Matt Wallaert is a behavioral scientist and a product strategist. He has spent over twenty years applying behavioral sciences to practical problems. He currently holds the position of Executive Director of behavioral Science at Frog, a Capgemini Company, where he helps organizations build their own behavioral science capabilities.
Show Notes
Melissa Perri’s guest on this week’s Product Thinking Podcast is Matt Wallaert. Matt is a behavioral scientist and a product strategist. He has spent over twenty years applying behavioral sciences to practical problems. He currently holds the position of Executive Director of Behavioral Science at Frog, a Capgemini Company, where he helps organizations build their own behavioral science capabilities.
Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Matt talk about in this episode:
Behavior change can be applied across many disciplines but its natural home is product. The point of product is to change behavior.
How Matt got interested in the world of behavioral science.
What it means to have actual outcomes for customers and how behavioral science can be used to point out what those outcomes should look like.
When doing behavioral research, segment on behaviors rather than demographics.
Behavioral statements come at the very beginning, and they describe the end. It's calling into being what hasn't yet occurred.
Activating someone means to get them engaged. "If people feel like they're creating business value, they'll be super engaged."
Product leaders need a deep understanding of the human side of product management.
The best product managers are curious people. They want to know how the system fits together and how all the processes within the system work.
How product leaders can determine if a person has cognition, and the relevant questions to ask to find out.
"If you can figure out how to change behavior naturally in the world, I can teach you the science part. I can teach you the process part. I can teach you four stages and competing pressures and all of the tricks and tips and tools that we use to make this work in the modern environment. But you have to want to be that person," Matt says.
"Product people are not status quo people. It's inherently about difference. It's inherently about change."
Resources Matt Wallaert | LinkedIn | Twitter
Episode Transcript
Melissa Perri: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Melissa Perri: Hey, Matt, thanks so much for being on the podcast today.
Matt Wallaert: Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to being here.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, we've known each other for a while. You were a mentor at the CPO Accelerator, which has been great. I think everybody's learning a lot from you. And you have a really interesting title of Chief Behavioral Officer, but a lot of that pertains to products. So can you tell us a little bit about your role, how behavioral science plays into that, and what does a Chief Behavioral Officer do?
Matt Wallaert: Sure, and I started my career post-academia in product. I was the head of product at Thrive. Behavior change can be applied across a number of disciplines, but I always think it's natural home is product. The point of product is always to change behavior, and it has its clearest linkage. So these days, as the Executive Director of Behavioral Science at Frog, which is a way less cool title than Chief Behavioral Officer, but I don't think they have CBOs there, I'm getting to infuse behavioral science into all of the products that they build.
And so what do I think that means to me? Look, different people have different versions of behavioral science. Some people use it to refer to social psychology or behavioral economics or other kinds of things like that. To me, it's very simple. Behavioral science is behavior as an outcome, science as a process, right?
So when we consciously articulate the behavior we wanna change, and then we use a science-informed process to do research, go through a design process, and then do experimentation to confirm that our designs actually result in the behavioral impact we want, that's behavioral science in a nutshell. And so product is obviously a key part of that. Now in different orgs, it can fit in different places, right?
I often break behavioral science up into sort of four big tranches. Behavioral strategy, the articulation of the behavior that we want, research, right? Understanding the insights that why do those behaviors exist in the world? Why would anyone ever wanna do that? And why aren't they already doing it, essentially?
Then there's a design process, mapping the promoting and inhibiting pressures and understanding how product interplays in that. And then some point of impact evaluation, understanding whether that product works and works being defined by the step that you did in behavioral strategy. So product is the uniting linkage across all of that, right?
Research kind of is leading in the second part strategy or some sort of biz ops is leading in that first part. Design might be leading in that third part, right? Data science might be leading in that fourth part, but product is the piece across the top of it that makes sure the whole thing is actually happening.
Melissa Perri: So what made you go from academia, looking at behavioral science and say, ah, I can apply this to software. Like what led you into this world?
Matt Wallaert: It's interesting. I loved academia, like you, as we were talking before the show, we both love teaching, right? Teaching is just so much fun. But ultimately the outcome that academia carries about is published paper. It's a publish or perish environment if you wanna stay in as a researcher. And I think knowing things is tremendously important.
Gnosticism is tremendously important. But I am not interested in only knowing things if it doesn't also create change, right? If you don't make things better for people in a day-to-day way, that just isn't personally inspiring for me. And so I often think of knowing and doing as sort of flip sides of the same coin.
