Kristen Berman

Onboarding is a critical lever for both initial conversion and long-term retention by accelerating the time to value.

"I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both signup conversion and increasing long term retention. Getting people to your aha moment more quic..."

To drive engagement, products must provide immediate benefits to satisfy the user's present bias rather than just long-term value.

"We are all present bias, which means we prioritize our present self over our future self, so there are plenty of reasons that somebody, your customer, your user should take an action, but you actually..."

To decrease negative user behaviors (like sharing misinformation), introduce intentional friction or 'barriers'.

"When you want to get somebody to do something more, you make it easier. When you want someone to do something less, you make it... Put up barriers."

Traditional interviews are poor predictors of job performance and should be used primarily for assessing culture fit, while skill assessments handle performance prediction.

"interviews, actually we know, don't predict job performance. So, very little to no evidence would say interviews will predict how I perform on the job... We use skill assessments and trials as ways to..."

Asking about a defining personality trait that is both a strength and a weakness reveals a candidate's self-awareness and core character.

"one of my favorite questions is just, what is a personality trait that defines you? So, really, one that you are filled with strength, but that also can be seen as something you're working to improve."

Using interactive questions in a signup flow can prime users to think about product benefits, increasing their motivation to complete the process.

"When you ask a question, you can insert an idea into someone's head, you can get them thinking about something different. And so, in a sign up flow, what would you want people to be thinking about? Yo..."

Teams often lack alignment on core metrics like 'engagement,' which leads to fragmented product development.

"The real question, what does engagement mean? Actually, a have fun exercise that people could do with their teams is if you ask everyone on the team what engagement means separately, you can compare a..."

Effective goal setting requires defining 'uncomfortably specific' target behaviors rather than just broad business outcomes.

"In order to change behavior, you have to pick a behavior that you want to change. So, companies are really good at outcomes, but just not as sharp at picking the behavior... we need to get uncomfortab..."

Aligning team incentives with specific user behaviors leads to more ethical and customer-centric product results.

"setting the incentive, and the KPI, and the product, and the marketing team on the behavior is going to result in a more customer-friendly product and outcome."

A 'behavioral diagnosis' involves a hyper-detailed mapping of every micro-step and psychological barrier in a user journey.

"the behavioral diagnosis, I'd say, it's like a journey map on steroids where you're really trying to map the steps that get people to the behavior change... we'll do a deck of 200, 300 slides of scree..."

User requests often fail to translate into actual behavior change; product teams should prioritize observed actions over stated preferences.

"We try to understand what people actually do versus what they say they will do. And by doing that, it becomes wildly clear that we should all be skeptical that budgeting would actually work to change..."

Testing a single design is ineffective for predicting behavior; you must present multiple options to measure relative performance.

"We never do a UX study where we're just showing people one thing because they could really like it or hate it, but they could really like or hate all the designs. We have no idea. So, when we're doing..."

The guest discusses a specific methodology of applying behavioral economics (biases like present bias, status quo effect, and uncertainty aversion) to product features to drive specific actions.

"behavioral science and behavioral design basically uses those insights on psychology to actually apply it within real world problems."