Trapper Markelz

My resources for product development and team culture

I was asked the other day for a list of resources that I particularly like on the topic of product development and company culture. I thought I would share the list here in case any one finds them valuable.

1. Lean Startups - Eric Reis
   "The lean startup method advocates the creation of rapid prototypes designed to test market assumptions, and uses customer feedback to evolve them much faster than via more traditional product development practice" - http://bit.ly/qD88hT
2. Four Steps to Epiphany - Steve Blank
   "The essential book for anyone bringing a product to market, writing a business plan, marketing plan or sales plan. Step-by-step strategy of how to successfully organize sales, marketing and business development for a new product or company." - http://amzn.to/oJbIoN
3. Gamestorming - Dave Gray
   "An embrace and understanding of game mechanics can yield benefits in many work environments, particularly those where old hierarchical models are no longer applicable, like the creatively driven knowledge work of today’s cutting edge industries." - This book will teach you to think differently. - http://amzn.to/qRMGqr
4. Game On - John Radoff
   "Games are more than a profitable form of entertainment?the techniques of social games can be used to enhance the quality of online applications, social media and a wide range of other consumer and business experiences." - Probably the best book I have found about how to directly apply game design to your business. - http://amzn.to/q9md00 
5. Less is More - 37Signals
   A blog post from 2005 that still rings true today and is the foundation of their books Getting Real and Rework - http://bit.ly/obOuR2 
6. Startup Metrics for Pirates - Dave McClure
   A great primer on metrics driven product development. - http://bit.ly/rgNJ79
7. What do Product Managers do? - Jim Anderson
   I came across this blog post awhile back, and it is stayed in my book marks. I like the simplicity of the description around the job. Roadmap, Requirements, Problems, Positioning. - http://bit.ly/q9iM5U 
8. Company culture of Netflix
   An internal Netflix presentation that I summarized in a google document a long time ago, but I still look back on regularly: http://bit.ly/q6b776

These are listed because they were the first to come off the top of my head. I am sure there are other great ones I am leaving off. What did I miss? Leave it in the comments. 

 

Bill Sabram on Gamification - Accepting Limitations

We were having a discussion internally at MeYou Health about a new product we are working on. In the conversation, Bill Sabram, our lead game designer, said this:

"Games are particularly good at asking us to put seemingly irrelevant limitations on our performance (Draw only one card, Roll only two dice to move, Wait for your turn before going again, etc.) and yet they are so fun that we gladly give up control to live within the 'rules' of this new group experience."

I think that is a great statement about one of the main powers of gamification. It isn't just about adding points, levels, or badges to your product.  Gamification provides an operating context that makes your participants open to experiencing a product in a very different manner than they otherwise might. It makes them open to direction, to ritual, to limitations. And not only are they open to it, they generally accept it at face value, and rarely even question it.

"Why should I do this? Because the game says so. That is how you play. That is the rule."

Very powerful stuff.

Building a social product vs a social network

As many of you (friends and family) know, at MeYou Health we are working on a social health product called Daily Challenge. We are taking some of the latest thinking in game design, social network science, and behavior change and blending it all together in pursuit of measurable improvements in people's well-being.

What is well-being? It is all the aspects that make up who we are. It is a mix of our choices in the past, the choices we can make now, and how both of these affect the choices we could make or might have to make in the future. I have come to learn that improving well-being is a partnership between what we can design in the product and what the human being who uses Daily Challenge brings to the table. Our mission at Daily Challenge is to engage. The mission of our participants is to improve. From these two things together, product and person, emerges an individual outcome for each unique individual.

Designing for this to happen turns out to be incredibly hard. But that is why I love my job.

The biggest challenge recently has been balancing the use of social features in the product that allow people to create support networks and the temptation to expand these into features that comprise an entire social network product.

