The illusion of value in product visibility

Movies will have you believe that all fights happen in bars. But to me, few places feel quite so ready to break into a spontaneous brawl as the line to get on an airplane.

And sure, there is sometimes utility to boarding the plane early. When my son was young, it was helpful to have an extra few minutes to get him settled. And you’re guaranteed to have overhead bin space if you need it.

But most bags do make it onboard, the seats are assigned, and we’re all leaving and arriving at the same time. The value of being in Group C instead of Group D is marginal at best.

So then why do people crowd?

Some of it is about social standing. In a million ways, humans pay to demonstrate our privilege and that is unlikely to end anytime soon.

But there is another factor at play: people like to feel like they are getting their money’s worth. And airlines have clearly connected boarding early to value. Early boarding is associated with Executive Diamond 100K Premier customers, higher-priced ticket types, and even explicit charges if you fly Spirit or Frontier.

So if you’re sitting in the waiting area and they call your group but you don’t board, you feel like you’re giving up value that you’ve already paid for. And humans are extremely sensitive to that form of loss.

This is, of course, a deliberate strategy by the airlines – controlling who gets to go first costs them nothing, yet creates the illusion of value. But there are plenty of times when “use it or lose it” is an unintentional consequence of designs that creates unnecessary feelings of missed value.

All-you-can-eat subscriptions like Netflix are an easy example. By putting so many options on the front page, they maximize the chances you’ll find something to watch. But they also highlight all the things you might want to watch (and more importantly, are paying for) but will never actually have time to enjoy.

Ditto for multi-function devices. There are a plethora of tools in my garage that can absolutely do more than I am capable of (I’m looking at you, compound sliding miter saw) and every time I use them for my basic needs, I’m keenly aware that I’m somehow missing out.

In a world where products compete on value, it often feels like the optimal is simply stuffing in as many sources of value as possible. And it is great that Netflix has many options and my miter saw can do many things. 

The key to balancing the gain of more features and the loss of not using them is to control how visible those features are. Netflix can make fewer recommendations. The miter saw can hide the more advanced controls. As applied behavioral scientists, we can sometimes create greater perceived value simply by being more direct with the highest value features and deemphasizing the visibility of those that most people will never get value from.

Preparing for an interview? Reframe your shortcomings using probability

A few years ago, I was talking to an entrepreneur working on an easy way to share STD test results and he said something that stuck with me: HSV is a dumb reason to break up with someone, because about 50% of the adult population in the US has it, and so it is 50/50 that even if you dump this person, you’ll have to dump the next person too.

To me, this is a very clever reframe. It doesn’t try to debate anything about the morality of breaking up with someone or minimize HSV itself. Instead, it just focuses on the probability of an event occurring in the next instance.

This is on my mind this week because of a conversation with a mentee about her immigration status. She’s looking to change jobs, so she’s been applying and getting interviews, but doesn’t get selected to continue because she only has 3 years left on her OPT visa.

So I invited her to do one of my favorite activities: a reverse roleplay. She got to be the interviewer, I got to be her. And when she asked me the question about my immigration status, I used a similar reframe: 

“The average tenure of someone at my level in a tech company is less than three years, so if you pass me over because of my OPT, it is just as likely that the person you choose to hire will actually leave in the same amount of time. So why not consider whether I’m the best person for the job instead of focusing on how long I’ll do it?”

Her job dropped.

Note that I’m not arguing the fairness of immigration status being a form of legal discrimination. And I’m not trying to convince the interviewer that I’m so much better than the next candidate that they should overlook the deficiency. Instead, I’m arguing it isn’t a deficiency in the first place because it is true for the majority of the population. 

This works for all sorts of perceived shortcomings in an interview. For example, take a job description I read once that had both “Ten years of applied behavioral science experience” and “Ten years of insurance experience” as requirements – a combination that literally no one had at the time. 

Rather than arguing that whichever you don’t have isn’t important or that you can make up for it in other ways, you can just rely on probability. By pointing out the non-overlap of those experience sets, you can level the playing field by arguing that everyone is going to have to learn something in order to do the job and so it might as well be you.

As the joke says, you don’t have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than the other person they’re chasing. By pointing out equivalencies, you can reset the frame on yourself as a candidate to minimize shortcomings. You’ll still have to highlight your strengths, but it can sometimes eliminate at least some forms of bias.

The myth of narrowing focus in product success

Over the weekend, the former CFO of Oura Daniel Welch posted about the success of narrowing the product focus to a subset of women’s health. And one of the comments, from Diana Torgersen, caught my eye:

“Wonderful – but still wondering how Women’s health is a “narrow focus”? By focusing on women you’re focusing on 51-52% of the population so it seems it’s not that narrow, merely the other half of the population.”

The reason it perked me up is because a) that math is wrong when you’re talking about product narrowing and b) it is a mistake that tons of product people make, resulting in insufficient levels of focus.

Take Fitbit as a representative of the default mainstream wearable device (you could insert Apple, Samsung, or dozens of others in here if you want). Torgersen is right: they generally try to target 100% of the market, with an implicit focus on men (because the patriarchy sucks).

But they do more than that: they try to target 100% of the market across multiple features, including sleep, nutrition, exercise, stress, etc. That is 100% x 5 categories, or 500 product points.

If Oura had taken that approach, they would simply have halved the population but kept the same features; a Fitbit Fem that exclusively focused on women would still have 50% x 5, or 250 product points.

But Oura didn’t just narrow the population: they also narrowed the features by focusing on just fertility, pregnancy, and menopause. That’s 50% x 3, or 150 product points. And in reality, because fertility, pregnancy, and menopause are non-overlapping, it is actually just 50 product points: 50%/3 (each member of the population is in only one of the three states) x 3.

I suspect that Torgersen was really just trying to use a rhetorical question to make the point that focusing on women isn’t narrow and more people should see women as an important market; a true statement, for sure.

But it inadvertently also made a point about how people conflate population and features. When seeking product focus, many product folks will narrow population OR features, instead of population AND features. And the “and” is where all the magic happens.

Now to be fair, Welch’s post was really about expansion; Oura had already done 100 products points of everyone x sleep. But you could argue they started with 50 product points, by doing men x sleep; Welcome acknowledges that in the beginning, it was seen as a very masculine device. They could (and perhaps should) have started with women x sleep, but would still be 50 product points. And that was with a $2.3m seed.

Every product starts by changing one behavior for one person. Over time, you’ll remove Limitations and add Populations and Motivations as you expand. But start with one.