And the difference between academia and product is, academia just prioritizes knowledge. It's great if it's applicable. They love that. It's fantastic, but it's not their primary focus. Same thing in product, but flipped. I think product people genuinely are interested in creating knowledge, right? They want to know more about their user, but they wanna know more in service of creating an outcome behavior, in service of creating things.
I often sort of say, the Avengers did me a favor with the like ubiquity of the infinity gauntlet, right? You know you're a product person when you really wanna know stuff, but ultimately if you just snap your fingers and get everybody to do the thing you wanted, you would do it, right? You know, if I could snap my fingers and women and people, underrepresented people were paid fairly, I'd do it.
I don't really have to know why, like all of those things exist. And as an academic, you wouldn't snap your fingers because the contention is, knowing is the point, right? Understanding why the gender wage gap exists is the point of studying the gender wage gap, right? And so I wanna be in the snapping business, I think, at the end of the day.
Melissa Perri: You wanna be the actionable person.
Matt Wallaert: Well, I just care about the outcomes. As you most academics, they just, they have to work within the priority system that they have. And I would rather go out and do applied work.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I think that makes total sense. The class I'm teaching at Harvard is very hands-on and it's not, they don't really have like a lot of classes like that. So we do, we literally like build products in it and everybody's like, wow, this is a different class. Like, I don't know how to do this. And you do see everybody have that kind of aha moment and the ability to actually like put those things to work after that type of class, which I think is important. I think we should actually have more of that in academia, but you're right. That's not like how it was designed. I think we all know that from school.
Matt Wallaert: And to that point, I mean, I think, one of the things I talk a lot about at Frog, right? I talked about sort of behavioral strategy, behavioral insights, or behavioral research, behavioral design, and then impact evaluation. There are lots of people that do those in isolation, right? They do strategy in isolation, they do impact evaluation in isolation.
But what's the key, and this is, I think, the key of a good product person is the piping in between them. I think academia would be better if it understood how people were going to use the information that it created, the knowledge that it created, because it would build the spigot so that you could attach a hose to it, right? And it would do it in a standardized way so that you could like always screw on the same hose and there would be a good transition.
And vice versa, I think product, a lot of product people read a lot of very interesting, they read Thinking Fast and Slow, they read other sort of like good psychology-based books. And I believe psychology is the, social psychology is the best training towards product that I can imagine, right? I mean, I think psychology, the understanding of human behavior and how to change it in a structural way is what a product design degree would be if we had one.
But I think a lot of them read it, are interested, and they can't figure out how to apply it, right? I'm super interested in this cognitive bias, but it's not being presented to me in a way that I can pipe it into what I do on a daily basis. I've tried so hard to try and make the book and everything that I do and every time I talk, really, really, really applicable, right?
This is a behavioral statement, like when population has motivation and limitations, they will behavior is measured by data. It's very, very, very concrete. And my hope is because frankly, the janitor should be able to do behavioral science, right? They should be able to say, hey, I want people to not litter, what things can I do?
I can try putting up a sign, I can move the baskets around and then run experimentation and say, hey, I moved the basket and litter went down a bit, I put up a sign plus the basket and that, you know. Everyone is capable of doing that if we make it accessible. And so I think that's the part that's really missing for me, to your point about sort of Harvard and getting to do it, right?
It's that accessibility piece. Even if your students don't choose application, right? They don't want to do applied behavioral science, they want to stay in academia, they want to do sort of academic product, or whatever, at least they understand who is going to be using it for what and they can build that spigot so that someone can come along and hook up a pipe and get water.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I love what you're talking about here with how behavior change produces outcomes. And in product, we talk a lot about like outcomes over outputs, right? And sometimes people look at those as business outcomes. We talk a lot about like, what is an outcome for a customer? And I think that's important.
I think that's what you're really honing in on here, is that side of what does an outcome for a customer look like? Because we talk about it in kind of nebulous terms, right? Like, oh, if we solve this problem for the customer, yay, good, we solved the problem. But like, what does it mean to have actual outcomes for customers and how can you use behavioral science to like pinpoint what that outcome should be?
Matt Wallaert: And I think that's the motivation piece of the behavioral statement. And it's the part people cheat on the most. I often teach at Columbia's business school and I will always remember this. We did behavioral statements. It's like the entrepreneurial MBA kind of thing. You know, I'm like, okay, try writing a behavioral statement for your product.
And their motivation was when whatever, whoever they were selling to, 20 year olds in New York, 20 somethings in New York want to drink free trade coffee from Ethiopia. And I was like, okay. So nobody wakes up in the morning and goes, you know what I want to do? I want to drink free trade coffee from over there.
