The hidden trap of Insight Porn

Insight porn is one of the toughest product traps we don't talk enough about. It's a particularly pernicious local maxima for many products designed to help people improve (health, finances, organizations, etc.) that most products in those categories don't escape. Here's why 👇

But first, what do I mean by insight porn? Insight porn feels like the real thing but isn't. It makes you feel like you've learned something interesting but doesn't result in change. Unfortunately, as a product builder, it's incredibly hard to tell if this is happening to you.

In tech products, insight porn tends to take a very particular form. Rich charts and analysis. Interesting metrics. The ability to track something you couldn't previously. You know it, you've seen it, it's the Fitbit phenomenon and it's everywhere.

The problem is, insight porn feels useful the first time you see it. It gives the dopamine rush of discovery. It feels like you've unlocked this hidden piece of knowledge. When you put it in front of users, they love it. It feels "actionable".

The idea of tracking your steps feels magical at first. It feels richly insightful, you imagine how having something measurable is going to give you a concrete goal to work towards. You imagine all the ways this information is going to guide you and make your life better.

So what happens? You know the story. The novelty fades. The insights, under the weight of repetition, feel less insightful. You miss one day, then a couple. The numbers you used to check multiple times a day, now you haven't looked at in a week.

The dopamine rush of "insight" wears off and now the habit is much harder to maintain. You don't give up all at once - it's a slow progressive fade but the end result is the same. The product has failed to have much of an impact on your life.

This pattern plays out all the time. In health and fitness. In personal finance where I lived this first hand. In every new organizational analytics and employee engagement tool. Most products trying to offer insights and especially "actionable" insights struggle with this.

As a PM, it's incredibly hard to navigate because there is no smoking gun. It doesn't come up in user testing. It doesn't manifest as a single attrition cliff, often several smaller ones alongside a slow but steady trickle. And so, you throw your toolkit at it.

You iterate, add some new "insights." Step up your comms game. Start badging. It's subtle at first, just a few gentle nudges but gets progressively more aggressive. You keep plugging holes and it works at first. But... it only goes so far because your bucket is made of straw.

You end up with these products that are alive but not thriving, good but far from having the impact they intended. You get a Mint - good enough for a healthy exit but a shadow from its dream. You get a Fitbit - bought for $2B! - but hardly a revolution in personalized wellness.

What's the answer? There are no silver bullets but the lead one is knowing your users deeply. Understand the impact you're actually having. Understand what habits you're really changing longer term. Know not just how your insights are "actionable" but how they turn to action.

Realize that the answers aren't always going to show up in the metrics. As a math major from MIT, this one was particularly hard for me to internalize, but sometimes you need to ignore the numbers and talk to people. See the things you can't measure but still matter.

Talk to people, not just once but over time. Don't just do user interviews but use the full range of tools at your disposal. Understand how people use your product in all its detail, to the point you know your users better than they know themselves.

None of these things I'm talking about are new, but they're underutilized because we gravitate to the quantitative.

The field of user research is rich but it can get pushed to the side because it feels "soft" and because many of the people who are best at it came from those liberal arts background we love to make fun of.

Metrics are helpful but they don't tell a story. They give you useful context, but they don't paint a full picture. It's a lesson that we who love our charts too easily forget.

Avoiding insight porn is incredibly hard. You have to be prepared to kill your golden calf. But if you get it right, it's transformational. Not many have done this well - in fact I struggle to think of anyone who has truly done this at scale.

Strava and Peloton come to mind. A newer generation of products like @ouraring and @unlocklevels have learned the lessons of the past by focusing on less instead of more, and closing the loop to impact.

@ouraring @unlocklevels Perhaps, most importantly, many companies like @wealthfront and @thistleco have skipped the insights phase entirely by focusing less on telling you what to do and more on doing it for you.

@ouraring @unlocklevels @Wealthfront @ThistleCo Insight porn is one of the toughest traps because of how helpful it feels at first. It also preys on our natural bias that metrics are helpful on their own. But, unless you really pay attention, you don't know if they are truly useful.

@ouraring @unlocklevels @Wealthfront @ThistleCo If you're building a product that's trying to change people's habits, tread carefully. Make sure your "insights" actually lead to impact. Otherwise you'll end up at a local maxima with a bunch of empty calories that feel good at first but don't add much to the meal.