Cindy Alvarez on customer research and iterative development

Cindy Alvarez is an expert in customer research and iterative development. She’s the author of Lean Customer Development, a hands-on guide for validating product and feature ideas. She's worked for small and medium-sized startups - and now runs user experience for Yammer (a Microsoft company).Cindy’s got a flair for explaining user-centered design in a compelling and understandable way. From her early days doing tech support for her professors at Harvard — to her current leadership role evangelizing lean tactics at Microsoft — Cindy thrives on new challenges. Listen in and learn how a seasoned UX expert blends customer development with product leadership.

Transcript

Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim. 

Amy: Cindy Alvarez is an expert in customer research and iterative development.

She's the author of lean customer development, a hands on guide for validating product and feature ideas. Cindy has worked for small and medium sized startups, and she now runs user experience for Yammer at Microsoft. Cindy's got a pragmatic approach to product development and a flair for explaining user centered design in a compelling and understandable way.

Cindy: You know, unfortunately, historically research has been sort of siloed off in a lot of organizations. It's, you know, it's an R&D org. It's someone who does usability testing. It's someone who, you know, may be a [00:01:00] contractor because a company doesn't think, see the worth in hiring a full time researcher. And often, you know, comes from a sort of more academic tradition, which is less compatible with the sort of startup lean mean experimental.

And so what you've seen is a lot of companies where research is kind of viewed as a nice to have. And so you know, when I talk about customer development, the reason that I really liked that as a phrase is because it ties it back to being part of the decision making process and I think that's one of the things that I brought into Yammer and I've been trying to evangelize to other parts of Microsoft is that this you have these people who know how to do this.

The problem is that they're not sitting elbow to elbow with the decision makers and so the really awesome insights that they're coming up with are not necessarily making it into the product and better yet, they're not necessarily. allowing someone to say, Hey, this thing on the roadmap, I don't think we should build this.

I think this is a waste of our time. And now we should be [00:02:00] focusing attention and that lack is what really sees companies advantage being dulled. And so if there's anything that I hope has happened through lean customer development, it's making more people, the people in the seat of decision making power realize that, Hey, this is really important.

I need to do this and also if I have people who do this better than me, I need to listen to them. 

Amy: From her early days doing tech support for her Harvard professors to her current role, evangelizing lean tactics at Microsoft Cindy thrives on taking on new challenges, listening and learn how a world class UX expert blends customer development with product leadership.

Welcome Cindy to the Getting2Alpha podcast. Thanks. It's great to be here. I'm really excited to dig in and learn more about your background and how you see the world. For those who aren't familiar with you, give us a whirlwind [00:03:00] tour of your background. How did you first get started in design and tech?

And what were the key pivot points for you along the way that led you to where you are now? 

Cindy: Sure, I think I started out as, as someone who might be one of the least likely to be in tech. In fact, I joke that in high school, I remember looking through those college books, you know, dating me perhaps that, that we had the physical books that you could check out from the library with the hundred best colleges.

And I remember looking and, and, and thinking I didn't want to apply anywhere that had a computer science requirement because I just really hated computers. Um, so, uh, so that was an inauspicious start. And what happened is I went to college, I went to Harvard, I wanted to study psychology. I've always been really interested in people and how they behave.

And I had every intention of being a professor. And as it turns out, I think no one is more glad than me that I ended up taking some [00:04:00] experimental classes and getting some bad grades that knocked me out of grad school consideration. Because I think I would have been a miserable academic. 

Anyways, in college, I quickly realized that I was going to need a computer to write papers, and I got it, and it was the most expensive thing I'd ever bought. And I realized that it would just be idiocy to own this incredibly expensive thing and not know anything about it. And so I started playing with it, and it was fascinating. And I just became incredibly fascinated with it.

The computer and how it worked and taking it apart and, and messing with programs. And, you know, those people who are, you know, old school Mac geeks will, will recognize that, you know, I discovered res edit and it was the most fascinating thing ever. And, uh, then with my newfound knowledge, I got an on campus job in tech support.

And I think that was the moment when I realized I was working in tech support in the psychology department. And I was working with These Nobel prize [00:05:00] winning professors, these incredibly brilliant people who could not figure out. where their document went or how to get it to print. Oh my God. It wasn't their fault.