That's like, you know, that's top of mind for me. That's so specific. It's like, nobody has that motivation. That's not a motivation, right? I want to feel good about myself. That's my motivation. The reason I drink free trade coffee is I want to feel good about myself or I want to save the earth or whatever it is, right?
Like it's these deep core motivations about how people engage with things in the world. You know, the good positive example is something like at Clover. You're trying to increase flu shots, flu shot penetration. You're trying to get people to get flu shots, particularly people who have not previously gotten flu shots.
And so when I do research, right, a behavioral version of research, I don't segment on demographics. I don't think that's a good way to segment your research. You want to segment on behavior. So we looked at five groups of people. Who always gets a flu shot, right? Like every year they get a flu shot.
What's going on with them? Who never gets a flu shot? Every year they're like, mm-mm, okay, what's going on with them? Who flips eyes back and forth? They're like, get one, don't get one. Get one, don't get one. Get one, don't get one. Okay, that's weird. What's going on? And then the last two groups, which is who's been doing it?
And then stopped, right? I was getting a flu shot. I was getting a flu shot. I was getting a flu shot. And then all of a sudden I stopped getting a flu shot. What happened, right? Something changed in my life. Because in reality, if you're trying to run an intervention, that is the change I'm trying to combat against, right?
So it happened naturally. I'm just trying to make it happen artificially. I'm trying to create something that causes that, but it happened at some basal rate in the world in general. And so I can understand what created that. But the real breakthrough is always the last group, right? Which is didn't, wasn't doing it, wasn't doing it, wasn't doing it.
And all of a sudden started getting flu shots, right? If you haven't got a flu shot for 10 years, and then all of a sudden you got a flu shot, you are my person. Because whatever the heck happened to you is the thing I want to happen for everyone else. I just need to create it instead of letting it manifest naturally.
And so the thing that we discovered was, oh, hey, they all have grandkids, new grandbabies. Right? And so they were getting flu shots for them. They were getting flu shots because they want to see their grandbaby and their kids had said, you can't see the grandkid until you get a flu shot because I can't get the grandkid a flu shot.
Their kids are vulnerable to flu. And so people don't wake up and say, when people want to get a flu shot, that's not the motivation, right? The motivation is see my grandbaby, right? And so if you could figure out what are those sort of motivations, see my grandbaby, protect my significant other, travel somewhere, be independent was a big one when we were changing flu shots, right?
I want to go to the hospital. I value my independence. So, you know, every morning I do get up and be like, okay, you know, I hope I stay independent today. That's a core motivation for me. And if you can tie something to one of those core motivations, music listening is a great example of this. I talked about this with Liz Kim, who's a behavioral scientist at Spotify all the time, right?
Like, is it when people want to listen to music? Spotify's, you know, sort of behavioral statement should never be when people want to listen to music, they'll use Spotify. It's much more interesting than that, right? Like it's more about like, why do we listen to music? What is it in our life that causes that to be true for us?
I want to feel good or I want to not feel bad. And I want to put on music that makes me feel not the way that I do in this moment, but there are these really core spaces that it occupies in our life. And that I find interesting. That's a long-winded answer though.
Melissa Perri: No, it was good. I think, so for the people who are listening and they don't know what a behavioral statement is, what is a behavioral statement? Like, how would you explain what that part is? And then also, like, when do you use them? I get this question all the time when I teach shops to be done. People are like, hey, do I use it instead of a user story? Is it for developers? Is it for a vision? Like, when should you use behavioral statements?
Matt Wallaert: So for me, behavioral statements come at the very beginning, but what they are doing is describing the end, right? So, you know, like my book is called Start at the End for a Reason. Here's a way to explain it. I'll explain mechanically what they're saying, but here's one way to philosophically think about it.
All product is about science fiction. So what do I mean by that? We are trying to arrive in a world that does not exist. And it doesn't matter what product that is. So if you take something like Get Raised, right, the thing we built to help women earn more money, I want a world where women are paid fairly, but I recognize that I live in a world where that's not yet true, right?
And so it is literally, I'm literally describing a fictional world, but I have to describe it. Otherwise it just remains a fiction. So I have to call it into being. That's what a behavioral statement is. And it's a formal articulation, you know, it has double variables. So when population, you have to know for who.
When I say I want people to be paid fairly, do I, who do I mean by people? Do I mean two-year-olds? Like what's happening, like who is people, right? Want to what? What is their motivation? What's core for them? When I say motivation, binary things that are true. It shouldn't be scalar, right? Like it shouldn't be something where my feeling goes up and down.
It's not like branding. Branding might make something more attractive. It might make people more likely to do it. In behavioral science, what we call it promoting pressure. It makes it more likely, but it's not like branding is a zero one, right? Like people like this brand, they will do it if they don't, they won't, right?
