Engagement: Vanity of Vanities

Engagement is the vanity metric of all.

It does not measure satisfaction with or utility of a product; it measures the level of addiction. The idea behind it is that more eyeballs on screens for longer is always good.

Except it isn’t. Products that do their job quietly and in the background are fine. Much better, in fact, than the millions of apps that behave like passive-aggressive Tamagotchis.

Here is a thought experiment that shows how optimizing products for engagement leads to unhealthy customer behaviour; behaviour companies condition customers to exhibit, because it is in the companies’ best interest, not the customers’.

More than Møgz

At the latest leadership strategy retreat, the chief executive of Møgz™, a company that sells plain coffee mugs, said: “Coffee is a tradition: people drink it at breakfast, in the morning and afternoon at work for a boost of energy, with friends at a café or in a diner with a slice of cherry pie, and they’ll sometimes have an espresso after dinner. Customers love our sturdy møgz, but our revenue is flat. So is our social media buzz. Nobody talks about how they are ‘Mad about Møgz’, which, as of today, is the name of our growth programme. We want our customers to love our brand maniacally. We want people to use our møgz all day long, not just when they think of coffee. We must wow our investors. Shift the paradigm. Redefine what it means to make møgz. So, the question to all of you is this: How can we make that bold vision happen?”

If that sounds nutty, you are absolutely right. If not, you have probably heard executives speak before.

Your task as product manager at Møgz is therefore to increase engagement, iteratively. We’re agile, after all.

So, what can you do? Off the top of your head, you are thinking about playing with the shape of the mug, the colour, prints, texts, and so on. These are nice ideas, but they already exist. They are also not going to make people want to hold their møgz even when they do not feel like drinking coffee.

And that’s when a light bulb goes off in your head: “We must add features that turn møgz into much more than møgz!” And with that, you run to the team for a brainstorm.

“We want customers to grab their møgz even when they do not feel like drinking. How can we reach that exciting north star, team?” you ask.

“What about making customers drink all day long?” the lead engineer offers.

“And how do we do that?”

“Well, we either design a pill that makes them thirsty all day long or build a catheter that drains their bladders.”

“Great idea! I do think that might verge on the unethical. Let’s park it on the board for now.” With that, you stick a post-it to the whiteboard. “What else? Come on, we need to think outside of the box here!”

If you were paying any attention, you would have noticed the collective eye rolling from the team. After a moment’s thought, another engineer thinks out loud: “What about adding addictive substances on the inside of the cup, so people keep drinking? Something more addictive than coffee, like, cocaine.”

“Great thinking again. Wow, we really are being creative today! I love it, but drugs are illegal in most places we operate, so that is perhaps not quite what our leadership has in mind. Let’s push the envelope a bit more here!”

A few awkward moments pass before you pre-empt similar suggestions that might attract unwanted attention from regulators: “Let’s focus on adding more features. How do we keep customers engaged?”

After a bit of thinking, your team comes up with the redesigned product with the marketing slogan: “More than Møgz.”

It’s not a coffee mug anymore. It is pure innovation!

Møgz 2.0 sports:

• A built-in display to show ads (of course!) and notifications. Lots of notifications!!! But, hey, it’s for people’s own good: the company is committed to their continued hydration!
• A USB port for charging the mug, which might prove tricky when doing the dishes. But that’s a problem the male-only team never would have thought about anyway. And neither will the guys on the executive team, so that’s all right. What is more, the company can offer a future version that is dishwasher safe. Or better yet: move incrementally towards dishwasher safety and sell Møgz-safe liquids for cleaning, which means even more money!
• A gamification engine to make drinking fun and necessary for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. And if they do not yet have an OCD, they will soon enough.
• Bluetooth connectivity for an app that nags people to drink more coffee, but only from their møgz, of course.
• An app with its own monetization mechanism, so that means ads on both displays. There is always space for more ads!
• And social features, because who does not want to pose in public to pledge allegiance to their favourite brand?

Just so many possibilities for future monetization!