It was, it was, it was inexplicable. You know, you'd get these error messages that were meaningless or, you know, they would save somewhere and then they had no search capability. There was no visualization. It was this realization that people's behaviors are very situational and technology was this incredible thing with all this potential, but it was really cutting off access to a lot of people because it was so inhuman.

And so I wanted to make it more human. 

Amy: Wow. That's your awakening. Yeah. So then what happened? 

Cindy: I worked tech support. I started making web pages for people. Uh, the, uh, again, dating me the graphical browser. I was using a pre 1.0 version of mosaic and then Netscape came out. And people started making websites and I was one of them.

And so that was another thing [00:06:00] of, of interacting with first student groups and then small businesses who liked the idea of a website, but it was this intensely difficult process with lots of steps and you needed lots of arcane knowledge to actually create them. From, you know, from there I was kind of hooked after college.

I worked as a network admin for a year, uh, but I'd always really liked design. So I started doing design for startups. And I started doing visual design and then interaction design because I really wanted to get more into the story. And then even with interaction design, I found myself sometimes designing stories that I didn't really think ought to be written.

And so I started doing more product management. And somewhere along the way, I stumbled into this opportunity to, instead of running product for a startup, to build a research culture at this rapidly growing startup, Yammer. And so I joined there, and then about a year later, we got acquired by Microsoft.

And since then I have been working at Microsoft, which is something that I also would never [00:07:00] have predicted for myself. 

Amy: Wow. That's amazing. So along the way, you wrote a book called Lean Customer Development that is very well known and is teaching a lot of people really valuable skills. What prompted you to write that book and share your knowledge in that form?

Cindy: I've been in startups my entire career until Microsoft, and I think even before there was really a defined role for it, I saw the need to talk to customers, find out what their problems were, find out what we could sell them, basically. One of those early startups was a company called Yodlee, which made financial applications.

When you're selling to banks and credit card companies, their sales cycle is incredibly slow, and so you might get a meeting with someone every 12 to 18 months. And if you don't have something they want to buy You don't get to talk to them again for 12 to 18 months, which is a long time in the life of a startup.

And [00:08:00] so I started figuring out how could we make sure that we were presenting something compelling to, you know, the bank of America's in the city banks of the world, all of whom, you know, felt rightfully that, you know, they knew their stuff and they didn't necessarily want to hear from, you know, this piddly startup.

And so one of the things that I did was. To go out and find customers of our customers and talk to them directly, which, you know, it's not that hard to find a bunch of bank of America customers. And so we could walk into a sales meeting and pitch a product. And when they kind of said, well, we don't really know if our customers want this.

I can say, well, actually they do because I talked to them and here's everything that they said about it. And here are the pain points they have currently and how we can address it with this product. And it really changed the tenor of sales calls. And I realized the power in that. And so that's something that I brought with me, you know, to other startups.

And then it happened that, you know, one of the next ones was Kissmetrics. And one of our [00:09:00] advisors was this guy named Eric Ries. Who is writing a blog post about this thing that he called the lean startup. And you know, he wrote a book, he started a movement that's gotten kind of crazy from there. And one of the things that, you know, one of the tenants of that is this promise of customer development.

So basically the notion that you should build your customer base before or along with your product. Which is really entirely backwards from the way most people have been doing it. And then what happened? So I, I talked about this a lot. I found myself talking to startups a lot, repeating this a lot and realizing that this was stuff that people didn't know.

And that of all of the lean startup tenants, customer development was the one that was hardest for people to adopt because it goes most. at odds with what startup founders are good at, which is building and selling and, you know, creating their reality distortion field. And, you know, I realized, hey, this is, this is a really important thing [00:10:00] that people need to learn.

How do I do a neutral interview? How do I find out what people's problems are? How do I direct someone away from the person who says that they want the faster horse and, and get them to realize that maybe they could try out a car. Incidentally, and there's no evidence that Henry Ford actually said that, but It's been cited a lot.

And it's inspiring. So. Exactly. And so I wrote a book. Yeah, which, which was fun, but incredibly long and time consuming. 

Amy: So is that something you're planning to do again in the near future or not so much? 

Cindy: You know, I think writing a book is kind of like having a baby. You need a few years of amnesia to kick in.

So you forget how bad it was and then maybe you'll do it again. So maybe. 

Amy: So when you were writing your book on lean customer development, how did you. Decide what to focus on, what to include and what to leave out. 