The brand is better or worse, right? At doing that thing. Motivations are binary, right? If you don't want to go someplace, there is no reason to take an Uber, right? It is zero one. If you want to go somewhere, you fall in the consideration set for Uber. If you don't, then you don't, right? So when population has motivation and limitations, same thing, but on the other way.
It's not like price. Price is a, it's a scale. You can move it up and down. It can be stronger or weaker. And so as an inhibiting pressure, it can be stronger or weaker. It's like having an electronic form of payment. You can't take an Uber if you don't have one, right? Like they don't accept cash. I mean, they do in some countries, but in the U S they don't accept cash.
That's a limitation. You have to have a connected device. If you do not have a connected device, you cannot take an Uber. You can't hail one. There's no other way except to connect a device to get one. So those are our limitations. Zero one must be true. And then what's the behavior? What do they do, right?
They'll order a ride. It's not download the app. It's order a ride. Like that is the physical literal thing I want people to do. And honestly, that's the one people struggle with the most. CEOs will come to you and say, I want you to make something people love. Well, what is love? What do you mean? You want people to use it, recommend it, talk about it.
What is love for you, right? That you physically, literally observably need. This is often the hardest one. This is the one where I'm, when I'm teaching product designs, you know, one of the places where I'm always telling people, try to imagine the person you know who does it and try to imagine someone who does it and then describe the difference to you.
Matt loves me, Bob doesn't. Okay. How would I as an outsider physically observe Matt loving you and Bob not doing it? And if you told me that, well, Matt is there when I need it. Okay, I can physically observe that and then I can measure it, right? I can make that sort of data-driven description. So when population has motivation and limitations, they will behave as measured by data.
And you can think of those last pieces kind of like an OKR, right? The behavior is the description of what you want. The KR is how you're gonna measure it, right? The data is how you're gonna measure it. It's that KR piece, right? And so that's a beautiful statement. To me, they come at the beginning and then they guide the whole process.
They're put forth by your stateholders, but they're owned by the product or project manager, right? And they guide the whole process. And the reason I say that they are the end is they are how we're gonna measure whether we actually accomplished this, right? Women wanna be paid fairly, they'll use get raised.
Okay, well, I could say theoretically, okay, of the hundred women who wanna be paid fairly, how many of them use get raised? I could look at that as a percentage, I could track it, right? And I can say, oh yeah, when I changed brands or I introduced it as an app or I did the next thing, how much did that behavior change from where it had previously been measured?
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I really like that. Cause it's tying back, like we said, the outcomes into it. But I like specifically how you get into the success metrics. It's like, tell me what you can observe to measure this, right? Like what are the actions that you take to actually measure that? And I think that's such an important piece there. So we get like really trapped, I think, in product with all these buzzwords of product metrics of like acquisition and activation. You're like, but yeah, what does that mean, right? Like what does it mean to activate somebody? Yeah, engagement.
Matt Wallaert: Oh God, I hate engagement.
Melissa Perri: Yeah.
Matt Wallaert: What do you mean? Like what is engaged for you in this particular moment? There was a, I had a great moment where we had bought Yammer at Microsoft and they were having some product problems, came down, got the product group in a room and was talking room. And what I realized was they just had different versions of what success meant.
Some of them were trying to make Matt. Matt logs in every day, comments on every post, right? Like that's what they thought it was. They thought it was an internal engagement product. And the other group was like, no, no, Melissa, she logs in once. She makes one comment, but has tremendous business value, right?
And that's what we're optimizing for. Now, sometimes those are related, right? I think an engaged user will create business value. And so I'm willing to say if I engage them, that's good enough for like, that's the outcome I'm okay with. And you might say, hey, business value leads to engagement. If people feel like they're creating business value, they'll be super engaged.
But ultimately, one of those is leading and one of those trailing. You know, sometimes I talk about this as a pen problem. People will grab the pen at the bottom, right? And they sort of say like, oh, it's about engagement. But what they're having in their mind is that there's some relationship between engagement and something else, right?
So you wanna start with the something else because there may be other versions that aren't engagement, right? You think you need to get profitable to log in every day, but if what we're really going after is business value, if I can get them to log in once a year, but it creates immense business value, I'm like, I've successfully, right? Which challenging that assumption that like, oh, in order to create business value, I have someone has to log in every day.
Do they, really? Why, right? I don't wanna log in every day to anything, right? I would love it if I created immense value in my life and I never logged in, fantastic.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I actually had a CEO, I worked for once who was trying to like get people to log in every day. I remember there was this moment where he comes over and he's like, look, people are using the dashboard. They log in every day. Not the dashboard, I'm sorry. He was like, look it, people log in every day to our product.