The goal of Daily Challenge has always been to build a network that can support you in the improvement of your well-being. From the research that we did which informs the product, this circle of influence is rather small. Anywhere from 3-12 people. Daily Challenge was never conceived nor optimized to connect you to hundreds of people like Facebook does. It has always been about taking these larger networks like Facebook, and using that as a starting point, asking you to identify the true influencers and supporters in your life. 

But, the moment you put friending in your product. The moment you put messaging, and commenting and interacting, some amount of "social networking" is assumed. The participants of your product are going to do what they do. They are going to take your expectations in directions outside your control. And that is ok. The problem is, if the actions they do, like friending hundreds of people, is not going to move the needle on the health outcomes you are looking for, it becomes impossible to justify supporting that, no matter how vocal they become. To pivot the product to a true social network to satisfy the needs of a few who arrived for that reason would mean abandoning those that are actually using it to find a framework for support and encouragement at a more intimate scale. 

So I find myself wondering, if you add social features to your product, will you always end up building a social network? When I started Daily Challenge, it was never the plan to build a separate social network from Facebook. But it seems that you are naturally pulled in that direction the moment you start asking people to connect.

We use Get Satisfaction for our support, and that product has social features. Do some hard core users of that product consider it their social network? 

If you put friending in your product, is the creation of a social network inevitable? Is this some law of the universe? 

How you can find out about things too!

I tend to be known as one of those people who uncovers all the cool new articles and internet tools. Even if the tool or service is not related to my specific job, I still might see it and think of you!

How do I find out about all of these things? Simple... I spend a great deal of time consuming the web. I am a huge user of Google Reader... and unlike many people, I practice an "Inbox Zero" approach on my RSS feeds as well. I view every single one... every single day... If I am on my mobile device (which syncs with Google Reader), I star anything that is interesting, and then read it later (typically on Monday nights or Friday afternoons).

My Starred list (feed favorites) is just like my email inbox. I try and practice Google Star Zero on that as well. :)

Now, I know there are a lot of RSS Ninjas out there... who probably read way more than I do, but I like to think that I have a pretty good system. I don't keep a lot of junk in my feeds. If I don't get value or it is too noisy, I trim it out. 

Here are some of my stats:

And a pretty chart of the last 30 days of activity.

You can see on 7/16 that I had gone on vacation for two days, so I had some serious catching up to do! And here is the top 10 most consumed feeds:

Being that I am in the web product space, it isn't surprising that something like TechCrunch is up there... they also tend to publish on average 30 stories a day, so those build up fast. 

So if you too want to know about all the latest cool stuff having across every industry on the web, you now know the secret. Google Reader action.

I was thinking the other day about the things I am good at (career wise) and staying on top of the latest trends, products, and ideas definitely ranks up there. It is definitely not work. I enjoy sitting in front of the information firehose. 

Character and Motivation of an Entrepreneur

I was reading through the Kindle sample for Don't Count on It!: Reflections on Investment Illusions, Capitalism, "Mutual" Funds, Indexing, Entrepreneurship, Idealism, and Heroes and came across a nice quote that John C. Bogle dropped from economist Joseph Schumpeter about the character and motivation of an entrepreneur:

"First, the dream and the will to found a kingdom. Second, the will to conquer, the impulse to fight, to succeed for the sake of success; not of the fruits of success, but of success itself. Third, the joy of creating, getting things done, of simply exercising one's energy and ingenuity."

Sounds like fun to me!

I haven't dug into Derek Sivers new book Anything You Want yet... but a few of his principals align with this:

1. Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.
2. When you make a company, you make a utopia. It’s where you design your perfect world.

...etc.

In short, do things that you think are awesome because you want to.

TEDxBoston 2011 Recap

I had the honor of attending TEDxBoston 2011. While I was lucky enough to speak at TEDxChange Nashville, and I watch many TED Talks on-line, this is the first time I was able to settle in for an entire TED program and devote my full attention to all of the talks. 

