The way brain works with cases in Product development
Understanding how the brain works can definitely help us not only learn more effectively but also make better decision.
In this articile, I will share with you 2 core principles of human brains that I find it really useful in our daily life. They are rational thinking which enables us to think logically, and emotions which is the sensation, feelings. Understanding how the brain works can definitely help us not only learn more effectively but also make better decision. Also, I find some examples in product management to illustrate some forms in which these 2 things might be. General speaking, what drive us decision making in most of the cases is our emotions, which represent the irrationality - emotions overtake rationality.
Let’s dive in.
Rational thinking
When it comes to rational thinking, I would like to refer to the very core of human brain to think relationally (previously written in this post). Just to quickly summarize what this is, relational thinking is the ability to relate things in order to make meaningful connections among information so that our brain can encode, retrieve and consolidate them in a more effective way.
Why does the effectiveness of encoding, retrieval and consolidation matter? It can help information is stored longer in our memory and applied in different contexts, particularly, new situations, and I think, is the foundation of creativity.
In product management, Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) is the framework under the innovation theory driven by Harvard Prof Clayton Christensen. The core theory is that humans use products to solve a Job. JTBD framework is comprised of 3 job categories that human needs fall into: Functional jobs, emotional jobs and social jobs (read further about what JTBD is and how it is applied in PM).
JTBD framework (Source: Internet)
Rarely any products can retain users if they don’t serve some very fundamental functional jobs. For example, when investigating successful apps, particularly super apps, I identify that every app starts from a niche, and that means that they serve underserved needs of a small segment. It has a functional JTDB at its core. Discords started as a communication tool for gamers, then broadens its usecase into non-gaming. QQ, the core network of Tencent (Tencent is the parent of WeChat), was first an instant messaging tool, then leveraging its user base to distribute entertaining services such as media, games, comics, etc.
Why we first need functional jobs? I think it needs to serve our thought process, our way of living and working. It must first help our life easier, to save our time, energy or money, to persuade our brain that they are useful and worth using.
Emotions
However, functional jobs are insufficient to eat up the digital product world. Emotional and social jobs give room to great products. The reason lies in our emotions, and what that means is our way of thinking or making decision is based on emotions. I would love to dig into the origins of emotions, to get to the bottom of what we are discussing.
I’ve gone super deep into the book “The laws of human nature” recently and I think you should check it out. For millions of years, living orginisms depended on instincts for survival. This is a sense of danger, which then invoked response actions. Gradually, sensation evolved into something larger and longer - a feeling of fear. This involves the chemical arousal and attention so that the animal can respond. For social animals such as chimpanzees or our human ancestors, feelings played a role as a form of communication. Non-verbal languages can reveal sexual desire, the desire to play, anxiety, etc. Much more recently, humans invented language and abstract thinking.
There are a bunch of evidence in product management that supports my rationale and let me distill and discusssome of them. The core principle of UX design is human-centered (human-centric is actually the fundamental of product management, and user empathy is widely recognized as the key skill of PM). In the previous article about user empathy, I wrote that great design is to consider how users communicate with digital products as the way users communicate with each other. Digital products are expected to respond/ bring out suitable emotions in specific contexts. As PM, we expect/are expected to give users delightful experience, so that they are satisfied with our products, and retain being with us.
Human-centered design (Source: Internet)
Livestreaming commerce takes advantage of our emotions during the shopping experience. I learn through an ecommerce expert that why it work is that livestreaming can bring better user experience. It gives us a sense of being served, reviewed, giving advice and an interactive experience much more like we are in-store shopping, while messaging can’t. Additionally, during livestream, KOL not only sells something. They create something funny, entertaining, interesting to engage their fans. Sales are successful when fans love (emotion) what KOL share with them.
Further, I would like to refer to behavioral models that are used to drive our actions and build our habits. Whether it is Hook model, Fogg model or model demonstrated in the typical productivity book “Atomic habits”, all of them include motivation or emotions as a trigger for building a habit. They assume that we humans prefer non-financial rewards to monetary incentives.
For example, Hook model takes advantage of emotional states as internal trigger. TikTok, Netflix, Duolingo and many other apps have used this way. Rewards for users are then categorized into tribe (social rewards ~ recognition, status), hunt (information/special deal), and self (self-satisfaction). My point of view here is that rewards are unlimited to such things, but related to anything that provokes users' motivations.
Hook Model for Facebook (Source: Internet)
Motivations
Take a look at 8 core drivers in Octalysis framework for gamification by Yu-kai Chou, one of the most well-known gamification gurus in the world. One thing I want to touch on is social influence driver. Basically, it refers to strong feelings of belonging and connection in the form of relationships such as incormentorship, acceptance, social responses, companionship, as well as competition and envy. It gets to the bottom of the nature of humans as social animal.
Social influence is one of the key elements of social network apps we use on a daily basis. In other words, the search for social power, our needs to prestige or reputation is leveraged in features such as following, or to show our identity. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, etc, all of such things attract millions of creators to build their fan community and personal branding for making a living.
What you should pay close attention to is the underlying motivations behind the scences. To be honest, I am still getting to know what motivations actually are theoretically and practically. Is this emotions or rational thinking? Some hidden motives seem to be attached to our instincts, such as envy, competitiveness, seeking for status or prestige. Our desire to a purpose of life seems to be a long-lasting emotions which are interpreted by our logical thinking. I keep that question in mind, and will dig deep into this interesting topic later.
Octalysis framework for gamification (Source: Yu-kai Chou)
Irrationality
Coming back to our emotions and rationality, the way we make a decision tend to be irrational, which means emotions overtake our rational thinking. This might be explained by the evolution of our cognitive power. Our brain comprises three parts.
The oldest is the reptilian part: controls all automatic responses, hence being called instinctive part
Above that is the old mammalian or limbic brain: governs feeling and emotion
On top of that has evolved the neocortex: controls cognition and, for humans, language.
Emotions originate as physcial arousal to capture our attention and make use to notice of the enviroment. Ironically, our coginitive thinking gives us the power, but the problem here is we try to comprehend all the sensations we have. Since emotion and our cognition are processed by different parts of our brain, the decode of feelings is often inaccurate. This is the origin of our internal friction, and emotions and rationality co-exist, even in the wisest men. Willpower, I think, is the ability to resist our instints to follow emotions and instead, think logically and rationally.
This drives me to some questions: Is it ethical to leverage the human weaknesses in product development? How can we make use of ways of thinking to design a better products? Appliation of gamification to help users learn better is a good example. These things also reminds me of a product guru that I admire: being a kind PM.
Recipe for being less irrational
Eliminating irrationality is not what we should do, but we can try to be less irrational, to make less bad decisions. There are 2 actionables that I keep in mind:
Acknowledge our cognitive bias: What I recommend most to other people when they want to dig into this topic is confirmation bias. In short, this is our tendency to seek for things that confirm our belief, which might not represent the truth. So, keep our mind open, instead of immediately reacting to things that are different from us.
Give us a space before making a decision: It helps us cool down.
Well, even wisest men in the world are born with the brain that separates the processing of emotion and rationality. Being more rational requires putting it, but I think, it’s worth.