We have to create a dashboard is what he was saying. He's like, they wanna see statistics and all this stuff. And I was like, all right, they're logging in every day. So make a dashboard is what you're saying. He's like, yes, exactly. Like we gotta give them things to do. So I said, okay, let me go research that.
And I went and I sat down with all the people who were logging in every day. And they were like, oh, I don't really log in every day. It's just that every time I boot up my computer that software starts and that logs me in automatically. And I was like, oh, they're like, no, I only use this once a week.
They're like, if you actually, and you refresh your data once a week, if you refresh your data more often I might use it more often, but right now I'm only gonna use it as much as you refresh your data. And I went back and it was just like, mind blown when I told them that. But it's so interesting how we make assumptions based on behavior that, what is actually the underlying reasons behind it?
There's only so much that that actual data can tell you. Like when you're looking at those analytics products like Amplitude has or anything else, what's the why behind it?
Matt Wallaert: Yeah, that's why. I mean, I think you nodding nicely to the, I always think in behavioral science and when I run behavioral science teams, I tend to use a triad of a quantitative scientist, a qualitative scientist and project manager. And so you might think of them sort of as a user researcher, right?
Some sort of data scientist or a version of that. And then some sort of product person. And that interplay between quanta and quala is so important. It's shocking to me that they're very often in different parts of the organization and almost never talk to each other because that interplay is so key.
We're trying to help people feel like it was easier to get the care test and treatment they needed. That was the sort of design challenge. There was a, there's a specific, we're rated on a specific question. There's a survey question that goes to people. And if we get a high score, we get paid by the government better.
And so we're looking at this and we never would have got there with only one of those two tools. It was about that interplay between them, right? So there was a hypothesis that was sort of, well, if people have to go a long way, that might be a reason to think it's not easy. So that's a very quant problem, right?
Like it's specifically observable. You can define what a long way means. And so you, and you can look at, you know, relationships between the surveys score and things. And what we found was data science very quickly came back and said, Tyler said, no, like it is related but in the opposite direction.
So the farther you go, the easier you think it is. There's maybe, maybe data science could have got the right answer if they just kept going long enough. They could have figured out why that was. But in two seconds, like Qual called three people and figured it out, which is, hey, if you're affluent and healthy, you have carefully selected a doctor that you drive a long way to.
And so of course you think care is just, you know, it's really easy to get. You're super healthy and can drive there and get it. Like it feels very easy, right? And so, you know, sick people are going to the doctors that are nearby, they're not affluent. They can't travel long distances. They can't talk to lots of time off work.
And it just went back and forth, you know, quant and qual, quant and qual, right? So qual says, hey, we think it might be about affluence and sort of healthiness. Again, now that's a quant question. I can look at, do they have chronic illnesses? I can look at, you know, what their household income is or do they live in areas that are high household?
Like I can look at those variables, but I needed qual to sort of put me in the right direction and then I can confirm it. So for me, it's about that validation. It's that I have a theory that comes out of one piece of my research that's invalidated, but through a different method. I'm not validating it the same way I got the insight.
I'm validating it the opposite way. And there's just that way you're ping ponging back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. People don't do that enough in measurement, right? I want people to, I want women to ask for and get a raise. Okay, but that's not just data on a line. I need to talk to people and are they liking the experience of doing that?
I mean, they may be doing it to your point, like doing it in the data. They're logging in every day. You can't see my air quotes folks, but I'm air quoting. Like they're logging in every day. It's not really logging in every day. And quant could never find that answer. I mean, theoretically, right? Theoretically, quant could have said they're logged in, but they don't actually click on anything else.
And so we could, you know, we could do things to assume this is a dead log in. It's easy to say that in hindsight. You're like, yeah, of course, data could have found that answer. No, they couldn't have. They needed somebody to observe it. And then say like, go look over here. And you're like, oh yes, now I can factor that out.
That back and forth is so key. And it's so much a part of what good product is about. It's just shocking to me that it happens. Yeah, completely.
Melissa Perri: And I like what we're getting on here too, with this topic, like quant and qual, you mentioned just earlier, they're usually in two different parts of the organization. So if you're a product leader, right? Trying to build a great product team, you know, a lot of them oversee design these days. Hopefully we also have a VP of UX, but what do we do? Like what kind of roles do we need on our teams to make sure that we can do that collaboratively? And I don't have to like go over to the team, you know, across the way and ask for resources and wait until they're budgeted. Yeah, I mean, I believe very much
Matt Wallaert: In hiring for T-shaped people. I know we've talked about this a little bit at the CPO Accelerator, right? We've talked a little bit about sort of why I think hiring for T-shaped people matters. So, you know, one area of deep expertise, it's either quant, qual, or some sort of product project management.