In the app, customers can see vital statistics, such as the volume of coffee left, the amount of caffeine consumed per day, their lips-to-møgz time, and what have you. Customers can also configure photos from their phone to be displayed on their møgz, so that means the company gains access to millions of private pictures. Let’s upload these to the cloud for now and figure out what to do with all that data later. Probably something with AI, because why not?! Blackmail sounds exciting, too.

Oh, and say goodbye to the sturdy coffee mugs of yesterday and hello to today’s brittle but brilliant garbage, because planned obsolescence is good for business. To ensure the environment freaks do not repair broken møgz, you ask the ceramics team to come up with a new formula that shatters møgz into dust rather than fragments. Maybe the company can even offer a kintsugi edition from old møgz to appeal to these people. They are satisfied customers but they do not move the needle on ARR. That is annual recurring revenue for people who do not yet have a brain lesion from talking to PMs. The genius of the idea is that they don’t even have to be recycled; they just have to have a label that says so. And if customers can assemble their own møgz, the company can save on packaging while introducing weak spots, too. A win-win. Awesome!

The team’s board is now full of sh… product ideas for a future designed to extract from loyal customers their most valuable resource: cash. Here is a sample of what they have come up with:

• A heart rate sensor built into the handle so you can see your heart rate spike in real-time as you drink a hot caffeinated beverage.
• A built-in speaker (without volume control) because everybody loves audio ads in the morning and maybe also music.
• An advanced gamification engine to boost engagement and unlock special features, such as an app-controlled volume control.
• A GPS tracker to offer location-based services (i.e. more ads) and recommend coffee brands approved by the board of directors (i.e. companies they happen to be on the board of).
• AI-powered smart features, because maybe one day in the distant future someone on some team within the company has a bright idea; if not, there’s always more ads to cram into the product. And AI sells better than sex, at least to investors, which was the impetus for the final pièce de résistance:
• Crypto micropayments and something-or-other with blockchains. Needs a bit of work, though.

But the key to success is of course a subscription: all these neat features are available for only $9.99 per month. Your annual bonus is guaranteed. Such innovation!

If all that sounds absolutely bonkers, you are absolutely right. If you think it doesn’t happen, think again. Better yet: look at your phone and notice the infinity of annoyances built in to capture your attention. It is a stream of microaggressions designed to treat you and every other customer like an addict: as long as you consume the product when the company wants you to, upgrade when they need you to boost their bottom line, you are a good customer. If not, you are about to be inundated with more notifications until you give in. Products optimized for engagement are toxic.

What to do

If you are a product manager and you are designing your products for engagement, stop it! Not every product needs to be used every day, every week, or even every month. Even if people want to use your product every day, you do not have to turn customers into addicts. Think about the long-term impact of your product decisions on customers for once. Design your damn products for healthy usage.

The field of product management feeds off books such as Nir Eyal’s Hooked, Amy Bucher’s Engaged, Richard Thaler’s Nudge, and Stephen Wendel’s Designing for Behaviour Change, irrespective of whether the behavioural science behind these is solid or not. Nobody asks why customers must be nudged, engaged, and hooked. Or why we must alter their behaviour.

And if your metrics still rely on 30 days, you are introducing bias, because customer behaviour is seasonal: by time of day, day of the week, and so on. 28 days are much better to even out weekly effects than 30, but you would have noticed that if you had not swallowed the HEART framework whole without thinking. Happiness (H), retention (R), and task completion (T) are much more valuable for healthy product usage than adoption (A) and engagement (E), which are addictive, growth-at-all-costs metrics. Task completion is admittedly much harder to measure than time spent inside an app, though.

“But engagement is positively correlated with key business metrics, such as retention!”

Obviously! Addiction turns ordinary people into addicts who rarely change their (bad) habits. And stop reading so much in iffy correlations.

Successful products need not be addictive. A healthy product must answer three basic questions:

1. Does the product actually do what customers expect it to do?
2. Can customers figure out how to do what they expect the product to do?
3. Are they sufficiently satisfied with the product, so they want to keep using it?

Anything else leads to vanity metrics and hostility towards customers.

So, think before you define your f’n metrics!