Cindy: So I did what anyone should do in customer development. I talked to my potential customers.

Uh, I wrote an interview, I wrote [00:11:00] an outline and I brought it to people and said, is this what you want to know? What else do you want to know? What are the problems you're having when you're trying to figure out what to build? And of course, you know, along the way I've been mentoring startups, I'm still a mentor to startups.

I'm an advisor for the Alchemist Accelerator. And so I had this kind of constant influx of people saying. Well, what do I do here? Well, what do I do when this customer says this? And so it really, you know, it's sort of, you know, the outline wrote itself, the book, the book I wrote, uh, that was hard, but the questions that people had were the questions that actual future customers of the book were asking me.

And so every time someone would ask something, I think, Oh, I need to cover that. And, you know, as I went, I started sending out chapters to people and saying, You know, read this. Do you believe this? What else do you want to know? What am I missing? And I got really valuable feedback from a lot of startup founders who would read something and say, Okay, I buy this part, but I don't know how to do it.

Or I [00:12:00] don't understand how you went from this part of the beginning of the chapter to this part at the end. And so I really did a lot of work with my future customers. 

Amy: That's awesome. I love that. So you've had a lot of exposure to lots of startups, lots of entrepreneurs, and you're in a interesting vantage point to see patterns.

Cindy: Yeah. 

Amy: What are some of the most common mistakes you see first time entrepreneurs making when they're in the early stages of designing and testing their ideas? 

Cindy: Sure. So one of the most common mistakes is not getting alignment in the room that you're in. And startup founders always kind of laugh. They're like, Oh, it's just me and my co founder.

We were a five person team. Like we're all aligned. You're not. I have never seen a team who could do, you know, kind of a sticky note exercise and all write down the same things. So one of the things I say is, What is your hypothesis? What is the problem that you believe you're solving for customers [00:13:00] and what value are they going to get by using your product and all of you write it down on a piece of paper.

Don't look at each other's and then go around and read them. And I have always seen co founders who sit across the table from each other, you know, 14 hours a day. Oh, that's not what I thought. So that's, that's by far the most common mistake. And when you're not all pointing in the same direction, you know, you're not necessarily going to get to a finish line or, you know, you're going to get to one finish line that no one else agrees.

So that's one of them. And the other one is just, you know, the simplest falling in love with your own creation. So we want to build. I mean, I, I'm a creative person. I like to design things. I like to cook. I like to write. I like to just jump in. And when you do that, once you have done something, you feel attached to it.

And so you're really defensive of any evidence that it might not be the right solution. And so I really push people not to think about solutions first, to force themselves [00:14:00] to ask questions and to really identify the assumptions that they have and, and say, we know this is an assumption and try and actively go out and disprove it.

Amy: Think like a scientist. Exactly. That's my catchphrase. And I think what's been awesome about. Seeing the ripples of the pebble in the pond that the lean startup did is so many people understanding this fundamental experimental approach, which has customer discovery in it. So it's actually learn, measure, build, not so much build, measure, learn.

I completely subscribe to that. I have my own way of teaching it based on long term engagement, but it's so interesting because You know, as a scientist by background, it's the experimental process applied to product, and you can't be all like, I'm going to publish this in science about it, you have to be really lean and mean about it, right?

But it's also what [00:15:00] people actually learn in design school, because I think that what Eric Ries discovered was not something that everybody didn't know. It's something that. Tech centric founders often don't know, but like I learned how to do this by working with a RISD trained designer on a number of projects.

And he always started with exactly what you and I do in customer discovery with me and with what we were doing. Cause that's how they were taught. So it's, in a sense, it's bringing design thinking, not the rigid, like, here's the way you run a design sprint, here's exactly what you do design thinking, but like designer training type of thinking to startup idea development.

Cindy: Absolutely. And you know, I joke that, you know, my book is, my book is a book about user research. I mean, that's, that's essentially what it is. There's very little in it that any trained user research professional wouldn't know. I think the difference is that, you know, unfortunately, [00:16:00] historically, research has been sort of siloed off in a lot of organizations.

It's you know, it's an R and D org. It's someone who does usability testing. It's someone who, you know, may be a contractor because a company doesn't think, see the worth in hiring a full time researcher. And often, you know, comes from a sort of more academic tradition, which is less compatible with the sort of startup lean, mean experimental.

