In my last post, I summarized my 3-step coaching meta-process:

1. Start by baselining the team and their business model

2. Use a traction-driven approach to identify what’s riskiest in the business model

3. Trigger the team to change course (if needed) 

Over the next several posts, I’ll dive into these steps in more detail. Before doing that, it would help to share the theory behind this meta-process—specifically, the science of habit change or behavior design.

Why Behavior Design?

We are living in a new world where the way we build products has fundamentally changed. Succeeding in this new world requires learning new ways and unlearning old ways.

Therein lies the challenge.

New world = New Mindsets = Habit change

It requires product teams to go from being experts in the old way (the familiar) to becoming beginners in the new way (the uncertain).

This is uncomfortable — especially when teams are met with negative versus positive reinforcement like a failed experiment (which is almost a certainty with initial experiments) or when they are required to do new things that they don’t yet know how to do (like selling before building).

What happens next is quite predictable — they revert to the old way.

This is just the nature of behavior change.

Adopting anything new and worthwhile takes effort.

We encounter behavior change challenges all the time. Despite knowing the merits of doing an activity, like eating healthy, exercising regularly, or saving money, we struggle to implement them into our regular routines.

Adopting a fundamentally new product development process is no different.

The good news is that we now understand the science of behavior change a lot better thanks to the work of people like Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, BJ Fogg, Dan Ariely, Charles Duhigg, Nir Eyal, James Clear, and more.