As you would expect, the ideas are big, and the solutions inspiring. My favorite talks were:

Joe Coughlin - Aging as an Extreme Sport
As the number of seniors continues to grow, a new understanding is needed about how environments will need to be reconfigured for their needs. He demoed a suit that a person can wear that makes it feel like you are 80 years old. It turns everyday movements like walking stairs, bending down, picking up objects into a struggle and brings perspective. The take away is that unless you manufacture empathy, it can be hard to design real solutions.

Lisa Gross - Civic Fruit
Lisa gave a very articulate and fun talk about a movement in Boston around planting pairs of apple trees throughout public spaces. It is part public art project, part green movement, part political expression, part food bank. You have to struggle to find reasons why planting fruit trees throughout the city is a bad idea. What I like about this idea is that it starts small, but it scales by inspiring local communities to take up the cause. You no longer just need Lisa going around planting, but you have schools, and churches, and towns all over the region doing their own planting. 

Erez Lieberman AIden & Jean-Baptiste Michel - A Picture is Worth 500 Billion Words
Google has digitized 15 million books. By analyzing the usage of text throughout the ages, it provides an interesting and humorous look at the evolution of our culture. It is amazing the types of patterns you can detect through this type of big-data analysis. You can see things like censorship, proliferation of diseases, and the adoption rate of technology... and that is just text. Imagine when everything is digitized? What patterns will we see then?

Dr. Bo Pomahac - Face the Future
This was the first talk of the day, and it was a crazy one about actual facial transplants. When significantly destroyed, the face is far to complex to reconstruct through plastic surgery. The new alternative is a complete facial transplant. The fact that this is even possible is a scientific wonder. I really like the statement that, while this procedure is risky and it isn't life saving, it is life giving. 

Richard Resnick - The Next Hot Commoditiy of Genone Sequences
This was my favorite talk of the day because it was so mind blowing. The cost of sequencing someones entire genome is falling dramatically. This allows for unprecedented clarity assessing mutations that cause disease and building custom medicine to repair it in our individual bodies. It was a big deal when the human genome project was complete, but now that amount of work can be done in less than a week, and soon it will happen in less than a day. Get ready for a revolution in bio-tech that very few people see coming. 

My main take away was this: You just have to start doing something. Most of the TED Talks were about people who just started doing something small... and that small thing served as inspiration to the larger thing... or served as inspiration to a larger number of people. Given my work in on-line software, I spend a lot of time thinking about how you get systems to scale... but the beauty of many of the ideas and solutions presented at TED is that no one ever cared about scale when they started... they just started doing it... and it grew from there. 

I guess what I am saying is that you could start two types of business. The first type is a consulting business where you build websites for others. This does not scale... because there is only one you... so you can only build as many sites as you have hours in the day. No more no less unless you hire more people... but then you can only keep them assuming you continue to get business at the same pace. The business does not auto-scale up and down.

The second type of business would be an on-line service. You spend the time upfront building the service, then people pay $20 a month to use it. Sure if you get a million people suddenly, you would need to scale that, but then you would have 20 million dollars to do it. The business would auto scale and you just have to provide operational support.

So given those two examples, most TED ideas seem to be the former... a single person just out there doing something. They rarely seem to get to the scale level... but does that matter? Probably not if inspiration is your goal. Can we go beyond inspiration? How many scalable ways are there to save the world?

Games for Health 2011 Recap

Bill Sabram's Prezi about Monumental

MeYou Health had a good presence at Games For Health this year. Our game designer Bill Sabram presented the effort and process designing our iPhone game Monumental. We also had posters of the application hanging in the expo space. And I participated on a panel about what we can learn from MMOs about using big data to solve big problems.

All in all, it was a fun and educational few days. My two big takeaways are:

The sensor wave is coming!
I was in the building for maybe 30 minutes and I had already heard the word "sensor" referenced a few dozen times. Everyone was talking about sensors and the solutions and experiences that they would eventually enable. It wasn't just accelerometers, but gyroscopes, gps, camera/light, temperature, NFC, cadence, galvanic skin response, blood pressure, pulse oximeter, compasses, etc. If you can think of it, someone is building a sensor to measure it. 