And so what you've seen is a lot of companies where research is kind of viewed as a nice to have. And so, you know, when I talk about customer development, the reason that I really liked that as a phrase is because it ties it back to being part of the decision making process. And I think that's one of the things that, I brought into Yammer and I've been trying to evangelize to other parts of Microsoft is that this, you have these people who know how to do this.

The problem is that they're not sitting elbow to elbow with the decision makers. And so the really awesome insights that they're coming up with are not necessarily [00:17:00] making it into the product. And better yet, they're not necessarily allowing someone to say, Hey, this thing on the roadmap, I don't think we should build this.

I think this is a waste of our time. And now we should be focusing attention and that lack is what really sees companies advantage being dulled. And so if there's anything that I hope has happened through lean customer development, it's making more people, the people in the seat of decision making power realize that, Hey, this is really important.

I need to do this. And also if I have people who do this better than me, I need to listen to them. 

Amy: That is such an excellent and articulate statement of what needs to happen. And then there's all these little roadblocks and frictions in reality, right? So one of the things that a lot of my clients struggle with, and I know I've struggled with is translating.

The results of research, the results of customer development, the results of interviews, the results [00:18:00] of all of that stuff into design ready form, into a form that the product team can digest and take quick action on. What are some of the methods that you've tried that work really well? Or maybe that you've tried that didn't work or maybe that worked in one situation and not another for making that bridge because that's one of the things that I've developed a lot of tools for and I bet you have too.

Cindy: Sure, so I'll start with a failure because people always like to hear those. Earlier on in my time at Yammer, As doing research for other projects, mostly projects that were kind of immediate, we're doing short term research, usability testing, etc., and in talking to people, something kept coming up, which is people would say, and we were talking to people who used Yammer, who liked it, and people would say, well, I don't post, oh, I don't feel comfortable with that, I'm afraid to post.

And that, to be honest, was kind of the classic feedback that no one wanted to hear. [00:19:00] And so when I started reporting that back, I got a ton of pushback. I got, I got flack for being negative. I got a lot of, well, that's not even a solvable problem. So let's kind of ignore it and maybe talk to the wrong people and all the classic things that you hear when you have research feedback that no one wants to hear.

And, uh, just bringing that to the forefront. Was not helpful at all. So what I actually needed to do was couch it in terms that people were more comfortable with, which, you know, in our case was quantitative data. And so one of the researchers on my team worked with one of our data analysts, and we started saying, well, what do we have numerically?

that proves that we have a bunch of people who, who are afraid to post and better yet, that there might be some way that we could change their environment to change that. And literally just started kind of hunting through the data. And this is where researchers who ask good questions are the best thing because, you know, this woman [00:20:00] just kept asking questions.

Well, when do people behave differently? Like, where are they? Where are they posting? Where are people changing their behaviors? And we found, you know, some things that really should be common sense, but, you know, so little actually is, that people posted much more in private groups. That the smaller the group was, the higher the percentage of people who posted.

And so now we started seeing some patterns. It's not that people aren't going to use this, it's that we're asking them to do the equivalent of get up on stage and do a dance, and most people don't want to do that. And if we give them, you know, the more the equivalent of the closed karaoke room with just five of your friends, then people are going to get up and sing.

And so it really had to be find the pattern, prove it in a way that people will feel comfortable accepting that, and then start looking for solutions. And I think that's really been the biggest thing when I talk to other research teams at Microsoft is you might not be a product manager, but you need to think [00:21:00] enough like a product manager that you can come up with plausible solutions.

And they don't necessarily need to be the solutions we will adopt. But people need something to react to. And so you might be completely wrong, but if you give someone a wrong solution, they're better able to say, no, no, no, we, we'd never do that. We'd do this instead. But otherwise you'd never get that we'd do this instead. 

Amy: Got it. So when you find patterns in the data, whether the data is coming from interviews or the data is coming from usage, are there ways you've learned to present it to the team and to stakeholders that are particularly effective? 

Cindy: Yeah, for one, qualitative information will never be quantitative and you don't do any good by dressing it up in those clothes because people will pick holes in it.

So, you know, I never say everyone says this. We don't say, you know, 87 percent of people that's, that's putting math clothes on qualitative research and it doesn't hold up. [00:22:00] But storytelling, here's a pattern we've been seeing. We've talked to a variety of people in a variety of industries, and they all had this problem, and here's how we know they had this problem.

