This week on Product Love, a podcast about product, I sat down with Nir Eyal, Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which we reviewed here. Hooked is great not just because it talks through research about tendencies and powers that shape the way we interact with products, but because it actually has exercises that are invaluable for product teams.
In this episode, we actually went well beyond that and spent a lot of time talking about the difference between persuasion and coercion. Particularly interesting was to hear Nir talk about the ethics of product building. Nir says: “If you know that you’re creating addicts […] you have an ethical responsibility to do something and help these folks.”
We also talked about distraction, addiction, FOMO, and company culture.