At the middle tier level I talked to two people during the day who were working only on the middle tier that pipes data from devices wirelessly using standards and links them up with HIPAA storage and medical records, or exposes them in a usable API. So even the middle teir (called aggregation management) is evolving.

A conversation about Simulations vs Games
This was the best session of the conference for me because it made me think the most about different types of product philosophies and how that impacts engagement. The topic of the panel was a discussion about the interchangeable nature of building games or simulations.

More profound was this single idea:

Once you know the learning objective, the game is no longer fun.

In my mind, that could be a huge reason why health games fail. The objective is far too known too early to be interesting. A big piece of this is that games are optimized to create emergent experiences, not outcomes. The best games do not dictate the goal. The goal is "fuzzy" and the purpose is to play the game to discover the goal yourself. When I look at what we are doing with Daily Challenge, that is the best part. We do not dictate an outcome, but we do convince you to play... and in participating, you have your own emergent experiences that are social and rewarding.

In games one can rarely point to the moment when a really good game became such. The entire experience has to be judged as a whole. The danger is over-engineering this. The moment we say "the goal of this product/game is to do <this>" it takes the fun out of it because the objective is known. So how do we design products that are required to have outcomes, but we don't lead with them?

Conclusion
The Games for Health conference gets bigger and better every year. I still feel like they offer a few too many tracks which leaves some presentations full while others barely have any people in them. Less choice and more guidance would be welcome, but I appreciate the diversity of the concepts and speakers, and I look forward to seeing how far sensors and design comes in the next 12 months. If the G4H conference points to anything, it is that this is a really vibrant and exciting time in the industry.  

Success at the Healthways Well-Being Summit

Racing armadillos with Dan Buettner (Blue Zones) and Ross Scott (Healthways)

Last week I was honored to be asked to speak at the Healthways Well-Being Summit. It was an amazing few days of talks about many different angles on well-being.

Some of my favorites included Deepok Chopra's talk about well-being at the cellular level, and his exploration around how language is capable of causing physiological responses. Then there was Daniel Pink telling it like it is on how to build high performance, motivated teams so we can all tackle these challenging health issues. There was of course Dan Buettner talking about his work finding Blue Zones around the world where people live longer than the average and unlocking the secrets. I had never seen him talk before which was fun.

My talk was on the last day of the conference, following a host of smart people from Gallup and Healthways who are working on the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index and what it can teach us about Well-Being. Right after me was Nicholas Cristakis on who's work many of our ideas at MeYou Health are based. So I have to say that I found myself quite star struck most of the time. 

Here is my talk if you want to give it a view. The title is "Designing for the first step". It is similar to the talk I gave at the Healthcare Experience Design conference recently with a new twist around intelligent inviting which we have rolled out recently. The talk is about 30 minutes long.

Watch live streaming video from healthways at livestream.com

Oh and funny enough, they had an artist make caricatures of all the speakers. Here is mine!

For the record, the power glove idea I think came from my TEDxNashville talk I did last year where I showed a picture of me wearing the glove. Who knows where the carrot came from. I guess I have to embrace the idea that, for Healthways, I am the token gamer!

Designing for the first step, my talk at the Healthcare Experience Design Conference

Last week was the Healthcare Experience Design Conference. I was invited to give a talk about Facilitating Engagement: Convenience, Sociality, & Fun. I chose to discuss how we at MeYou Health are designing an online health product (Daily Challenge) that can achieve reach by being realistic, immediate, convenient, and genuine, and how it can be effective by leveraging the latest in game design theory, behavior science, and social network science. 

You can flip through my presentation (created in PREZI) here:

Designing for the first step on Prezi

You can also check out my quick recap over at the meyouhealth.com blog:

My presentation was in the afternoon session, titled “Designing for the First Step.” My goal was to lay out the set of principals that MeYou Health follows in building our mass-market online health solution called Daily Challenge. I then spent the second half of my 20 minutes diving into some of the science-based approaches we are following to make sure that solution is effective. 