Here's what we observed. Here's how we tried to disprove that maybe they actually have a different problem and the fundamental issue is they have this problem, And we thought about what solutions could we possibly do. And here are a couple of solutions that might address that problem. So it's a story, it's open ended, it's suggesting something actionable, but it's also not dictating because no one likes that either.

Amy: Have you ever tried using a job story format to express that exact thing succinctly? I 

Cindy: feel like we do a lot of, uh, oral storytelling here. So I love the jobs to be done framework. The, just the nature of Yammer's culture is such that. What has worked for us has been a lot of, of a lot of storytelling. We used to believe this, then we talked to people.

Now we know this, here's what we should do next. [00:23:00] 

Amy: How do you integrate playtesting and prototyping into your development process? 

Cindy: So that's a really interesting thing because I love the notion of prototypes. And I find that Yammer, and actually any really personal data rich product, there's a very limited amount of information you can get out of prototype testing.

Uh, so Yammer is one of the things, a Yammer network, The entire value of it is what's in it. It's the content that's put in by your network, by your company's employees, by the people you work with and the projects you work on. And so you can show someone a prototype with dummy data and it will be meaningless to them.

You cannot draw any conclusions about will they use this thing or not. You can pick up on things like Is this copy choice terrible? Is it confusing? You can pick up on like blanket usability errors, like there's 20 places to click and I don't know where, but you won't actually capture that value. And I [00:24:00] found similar things at Kissmetrics.

We did web analytics. And again, you can show people a funnel, but when it's not their data, you don't really know what they feel about it. When I worked at Yodlee, it was financial data. You could show someone, you could walk someone through a prototype of a funds transfer application and they'd say it was great.

And then you'd build the thing and once they were actually trying to transfer their own money, then you discovered all the problems with it. Because the level of attention that people pay is just different when it's their own thing. So we do prototypes to explore ideas, to uncover low level usability issues, and to suss out copy, and to really like test our own notion of storyboarding.

But for usage, the only thing we found that works is actually, you know, building an MVP and putting it in front of people. 

Amy: And that's where companies who have a nice clean API so you can build a quick prototype against that data really win. Yeah. That's an issue that I've definitely run into quite a bit in my [00:25:00] work with startups.

It's not something that everybody wants to build early on, but a lot of people forget to build their API. Yes. So, You've had this fascinating range of experiences that go through, you know, tech support and UX design and product management and deep usability and customer development knowledge and hands on expertise.

What do you see in your future? Where are you headed here? Sure. Uh, so 

Cindy: I think the most interesting thing I see is the potential of scaling this out. So as I mentioned, I'm at Microsoft. Not where I would have envisioned myself, but it's a really fascinating time at the company because we've had a recent leadership change and there's really a big cultural change undergoing of, wait, we need to listen to customers.

We need to be more experimental. We need to learn. You know, in some regards, we missed the boat on on a couple of things. Uh, you know, the Internet for one and then [00:26:00] mobile and and there's some things where we're behind and I think introducing that humility has been really interesting. So I see it as I work at a place right now that has over a hundred thousand, incredibly smart people, most of whom don't know how to do what I do. 

So if I can find a way to scale some of what I do to that immense organization, I just think that's incredibly exciting. Like what, what could we do if we actually talk to our customers? 

Amy: Wow. I have some ideas on that.

We should talk and, uh, you, I know, are exploring those conversations and that would be amazing to be able to really scale it. And I got to tell you. It's not just you who has that problem, right? How do you actually scale that special combination of knowledge and technique that makes change, makes transformation?

Cindy: Yeah, you know, so much of it is not just the skills. I do a workshop for companies on customer development. You're pretty [00:27:00] standard. You know, here's why you should talk to customers. Here's the kinds of things you should be asking. We'll do a mock interview. We'll figure out what we learned from it. And that's, that's kind of your entry level.

And I recently started doing a second one, which is sort of the, okay, you started doing customer development. Now, here's all the problems that you're running into. And I know you are. And here's how to overcome them. And it's been kind of funny because, you know, I started out and, and there was this collective moment where everyone was like, Oh, we thought it was just us.