Could be other things, right? Could be design, could be that strategic piece. I really understand how the money part of it works. I understand how this relates to our business model. But at the end of the day, it's, you know, there are different specialties. But what's key is that common understanding, right?
We talked about how it's so important to pipe what you need into the next stage. And that means having a minimum, I don't have to do the next stage. I don't have to be in charge of the next stage, but I have to at least sort of understand what's happening at the next stage so that I can build the right spigot so that they can hook up their hoes.
So at Clover, for example, we used to do tea time on Fridays where, you know, someone from a deep discipline would teach it, but at a horizontal level, right? So, you know, someone from data science is talking about like, what does correlation actually mean in a sort of lived in the world way? Like, you know, what does 0.8 really mean when we say 0.8?
That's like, you know, the strength of like gender and height. Okay, like it's pretty strongly correlated. It's not perfectly correlated, but it's pretty strongly correlated, right? Like 0.8 is pretty strong, right? Like, you know, clouds and rain are, you know, it's 0.4, it's much less strongly correlated than this other thing.
And so you can sort of talk through those pieces, but at a high level and then have separate time where they're sitting down with the other quant people and going really deep. They're gonna talk about multiple hierarchical regression or some new machine learning technique or something that way too, way too deep for everybody. And there has to be learning experiences in that.
People need to be able to deepen their discipline, you know, which I think is where a lot of training happens. A lot of training is about deepening your discipline. You're gonna go to some data science conference and you're gonna talk about really deep data science things. But what you really need at the data science conference is some qual person saying like, hey, here's how data scientists could build for qual people, right?
Like, here's what you need to know about qual in order to be effectively able to sort of collaborate with us. I think that's the challenge for product people is ultimately product people, you know, we need to remain firmly rooted in our discipline, which I think is behavioral change and impact evaluation and sort of like understanding at a deep level of this human piece, but you have to have these horizontal skills. You have to know what user research is doing.
You have to know what quant is doing because otherwise you can't question it. You can't work with it, can't use it. And then, you know, you're just back to relying on your own biases, which is what, you know, the whole point of bringing a scientific process to product is so that we don't have product leaders saying like, that's the right answer and I know it's the right answer because I know it's the right answer.
No, you don't. The only way to know the right answer is to test it and show that it's the right answer. And the only way you can do that is if we go back to a behavioral statement and we've defined what right means, right? We have to define the ruler, then we have to say, okay, it actually did move the needle on the thing that I cared about.
And like our opinions don't matter at all.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, so it sounds like it's not necessarily about having very specific roles on the team. It's that everybody has to understand that you gotta go back and forth between qual and qual and here's the basic skills that you need to be able to do that. I think that's pretty powerful because it's sometimes hard to keep building out more and more people to play specific roles, but this probably makes everybody a little bit faster too.
Matt Wallaert: Yeah, I mean, I'm so excited. That is like, we can't just have a giant team of generalists, right? In order to truly extract value from data science, you have to be able to sort of concentrate on it. And in order to truly extract value from user research, you have to be able to practice that discipline and go deep and get new skills and stay up to date on what people are doing.
So there does have to be some specialization, but in the constant war between specialization and generalism, like I would place my bet on having some helping people to get to understand the relationship between their discipline and other disciplines, which is why my team at Clover, when first started, I hired a lot internally and people were like, I've got people from customer service. Working for me as project managers. I got people from all over the world.
And so in our first meeting, I have very transparent culture. They were like, why us? We all applied for this job, sure, but like, why did you pick us? And I said, I'm gonna demonstrate. It's gonna be very easy. And I gave them all a scale that we use in psychology, called the need for cognition scale.
And so need for cognition, it's not an intelligence test. Like it's not an intelligence test. And I love it because it's relatively judgment free. It basically says, how much do you like thinking? So items would be things like, you know, in order to have a good scale, you want something on which reasonable people would say one thing, reasonable people would disagree, right?
And so it has items like, I want everything in my life to be a puzzle. Not everybody feels that way. I'm not even sure I feel that way. You know, I'm like an eight out of 10 on that. I don't want everything to be a puzzle. I'm not like puzzling out how to eat my lunch, right? Like I don't want everything to be a puzzle.
So I had them take the scale and I said, look at your scores, and they all have crazy high need for cognition scores. And I'm like, there you go. That's why you all want to know, right? And it is that wanting to know that's gonna drive you to create the better answer and to build the thing that in healthcare, other people haven't been able to build.
