences) are gates that can block or facilitate action
• Products have a lot to do to encourage us to take an action…
• cue us to think about the action
• avoid negative intuitive reactions to it
• convince our conscious minds that there’s value in the action
• convince us to do it now
• and ensure that we can actually take the action

• Create a review body (external and /or internal)
• Remove the fudge factor → make the rules crystal clear with a plain-language internal policy,
• Raise the stakes: tell others about our ethical commitments. Tell them the rules you’ll follow for designing products and applying behavioural science.

Blueprint for behaviour change:

• Define the business case and problem. Diagnose the status quo and opportunities for change. Design and test the proposed solution to the problem. Decide on whether to scale up and implement the solution more broadly.
• Essentially this is copying the common sense and the scientific method

• Defining a clear problem definition:
• The target outcome: What is the product supposed to accomplish? What will be different about the real world when the product is successful?
• The target actor: Who do we envision using the product? Who will do something differently in their lives and thus accomplish the target outcome?
• The target action: How will the actor do it? What behaviour will the person actually undertake (or stop taking)
• By helping the [actor] [start/stop] doing [describe action], we will accomplish [outcome]
• Define the clear, tangible, and measurable outcome that you seek, with a metric
• Define a clear, tangible, and measurable action that drives that outcome, with a metric. Create a threshold for each metric that defines success and failure

• Create behavioural Personas + use behaviour maps to identify possible interventions

Point-in-time Interventions:

Creating or stopping habits:

• In shorthand:

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Part I. How the Mind Works

Chapter 1. Deciding and Taking Action

• People struggle to turn their intentions into action. People struggle sometimes to make good decisions. Often, motivation isn’t the problem.
• To effect change is to effect behaviour change.
• Behavioural science combines psychology and economics and tries to understand how people make decisions and translate those decisions into action
• Choice architecture or Behavioural design is about designing environments to influence our choices and actions.
• Book recommendations:

• How Our Minds are Wired