Read more

A special thanks to Claricode and POD Design for the invite and for hosting a great event. 

Four design principals of a mass market health product

Photo by by swgn

At MeYou Health we are trying to design products for people who need to take the first step. This means resisting the urge to design for people who are already aware and achieving in health, and instead trying to think up how we can build something for people who find today's widely available products unrealistic, inconvenient, misaligned with their personal goals, and assume, since they are prescribed by their health plan or employer, disingenuous by nature.

We are on a path to do this using the Daily Challenge. We send you a quick email once a day (7am) with some small "challenge" for you to do some time during the day. If you do it, click DONE in the email. If you don't do it, you will get a reminder (4pm). Rolled up in that are opportunities in a social layer (for support and motivation), and a game layer (for progress). Eventually there will be a few more layers to deepen the experience once you are ready.

Most of the time, people say "that's it? You send me an email?" Yep. That is it. Although lots of different types of people can take advantage of such a light weight intervention, the simplicity is actually part of adhering to four design principals that I have come to believe not enough health products respect.

1. Be Realistic
2. Be Convenient
3. Be Immediate
4. Be Genuine

Realistic

For everything we build, we must recognize and respect the challenges and capabilities of unwell people and give them achievable tasks.

I really like this because it is something that gaming does very well. Through the use of progressive difficulty, you are never asked to do something that feels like too much of a stretch. The difficulty and complexity of a game increases overtime, moving from novice to expert to master, so that everything seems achievable.

Our idea of small actions goes right at this concept. Small actions build momentum and cut through the lack of confidence that most people face. If you can do a small thing, maybe you can do the next small thing. 

The science behind the population affects of small actions is also well documented, so there is a bit of validity around just getting large numbers of people to do small things:

• Stroebele N, de Castro JM, Stuht J, Catenacci V, Wyatt HR, and Hill JO. A small-changes approach reduces energy intake in free-living humans. J Am Coll Nutr. 2009, Feb;28(1):63-8.
• Lutes LD, Winett RA, Barger SD, Wojcik JR, Herbert WG, Nickols-Richardson SM, and Anderson ES. Small changes in nutrition and physical activity promote weight loss and maintenance: 3-month evidence from the ASPIRE randomized trial. Ann Behav Med. 2008, Jun;35(3):351-7.
• Rodearmel SJ, Wyatt HR, Stroebele N, Smith SM, Ogden LG, and Hill JO. Small changes in dietary sugar and physical activity as an approach to preventing excessive weight gain: the America on the Move family study. Pediatrics. 2007, Oct;120(4):e869-79.
• Hill JO, Wyatt HR, Reed GW, and Peters JC. Obesity and the environment: where do we go from here? Science. 2003, Feb 7;299(5608):853-5.

As we build a system at scale that helps people complete small actions, we hope that MeYou Health can ultimately contribute to this ongoing research.

Convenient

For everything we build, we must be aware of the time constraints that everyone is under and provide solutions that easily fit into those constraints.

This is one that I think us product developers overlook the most. We assume that because our intervention is so effective that people will naturally do it! Or we assume that because it is in someone’s best interest to be healthy, they will realize that and will put in the effort needed if we can only convey it with enough urgency!

A classic on-boarding experience of many health products is something like this:

1. Hi! Welcome to our health product! By signing up, you have put yourself on a path to a new you! 
2. Here please take this HRA... er... I mean quiz that will customize your experience.
3. Please enter your blood glucous level... my what?!
4. (Somewhere in there you enter your height and weight)
5. Oh sorry, looks like your BMI calculation means you are overweight.
6. You better start working out, here is your list of at-home exercises.
7. ...and we have this discounted gym membership for you!
8. ...and here is a weekly nutrition plan, print this out. It has food on it that you never eat and barely tells you how to prepare it.
9. ...and here is a great mobile app for your iPhone to log calories of everything you eat!
10. ...and if you don’t have an iPhone you can always log back into this site which is really not convenient for you at all to update all your calories at the end of the day when you are the most tired from work.
11. ...and if none of this seems interesting, or you choose not to participate at this time, what if we give you 5 bucks? Would 5 bucks convince you? How about $10?
12. etc...