Cause that was a job at Clover was, you know, you got to crack the nut that other people haven't cracked, right? And so that need for cognition is, I think, the defining characteristic of product people. It's that desire to systematically think about things.
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Melissa Perri: I've been like trying to figure out, you know, this has been something that I've been cared about for like the last couple of years. I was like, what is that one piece, right? That you can look at somebody that starts to, to really define what's gonna make a good product manager and what's not gonna make a good product manager.
Cause I firmly believe that you teach people hard skills and I think you could teach them some soft skills to a certain point. There's some people who are just like, don't care about that. So they're never gonna care, right? But, you know, there are skills that you teach people. I think I can teach anybody how to build a roadmap.
I could teach anybody how to write a user story or a behavioral statement or run an experiment. But that need for cognition, right? Like that, I love that because it's really solidifying, you know, the people who thrive in that role. And it's true, like every, the best product managers I see, they're curious, right?
Like they want to know why they're, they're always like, I need to figure out how this all fits together. And they think about the entire system. So I always like thought called them systems thinkers, but it's challenging to actually figure out like who's a system thinker. So I kind of love this test.
So if you're a product leader and you're trying to figure out, right? If people have cognition, you mentioned there's a test. What else can you ask them or how can you dive into if this person is, has that need for cognition? Like what's some interview questions or screening questions you would try to get into?
Matt Wallaert: So I have a post that's coming out soon on like interview questions specifically for behavioral science, which I think is a little bit different than how to do a product manager. But if you look at the project management portion of VFC, and I talked about these three big pieces quant quality project management. If you look at the project management pieces, it's probably the closest.
So the thing I normally ask people is tell me about a time you changed somebody's behavior, right? And it doesn't have to be, I talk to junior people all the time where they're like, yeah, but I haven't, I haven't worked at Facebook and I'm blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I don't care. One of my favorite answers that somebody ever gave me was she was annoyed at her roommates who kept like drinking red wine and then not washing out their glasses.
And, you know, like then it dries on the bottom of the glass and you never get your hand in there. And so like it just, you have these terrible red wine glasses forever. And she just talked about like how she systematically tried to change that behavior. First I got a brush and that didn't work. And so then I tried this and you know, like she talked about the experiments that she ran to change that behavior.
I love that answer. That's what I want, right? That's why I think need for cognition is so key. It's that perpetual curiosity. What I want is someone that I have to reign. Like I used to do this all the time at Clover where like, you know, I'd have to shake people off of our problem. I'd be like, that project is over.
Like you can't, we can't keep researching it. I know you want to still know. I know you want to push it farther, but like we just can't do that. We got to move on. I'd much rather have that than the challenge of trying to motivate. You know, I used to have a degree in education, degree in psychology.
And when I taught eighth grade, what I sort of figured out was like, you could be not the smartest person in my class, but if you had motivation, I can get you there, right? If you were like engaged in really anything, sneakers, like I will find a way to relate it to the thing that you are interested in. That's on me as a teacher.
But if you just show up and you just kind of sit there and there's nothing that's interesting to you, I don't really know what to do with that. Like I can't, creating motivation is in fact, the hardest thing that we have. And so I think to your point about teaching soft skills, I can't teach people to want to know, right?
I want people who, you know, I sometimes describe this behavior like, who are just sitting and playing with the world. We talked about science fiction, who just are science fiction in the world all the time. You know, I'm on a New York subway going, huh, I wonder how we could get everybody to like give up their seats for old people or get exercise or what, you know, like I'm just playing mind games about behaviors all the time.
You know, what would an exercise, what if we could get people to get exercise on their commute? What could we do? We make pull-up bars, and we all agree to walk in a circle. Like we take out the benches and we all walk in a circle, right? Like what could we do to make this subway car a chance to work out?
It's that kind of like, I'm just always imagining how the world is different. There's a term we use in psychology called counterfactual thinking, right? Thinking against the facts of the world as it is. That's what I want. I want someone highly skilled at counterfactual thinking who's just always sort of naturally playing with, what if things were different?
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's a really interesting one. I like that. And I do think I like those screening questions too. Like, tell me about a time when you change somebody's behavior just in general. I think everybody thinks that they have to, yeah, like work at the big companies or have had this job before to require some of those traits, but I don't think that's really true. I think there's a lot of smart people out there and, you know, curious people that will make great product managers.
Matt Wallaert: One of the reasons I love that question and one of the reasons I think it's really important is it does make product more egalitarian. It makes it a place that we can be inclusive, right? I don't care if you've been in some big company and done some big thing. I can teach you all of the, to your point, I can teach you how to write PRDs and how to, you know, spec things out.