And I was like, yeah, I'm sorry. You know, you know, you can know how to do an interview and do a really brilliant set of interviews and still have a hard time turning that into product because there's a whole lot of other stuff that happens, you know, like we talked about earlier, how do you deliver what you learned in a way that people will accept it?

How do you say. Okay, what are we going to do today? How do you break down some big finding into what do we do this week and next week? And how do we know that we're still on track? How do you deal with people who say, frankly, I don't want to change. Like I was good at doing my [00:28:00] job the old way. And now you're asking me to do something that's less certain and it's chaotic.

And you know, I don't have 18 month roadmaps and I'm really uncomfortable. And I'm going to try and subtly undermine you. That's What a lot of companies and not just big enterprises, I see this in startups too, are dealing with. 

Amy: Yep. And there's a whole army of people stepping up to help them. It's the ripples in the pond of lean startup and also agile, you know, people that there's been agile coaches for a while.

And there are many of them are very knowledgeable about lean startup and, you know, their specialties and people that have a lot of organizational change experience that's being transformed by all this. You know, sort of customer development first effort. So that leads into a question I have, how do you think of your superpower?

What kind of projects light you up the most? What's that nugget of, you know, energy that's your [00:29:00] superpower? 

Cindy: Oh, let's see. I love learning what people are having problems with. And trying to figure out like, what can we do about this? I'm super tactical, you know, strategically, you know, it's my, what's my one year, five year plan?

I don't know, but put me in front of a, here's, here are people who have a problem. They know they have a problem. They don't know what to do about it. How do we figure out what the problem is, uh, figure out what has worked in the past, figure out what their limits are and get them over it. And actually, like, make progress in that day by day.

So it's a very, you know, I guess it is a very coaching sort of relationship. But, you know, I love building things, but I think fundamentally what I get really excited about is seeing people who are faced with a problem and helping them overcome it. 

Amy: I love that it goes back to your creation story in tech support.

It loops right back to that because that's what you were doing. What you just said. 

Cindy: Yeah. How people behave is fascinating. [00:30:00] And you just take that and you apply it to this problem of like, how do we form habits that we want to maintain? How do we have a healthy relationship with technology? How do we use technology to be better humans?

You know, keeping in mind that we are still humans and we sabotage ourselves all the time. 

Amy: We do. And then we get back up. Yeah. So what are you seeing that's new and exciting to you in the tech and design landscape these days? What trends of any kinds are you following? What, where are you paying attention?

Cindy: One of the things I think is interesting is that I feel like tech is becoming smaller and smaller and more and more personal. And what I mean by that is the difference between whether you want to use this app or that app, or you want to adopt this behavior or that behavior is incredibly small. I've seen people abandon apps because the pull to refresh was just a bit too slow, or something, someone doesn't like searching because the results are just a little too [00:31:00] cramped together.

And I think now that technology is something that's everywhere, it's in everything we do, we are allowed to be incredibly picky. And, and that's for good and because, you know, sometimes We had the perfect app and it actually, it hits our, our, it aligns with our mental model so well that it makes us incredibly powerful and incredibly, you know, able to do new things.

But it also makes technology really hard to design because the things that make people uncomfortable or turn them off something are, are very small and they, they seem ridiculous. Like I was at a customer site a couple of weeks ago and someone was complaining about the way Yammer's notifications worked and it was a timing thing.

And she was describing in this great detail about how she would be using Yammer and she'd reply to a post. That mentioned her and then five seconds later she'd get a push notification on her phone and she would look at it and it would be the same post and then she'd get irritated she's going on and on and after like three [00:32:00] minutes she stopped and she's like oh my gosh I feel like such a diva complaining about this and I was like but no it's it's annoying you to the point where it's actually hindering your productivity and that's important for us to know but it would be incredibly hard we'd never suss that out from quantitative data.

We probably wouldn't test it out from usability testing. You actually need to have this sort of heart to heart conversation across the table, looking at each other face to face for me to realize that this weird, tiny little thing is actually a huge friction point. So I think that's really interesting that our pickiness level is going way up, but I think it also means that the potential to have the perfect match with some technology is going up.

Amy: And where do those cross, those two trends? 

Cindy: I think it's, you know, again, understanding what people are trying to do and what are their, what are their constraints, what makes them happy, what motivates them. And if you can hone in on those [00:33:00] things, you can find a solution that is really, really perfect. 

Amy: So is there anybody out there whose work you're following or articles you're reading that's inspiring to you that is dealing with these kind of issues?

