- Ambitious Mission Statements, Misaligned Execution
- How I Created the Impact Mindset
- Overuse of Usage Metrics as Success Criteria
- How Grand Ambitions Became Usage Obsessions
- The Pitfalls of Solely Prioritizing Usage
- Measurements of Success Beyond Usage and Usability
- Comprehensive Approach to Metrics for Your Team
- Chapter Recap
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
How I Created the Impact Mindset
My fascination with technology began in childhood, when unboxing a new gadget meant hours exploring every setting to uncover its capabilities. In school, this passion evolved; I shifted from the technical details to the human side—how people interact with technology and how it transforms their behavior. It was disheartening to hear complaints about technology failing to meet expectations, often fostering negative behaviors instead of creating a genuine positive impact.
Starting my career as a consultant implementing large human capital systems, I saw the mismatch between promised value and reality at a large scale. Brought in to help organizations adopt these new systems, I quickly learned how even significant investment in traditional change management could not fill the void that these technologies created. In search of something better, I found the field of applied behavioral sciences, which I saw as an agile approach compared to the waterfall of large-scale change programs. I decided to pursue a master’s degree to explore its potential.
During my studies, I discovered behavioral science’s broad applicability—from simple nudges to complex interventions designed to forge new habits. The insights in the field could be used to drive people to act according to their values and long-term desires. Yet one thing seemed irrefutable: technology would be needed for these solutions to scale. I decided to pursue a tech career, expecting a welcoming environment for these principles.
However, the transition revealed a stark reality: little consideration was given to the actual behavioral changes driven by products. If anything, I found that techniques from behavioral sciences were often misused to boost engagement without regard to consequences. Even companies that built their brands around helping people change behaviors did minimal research to ensure their products generated desired outcomes.
I am not alone in noticing this trend, and being vocal about my disappointment led to the opportunity to talk and work with many who were building out solutions in hopes of driving behavioral change. Seeing both the best case and the common shortcomings led me to question what was preventing the team from focusing on what mattered. Teams focused on driving abstract outcomes with no way of measuring them, and thus defaulted to more accessible metrics such as usage and satisfaction. Compounding this was incentive structures that demanded output over outcomes and made it easier not to ask questions.
My research into this issue clarified the core problem: the missing link between usage and impactful outcomes was the behavior changed by the product. If a company wants its users to lose weight, it must encourage less calorie consumption or more exercise. Increased productivity? Less engaging in distractions and more task-tracking. Better data infrastructure? More upfront organization and following processes. It all came back to the original reason I wanted to get into the field: the promise of technology to scale behavioral interventions that companies can build more sustainable solutions on.
This realization led me to develop the User Outcome Connection, a framework for evaluating how specific behaviors altered by a product influence user outcomes and business impacts. My first opportunity to test this concept came through a feature designed with a clear purpose yet unproven effectiveness. I collaborated with engineers and product managers, and we defined new metrics to measure behavioral changes post-interaction. The positive results validated the approach and sparked broader organizational interest in adopting this methodology, which became the primary process introduced by this book, the Feature Impact Analysis (FIA).
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As I shared these insights across organizations, I refined the philosophy into a comprehensive approach centered on building products grounded in validated User Outcome Connections: the Impact Mindset. I have found that adopting this framework is good for business, as it equips companies to develop products that retain users and promote organic growth, optimizing both customer lifetime value and acquisition costs.
Implementing a cultural shift and embracing a new philosophical approach to product development are monumental tasks. I have not written this book with the illusion that you alone should be responsible for creating the entire change. Instead, inspired by transformative works like Eric Reis’s The Lean Startup, which advocates for a grassroots movement in organizations, it positions you to be the catalyst of the movement. Using the User Outcome Connection framework to illustrate the importance of rethinking features and sharing these insights, you will form the foundation of this culture change.
Defining the Impact Mindset
The Impact Mindset describes a novel product development philosophy that focuses on measuring and maximizing the behaviors that features cause users to do. My aim in writing this book is to encourage product teams of all sizes and throughout industries to adopt the Impact Mindset, as it yields more effective products that in turn increase business outcomes. The philosophy consists of four components that are explored in greater detail throughout this book.
TABLE A Four components of the Impact Mindset
COMPONENT |
DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
User Outcome Connections |
Establishing a User Outcome Connection for each core feature helps teams understand the feature’s purpose, validate behavioral changes, and ensure these changes positively influence user outcomes and business impacts. |
Experimentation |
Validating User Outcome Connections through experimentation involves collecting and analyzing data to generate insights, requiring systems that support the technical and administrative aspects of conducting experiments. |
Insights Hub |
Creating an Insights Hub centralizes all User Outcome Connections, research findings, and experimental results, fostering transparency and a shared understanding among team members to inform evidence-based decisions. |
Evidence-based decision-making culture |
Adopting an Impact Mindset requires cultivating a culture in product teams that prioritizes evidence-based decision-making, ensuring that every member understands their role in driving meaningful user actions aligned with user needs. |
At the heart of the Impact Mindset is the validation of User Outcome Connections for all core features. Teams must develop these frameworks for each feature and find or create evidence that supports or refutes the connection between the behaviors changed by a feature, the satisfaction of user outcomes, and the resulting business impact. When new insights are needed to determine if a link exists between these variables, experimentation is required. Thus, having the infrastructure and team capabilities to conduct this work forms the second component.
As more demand for evidence is created due to the User Outcome Connections that need to be validated, a centralized location for all insights must be created. The third component of the Impact Mindset is the creation of an Insights Hub to store all feature definitions and the associated evidence that supports that they are achieving their intended purpose. A byproduct of having a unified hub for data that is organized in an intuitive way is that teams will have access to it to make decisions. Building a culture of evidence-based decision-making where teams are not just able to but truly empowered to seek, create, and rely on data for decision-making is the final component of the Impact Mindset.
You don’t need to understand the intricacies at this point. Each step we take in this book will bring us toward the ideal end state. Whenever you’re lost, recall the concept of the Impact Mindset and you will be sure to find a connection to one of these four concepts.