Like all of that is just stuff that you can learn. Right? What I want to see is that boundless curiosity. And so we live in a world where there are all of these institutional barriers to people getting access to a product, right? Like I lucked into it. I lucked because I happened to be studying something that was applicable to the first startup that I worked at, right?
It sort of made sense. And really I got referred essentially from a very famous academic that they contacted, right? And said, oh, you should talk to this person, right? Not everybody has that, right? I'm a first-generation college kid from rural Oregon. Like, I don't have a network, I don't have a network.
It was a complete fluke that I ended up in product. And in some slightly different world, I never would have. And so if people, you know, revel in asking Google-like nonsense product questions where they put you through, you know, 200 hours of terrible interviews that are designed to test your privilege, essentially, we're just gonna end up with the same monolithic product group that we always do.
And I don't care, tell me about your wine glasses. Yeah. That's fine. I don't care. Tell me how you got your little brother to stop kicking you in the knee. I don't care, right? Tell me how you stop chewing your fingernails. If you can figure out how to change behavior naturally in the world, I can teach you the science part.
I can teach you the process part. I can teach you four stages and competing pressures and all of the tricks and tips and tools that we use to make this work in the modern environment. But you have to want to be that person. You have to be the person who says, you know, Frog has this statement, make your mark.
And I really do like, it is those people who, it's not about them. Maybe I don't like to make your mark the part where it's about me, right? Because product people, I think good product people are selfless and can take themselves out of the equation so that they can balance it. But it is that I want things to be different.
If I want things to be, if you want things to be the same, product is not for you. It's your organization whose job it is to maintain the status quo. The fight, the CFO and their team often are status quo maintainers. And that's their job and that's good, right? That is a good thing. We need people to advocate for the status quo to balance out our boat and make sure that we don't go too fast and flop too far.
But that is not what product people are. Product people are not status quo people. It's inherently about difference. It's inherently about change. Like we should be leading the charge on inclusion because it is inherently about creating something that is other than it is now. Do you wanna just make what is now?
That is not product. We are not for you. We are about behavior change, right? Not behavioral measurement, right? Not behavioral maintenance, behavioral change. That is product. And so those are the people that we need. We need that hunger for change. And that's what I'm looking for when I'm looking for that person that's sitting on the subway.
Well, what if I could get everybody to get up and give their seat up to old ladies? Like, I want a world that is different and I can imagine it and I can see it and I can taste and I smell it. I can imagine it in a science fiction sort of way then I'm gonna build a bridge. I'm not just gonna imagine it.
I'm not just gonna leave it there. I'm gonna work with a bunch of people to build the bridge between the world that we live in and the world that we wanna live in. And that's product.
Melissa Perri: That is some very encouraging words. I was like, oh, this whole thing is pumping me up. I'm like, I'm excited to be a product person now listening to this. I think it's a cool issue.
Matt Wallaert: Doing behavioral science, doing behavioral science is the coolest job in the world. That's why I want everybody to see themselves as behavioral scientists, see themselves as able to create behavior change because it is the coolest job in the world. Realizing that you can make your mark, that you can change the behavior of other people is a big deal.
Melissa Perri: Definitely. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast, Matt. So you have a book. It's called Start at the End if anybody wants to dive more into this. Can they buy it on Amazon, anywhere else you'd like them to purchase it from?
Matt Wallaert: Wherever you want, wherever is most convenient for you, get it from a friend, like pass it on to a friend. The fewer book sales with more people reading them as far as I'm concerned, like if we could all do this together, we would be in a much better spot. And I'm excited for that. And that's what gets me up in the morning. That's what turns me on.
Melissa Perri: Awesome. And if they want to go read more about your work, MattWallert.com, right, is where we can all find you.
Matt Wallaert: Yeah. You can like, I'm trying to be active on Twitter. I try and be very responsive. I keep open office hours. So, you know, an hour a day, anybody can sign up for half an hour slot and take some time with me. You know, I try and spend that time with people you go to, you know, if you want a longer education, you go to something like the CPO Academy and other places where I'm sort of hanging out in a more formal way to help folks.
But they also don't need me, right? It's not about Matt Wallert, like go push on behavioral science. There's lots of talented, amazing behavioral scientists out there who have wonderful thoughts. It's not like I've, the book proposes one way to do it. It's not the only way to do it. It's probably not the best way to do it.
Go make a better way, right?
Melissa Perri: That's awesome. That's what we're supposed to be doing. That's what product is, seeing one thing and making it better and better and better and better and better. Great.
