Michelle: Companies spent over $220 billion on advertising in the U.S. last year. What if almost all of it was a massive waste of money, not because the ads were bad, but because the products themselves were designed completely backward? Mark: Designed backward? What does that even mean? You build a product, then you advertise it. How else would it work? Michelle: That's the exact question at the heart of Start at the End by Matt Wallaert. And he's not just some theorist; Wallaert was Microsoft's behavioral scientist and the Chief Behavioral Officer at a major health company. He argues that the 'build-then-sell' model is fundamentally flawed. Mark: Okay, a Chief Behavioral Officer. That’s a title you don’t see every day. It sounds like he’s seen the messy reality of how these things get made. So he’s saying the problem isn’t the marketing, it’s the thing being marketed? Michelle: Precisely. He believes we're obsessed with the wrong question. We ask, "What should we build?" and then spend billions trying to convince people to use it. Wallaert says the better question, the one that leads to real change, is: "What behavior do we want to create?" Mark: Huh. That feels both obvious and… completely revolutionary at the same time. It reframes the whole point of creation. It’s not about the object, it’s about the action. Michelle: Exactly. And that’s our first big idea today: why starting with a behavioral goal, not a product, is the secret to success.

Mark: Alright, I'm intrigued. Give me an example of this in action. How does starting with a behavior instead of a product actually work in the real world? Michelle: The perfect case study is one from Wallaert's own time at Microsoft, with the "Bing in the Classroom" program. The initial problem was simple: kids in schools weren't using the Bing search engine as much as Microsoft wanted. Mark: Okay, I can guess the next step. The marketing department probably cooked up a huge, expensive ad campaign with the slogan "Bing: Fueling Your Curiosity!" or something equally cheesy. Michelle: That's exactly what they wanted to do! It’s the default move. But Wallaert’s team stopped them. They didn't start with a solution. They started by defining the desired behavior with extreme clarity. Their behavioral statement was: "When students have a curiosity question in school near a computer, they’ll use Bing to answer it." Mark: That sounds a bit like corporate-speak, but I see the point. It’s specific. So what did they find when they actually looked at that behavior? Michelle: They went into classrooms to observe, and what they discovered was fascinating. The problem wasn't that students lacked curiosity. They had tons of questions. The real issue was the teachers. Mark: The teachers were the problem? I thought they’d want kids to be searching for information. Michelle: They did, but they were terrified. They were worried about kids stumbling onto inappropriate content, being bombarded with ads, student data privacy, and the chaos of 30 kids going down internet rabbit holes at once. The teachers' anxiety was a massive, invisible wall blocking the desired behavior. Mark: Whoa. So the barrier wasn't a lack of motivation in the students, but a huge amount of friction from the teachers. It was an anxiety problem, not a curiosity problem. Michelle: Exactly. So, instead of a flashy ad campaign, the team built a product that directly addressed the teachers' fears. They created a special version of Bing for schools that had the strictest SafeSearch locked on, zero advertisements, and enhanced privacy protections. They even provided structured lesson plans to help teachers guide the search process. Mark: Wait a second. So they didn't add anything for the students? They actually took things away—ads, unrestricted search—to make the teachers feel safe. That's completely counter-intuitive. Michelle: It is! And it worked spectacularly. Search queries in the pilot schools shot up 40%. They didn't need to "promote" curiosity; they just needed to remove the barriers that were inhibiting it. It’s a perfect example of starting at the end. They defined the behavior, found the real-world friction, and designed the solution around that, not around a preconceived product idea. Mark: That makes me think of the first iPhone. Its genius wasn't just what it added, but what it took away: the terrible, clunky interfaces, the physical keyboards, the confusing menus of all the phones that came before it. It just removed all that friction. Michelle: You've nailed it. Apple understood the desired behavior was "people want to have the internet in their pocket, all the time, without a headache." They solved for that behavior by removing the inhibiting pressures of the old technology. And that concept of pressures is the real engine of Wallaert's whole process.

Mark: Okay, "pressures." Let's break that down. It sounds like a physics term, but we're talking about human psychology. Michelle: It's a beautifully simple concept. Wallaert says every behavior is the result of a battle between two forces. First, you have "promoting pressures," which are the things that push you toward a behavior. Then you have "inhibiting pressures," which are the things that push you away from it, or create friction. Mark: So for my morning coffee, the promoting pressure is "I'll feel awake and happy." The inhibiting pressure is "I have to get out of my warm bed, grind the beans, and wait for it to brew." Michelle: A perfect, and very real, example. And your decision to get coffee depends on which set of pressures wins out in that moment. The book uses the example of M&M's. The taste, the bright colors, the satisfying crunch—those are all promoting pressures. Mark: And the inhibiting pressures would be... the price, the fact that I have to get up and go to the store to buy them, and the quiet voice in my head saying "you know, that's pure sugar." Michelle: Exactly. And here’s the key insight: most companies, and most of us in our own lives, have a massive blind spot. We almost always focus on amping up the promoting pressures. We think, "To sell more M&M's, we need to make them taste even better! Add a new flavor! A bigger bag!" Mark: Right, we try to add more reasons to say yes. Michelle: But Wallaert argues that it's often far more powerful to focus on reducing the inhibiting pressures. Think about Uber. Its success wasn't built on making the car ride more luxurious. They didn't add champagne and leather seats—those are promoting pressures. Mark: No, they did something else. They attacked the things we all hated about getting a taxi. Michelle: They obliterated the inhibiting pressures. The anxiety of not knowing when your ride will show up? Gone, there's a map. The awkwardness of fumbling for cash or a credit card? Gone, it's automatic. The hassle of standing on a corner waving your arm like a maniac? Gone, you just tap a button. Uber's genius was its relentless focus on removing friction. Mark: It’s like trying to get a cat to come inside. You can shout its name and wave a toy—that's a promoting pressure. But it’s probably more effective to just open the door wider and put a bowl of food right inside. You're not forcing the cat, you're just making the path of least resistance lead right to where you want it. Michelle: That’s a fantastic analogy. You're not controlling the behavior directly; you're designing the environment of pressures around it. And the reason we have this blind spot is a quirk of human psychology called prospect theory. The research shows that losses hurt us more than equivalent gains feel good. Losing twenty dollars feels way worse than the joy of finding twenty dollars. Mark: So removing a pain point—an inhibiting pressure—is psychologically more powerful than adding an equivalent pleasure, or a promoting pressure. Michelle: Precisely. Eliminating the five-minute anxiety of waiting for a taxi is a much bigger win for our brains than making a 15-minute ride 5% more comfortable. But this whole idea of designing pressures to change behavior… it does bring up a pretty big, and slightly uncomfortable, question.