Cindy: So, I mean, I've, you know, I've read a lot of Nir Eyal and Dan Ariely and, and sort of Irrational Thinking, Jane McGonigal and Super Better. I think those are things that I've been thinking about a lot is like, how can we trick ourselves or nudge ourselves or encourage ourselves to be better than we are?

And using that as a framework, I've really been trying to look at what are the things that work for me and why do they work? And thinking about like, how can we be better at that in general? How can we recognize, you know, when is nudging too much nudging? When does it get into preaching? There was a great article recently about next door, the neighborhood social network, and they found that people were posting basically racial profiling posts.

Like, you know, there's an African American [00:34:00] man walking around my neighborhood, looking suspicious. That's not a crime. That's, that's you seeing someone of color and assuming they're suspicious and, and they were kind of horrified by this. And so they've been re, uh, they've been revamping their crime and safety section so that if you actually post something that mentions an ethnicity, but you don't mention any criminal activity, they'll ask you for more details.

You know, well, well, what were they doing that was suspicious? Well, can you provide more information about them? And it's not saying you're a bad racist person because no one would, no one would react well to that. We shut down when people criticize us directly, it just kind of making you think, was that guy actually suspicious?

Was he, you know, looking in windows or, you know, trying to open car doors or was it just that you didn't recognize him and you have kind of a preconceived idea about people of color and maybe I don't need to post this after all. So I think. things like that are fascinating. It's looking at a pattern.

It's thinking about how do we deliver the data in a way [00:35:00] that people will respond to, and it's creating a better environment. And, you know, it may not be actually doing anything to people's implicit biases, but it's making a more humane environment for the other people using that technology. Which is, you know, like a complete 180 from Twitter who's basically like we're not going to do anything about harassment on Twitter because our numbers are going down and that just makes Twitter worse and worse.

Amy: So, small, highly effective nudges. Yeah, I think it's a tremendous, tremendous power in that. Wow. So, where's your focus these days? What's coming up for you? What topics are you really passionate about? 

Cindy: Oh, you know, in addition to getting people to be their better selves, I find, uh, you know, one of the things it's, and, you know, I feel like we're a little behind on the think pieces, but I've been playing a lot of Pokemon Go and I really like that right now.

And I think there's something really interesting about the stories that came out just after it was released about all the people who are going out and walking more. Because they [00:36:00] had this like really fun little nudge to go do it. And I think there's, you know, there's things about the gameplay of Pokemon go that could definitely be improved, which is to say there's not much gameplay, but it's, it is a motivating factor.

And I find that, you know, I use that. I use Fitbit, which has like the seven day rolling leaderboards of who's walked the most. And I use a couple of other apps that. will nudge me to get a little bit more exercise and that's a healthy thing. And I think that one app on its own isn't motivating all the time, but I kind of rotate between them.

And so I always have something, some, you know, ridiculous external factor that's making me go out and, you know, walk another half mile or something. And I think, you know, I'm, I'm actually fairly active anyways, I run. And I think there's this, you know, It's just great visceral joy of using your body that I think technology has for a long time had the risk of kind of trimming down, right?

Like we can get so much from our smartphones, why, why get off the couch? Why go [00:37:00] anywhere? You know, you can just tap with your finger instead of wandering around. And I think that more than anything, the, the sort of augmented reality notion of Pokemon go being fun. I think of what if we could do that to make people more encouraged.

to reconnect with that visceral joy of using your body. And you think like, if Pokemon Go can get you to walk an extra mile, that's pretty cool. But you think, we have VR on the horizon. And sure, we could use it to make some really cool first person shooters. But you also think of, How can we use that to make people feel like they can do more physically than they actually can?

What if you have someone who's totally out of shape and they go to the gym and they're walking on the treadmill and they're out of breath and they're just like, this is so disheartening. You could use VR to make that person feel like they were doing something amazing. You could make, you know, jumping on a trampoline feel like you were, you know, careening off a giant cliff.

That's super [00:38:00] interesting. And, you know, it's, it's not my background to actually build that stuff, but I really hope that someone is working on this. 

Amy: That's awesome. Cindy, thank you so much for sharing your time and insights and visions. It's, uh, incredibly inspiring to talk to you. 

Cindy: Thank you. Always good to talk to you as well.

Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.