To be convenient, we have to keep in mind the attention economy. All that means is you acknowledge that the attention of a human being is a scarce commodity. You have to assume at all times you are going to get nothing from people. Almost everyone we talked to in our market research was severely time-impoverished. Whether they actually are or just think they are doesn't matter.

As a health application designer, you are playing a zero-sum game. To get 10 minutes of their time, you are probably pulling it from 10 minutes somewhere else in their life where they really enjoy spending it. One women we talked to in our interviews told us that in order to spend 90 minutes with us that morning, she was giving up 90 minutes of her six hours per night sleep. (she worked the night shift and slept in the mornings).

If we are going to ask anyone to do anything, we have to treat the time they give us with the utmost respect, almost to a completely radical degree if we expect them to keep giving it to us. 

Immediate

For everything we build, we must provide value from the very first interaction, and create a sense of tangible progress.

I think the real power of gaming comes from the creation of immediate feedback. It could be points, it could be levels, but whatever it is, it makes progress out of essentially nothing but the smallest of incremental actions. 

The new neologism for this is "gamification". I personally belive that using that term presumes that you carry forward some of the other aspects of games, like fun, narrative, characters, etc.. I think of points and levels as a way to create a tangible sense of progress. Putting a progress bar to fill out your profile on LinkedIN, doesn't make it a "game" in a strict sense. So I argue that adding points to an app that a user accurues for engagement doesn't make it a game either. Points are just another type of progress bar. If I do something, and then come back and do something else, and then come back a third time and do something else, how do I know on the third time that I have made any progress? If I get 100 points each time and at the end I have 300 points it is pretty clear to me (and others in a social context) where I am at.

Progress is really important to create immediate feedback. We are committing to real well-being products that create behaviors and perspective that last a life time. You can’t really lead with that (see principal #1)!

If we can give people something to do today. And they can do it today. And they can get that quick win today. And it can make them more mindful today. And they can maybe have a fulfilling discussion with someone today. They will be much more likely to come back tomorrow.

Genuine

We must never, ever trivialize the challenges that others face pursuing well-being.

Making things “fun” has to be the hottest catch phrase in health these days. I am a gamer. I know what fun games are to me... But fun is a really overloaded word. If we overly focus on fun experiences we potentially miss the decidedly non-fun experiences that can be equally rewarding and engaging.

Keely Rued said it best in some commentary about the topic in an article called “Having Fun Isn’t always the point”:

People can be deeply engaged, motivated and, ultimately, entertained by experiences and media that are downright disturbing, sad, and leave us with more questions than answers, more tension than resolution. Moreover, people can be entertained by games, media, and experiences that are patently dull, repetitive, and frustrating as hell (for example, the grind to get experience points (XP) in your favorite massively multiplayer online (MMO) title – sure, it has a payoff at the end, but it isn’t always fun while you’re doing it).

If you are someone with low well-being, you are facing some pretty serious challenges. Many of the things you will be asked to do will be dull and repetitive... and frustrating... and maybe sad... and that is ok. It isn’t always going to be fun.

If the products we build trivialize your challenges. We’ve lost you. More importantly, we’ve failed you. After all, that is why we all got into this industry right? To genuinely help people improve their lives?

That said, I am the first to admit that building something genuine is really, really hard. It is surprisingly easy to fall off the wagon and just do something fun and light-hearted, and in the process alienate the audience we need to help the most.

Conclusion

So in the coming years as we unleash an entirely new generation of well-being products on the millions of people that can really benefit from them I am promising myself that I will always push my solutions to be realistic, convenient, immediate, and genuine.

That is how I plan to change the world. Shhhh don't tell.