Mark: Yeah, I was just thinking that. Manipulating pressures to change behavior... this is starting to sound a little, well, manipulative. Where is the ethical line here? Michelle: This is where the book gets really important, and it's a question Wallaert confronts head-on. He argues that behavior change isn't inherently good or bad, but it carries a huge responsibility. He gives some chilling examples of when it goes wrong. Mark: I have a feeling I know where this is going. Michelle: Think about Uber again. A few years ago, it was revealed they were using behavioral science to keep drivers on the road longer, even when they were tired. They would send notifications like "You're only $10 away from making $300 for the day!" which exploits our brain's aversion to incomplete goals. Or they'd automatically queue up the next ride before the current one was even finished, making it psychologically harder to log off. Mark: That's just dystopian. They're using these psychological tricks to get drivers to act against their own self-interest, like getting enough rest. Michelle: It's a clear ethical breach. And then there's the infamous Facebook "emotional contagion" experiment, where they deliberately altered the News Feeds of nearly 700,000 users to show them either more positive or more negative posts, just to see if it would change the emotional content of their own posts. Mark: Without their consent, of course. They were literally trying to see if they could make people sadder. That’s horrifying. Michelle: It is. And Wallaert uses these examples to build a clear ethical test. The most important question is: are you helping people do something they already want to do, or are you imposing a behavior on them for your own benefit? The first is ethical; the second is not. Mark: So, with Bing in the Classroom, the teachers wanted kids to learn, they were just afraid. The intervention helped them achieve their own goal. With the Uber drivers, they wanted to go home and rest, but the intervention pushed them to do the opposite. Michelle: You've got it. And the most powerful, ethical interventions often tap into something even deeper: our sense of identity. A brilliant example is the #LikeAGirl campaign by Always. For decades, the phrase "you run like a girl" was an insult. It was an inhibiting pressure on girls' confidence in sports. Mark: Oh, I remember that campaign. It was incredible. Michelle: It was a masterclass in what Wallaert calls "moderation." They didn't just say "that's a mean thing to say." They showed adults acting out "run like a girl" in a silly, weak way. Then they asked young girls to do the same, and the girls just ran—powerfully, confidently. The campaign didn't invent a new behavior; it weakened the negative association between the identity of "girl" and the behavior of "being bad at sports." It was empowering, not manipulative. Mark: It changed the pressure. It made the identity of 'girl' a source of strength, a promoting pressure. Michelle: And that leads to the final piece of the puzzle: when you want to eliminate a bad behavior, you have to replace it with something that honors the underlying motivation. The decades-long campaign against smoking is a great example. We added inhibiting pressures like taxes and warning labels. We reduced promoting pressures by banning ads. And smoking rates plummeted. Mark: A huge public health victory. Michelle: Yes, but we left a vacuum. The motivation for many young smokers wasn't just nicotine; it was about identity, looking cool, and social ritual. And what rushed in to fill that vacuum? Mark: Vaping. Juul. Michelle: Exactly. A new product that served the same underlying identity needs. Wallaert argues a truly complete intervention would have also provided a positive replacement—a new way to satisfy that need for social identity that didn't involve inhaling chemicals. It shows that you can't just stop a behavior; you have to give that human motivation somewhere else to go.

Mark: Wow. So after all this, what's the one big takeaway? Is this just a better way to build apps and sell more stuff? Michelle: I think it's a fundamentally different way of seeing the world. It's about realizing that everything we create—a product, a company policy, a public health campaign, even a conversation—is an intervention in someone's life. The question isn't if we're changing behavior, because we always are. The question is whether we're doing it with intention, with science, and with ethics. Mark: That’s a much bigger idea. It’s not just for product managers at Microsoft; it’s a lens for everyone. It makes you look at the world and see the invisible pressures shaping everything we do. Michelle: And the most powerful part is that it starts with simply asking: what's one small inhibiting pressure I can remove for someone today? Maybe it's for a customer, by simplifying a confusing form. Maybe it's for a coworker, by clarifying an ambiguous task. Or maybe it's for yourself, by finally putting your running shoes right by the door. Mark: I love that. It brings it down to a human scale. It’s not about grand manipulation, it’s about making the right thing the easy thing. What's a small friction you've noticed in your own life that you could design away? We'd love to hear your 'pressure maps.' Let us know. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.