10x Your Product with Atomic Habits
How tiny changes lead to remarkable results in product. We’re breaking down Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Habits determine all human behavior, so if you want to 10X how you build products, how your team builds products, or just get people to use your products, you want to know Atomic Habits by James Clear. Specifically, I’ll cover three big Atomic Habits ideas in the video below, and we’ll get a bit more into habit science in this post, too.
But first, watch the video!
Atomic Habits is a masterclass on building good habits and breaking bad ones. Before we connect the dots to Product, let’s understand how habits work in the first place.
The Loop
Habits exist to give our brains a break. Habits are actions we take nearly automatically because we’ve done them enough times that our brains can act on auto-pilot, and you don’t need to think much to complete the task. Habit science tells us that there are four steps to building a habit:
Cue
Craving
Response
Reward
It’s all subconscious; your brain is constantly searching for cues. For example, in nature, the sound of a river would cue your thirst (craving), you’d respond by finding the river, and your reward is that your thirst is quenched. Your brain associates the reward with the cue, creating a loop, the habit loop, and if you go through this loop enough times, the whole thing becomes automatic, and you’ve just developed a habit.
If you’ve worked in tech, specifically building products, for the last ten years, this loop probably looks familiar to you. Nir Eyal published his best-selling book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, in 2013. It was a sensation. I remember attending a Hooked workshop back in the day and the fan-girl moment I had when Eyal stayed after the session to answer students’ questions, and I got to ask him in person about building habit loops into my own product. 🤩
Eyal did such an amazing job teaching us product builders about habits that he followed up his own work with a second book, Indistractable, to teach us how to disconnect from the habit-forming products we’ve built. (P.S. The loop in the Hooked Model is a bit different from James Clear’s version that we’re focusing on here.)
So, you already know that product managers need to understand habits to build great products. What’s so special about Atomic Habits? James Clear shares a whole framework of practical steps you can take to improve your habits. It’s an incredible resource for anyone trying to improve how they work and live. And I think three big ideas from the book are particularly helpful for product people: compounding, identity, and environment.
1. All the small things
The main idea in Atomic Habits is that small (atomic, get it?) changes that you make consistently compound over time, leading to massive wins. We often think that to achieve big things, we need to make big, heroic moves, but most of the time, the small, consistent habits we commit to make the biggest difference.
“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.” – James Clear
If you improve by just 1% every day for a year, you’ll be nearly 37 times better at that thing by the end of the year. 🤯 And this works in reverse, too. Bad habits lead to big declines.
Dave Brailsford took over the British cycling team in 2003 when they were a disaster. In a century of riding, the team had just a single Olympic gold medal. Jump forward to the 2008 Olympics, and they won 7 gold medals, 70% of all of them. How’d they do it? As the team’s performance director, Brailsford focused on 1% improvements everywhere. From the spandex to checking for dust on bicycles to personalized pillows to help riders get the best sleep. They even hired a surgeon to teach the riders how to wash their hands to reduce their risk of getting a cold by a smidge. Small improvements over time set them on a trajectory for success.
James Clear uses this story to encourage us to focus on small improvements over time and our trajectory rather than our current position. With good habits, time becomes your ally.
I’ve always been a “go big or go home” type of person, so I did not appreciate this phenomenon until recently. Now that I’ve been working long enough, I can look back on my own career and find evidence of small, consistent habits paying off massively. The trouble is you can’t see the change right away. It’s too small. You need time to work its magic.
Like when I committed to hosting a weekly presentation at work. At first, public speaking terrified me, literally putting me into a panic every Tuesday morning before my presentation, but I did it every week for two years. Next thing you know, I’m a two-time keynote speaker on-stage in front of a thousand-person audience.
Or how I blocked off study time every Friday afternoon to research technical concepts I didn’t know. I went from knowing nothing about infrastructure to being a confident platform product lead in a super technical area. In both cases, the commitment to small improvements over time set my career on a trajectory for success.
Scrum teams get it. The Scrum process forces teams to pause at the end of every two-week sprint to hold a retrospective meeting. We ask ourselves, what worked and what didn’t? And we commit to small improvements to our process, communication, and team work habits to get a little bit better in the next sprint.
What about your product? What 1% improvement can you make with every release? Can you fix small, annoying bugs or remove bits of friction? What if you add small features to increase delight for your users? These improvements compound over time for a great user experience.
This is the premise of Atomic Habits: tiny changes that seem insignificant, 1% improvements, compound over time to achieve remarkable success. Or failure if your habits are bad ones.
As product managers, there are plenty of ways we can use small, consistent habits to up our game. Here are a few ideas to get you started!
Spend a few minutes observing the products you use every day and reflect on what’s great and not great about the product’s design. This will strengthen your product sense. (Use my worksheet to help!)
Spend 15 minutes exploring your product data every day to become data-fluent.
Write every day to become a clear communicator.
Schedule a customer interview every week to increase your customer empathy.
End every 1-on-1 meeting with the question, “What can I do to help you?” to build stronger relationships with your colleagues and grow your influence.
2. Habits ↔️ Identity
Habits shape your identity and vice versa.
“The true reason that habits matter is that every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” – James Clear (Source: YouTube)
In humans, you need to establish an identity first to become the type of person you wish to be. According to Clear, it’s easy-peasy. As he writes in the book:
“It’s a simple two-step process:
Decide the type of person you want to be.
Prove it to yourself with small wins.”
So, if you want to be a writer, start saying, “I am a writer,” and you’ll naturally be more inclined to write every day because that’s what writers (you!) do.
It’s a simple yet powerful concept. It means you can transform yourself with these small actions. Because the small actions build up the proof you need to believe in your new identity, and the new identity fuels the behavior you want to develop. Pretty cool!
My husband and I used this tactic about five months ago when we realized we needed to improve our health. We kicked off a health quest by deciding, “We are healthy, fit people!” Then we proved it to ourselves with small daily wins: eating vegetables every day, standing at our desks while we work, taking our hyper-active golden retriever on not one, but two walks every day because that’s what healthy, fit people would do. I’ve lost twenty pounds, and Jeremy lost forty. By establishing that identity, we became the type of people we wanted to be.
Ok, ok, Sondra, good for you, but how does this apply to product management???
We’re getting there. 😉
With products, your product vision is that identity; it’s the type of product you want to be. And you prove it to your customers with small wins over time – you build the features that get you to that 3- to 5-year vision.
The best product companies take their identity a step further; they have a user-centric identity. They say, “We put our users first,” and they mean it.
When I was at Looker, “Love Looker Love” was a core company value. It meant our customers love us, and we love them. It was part of our identity and culture that our customers’ success is our success. This customer-centric identity helped make the company super successful, just like it did with Slack. You can check out my video for more on Slack and their customer wall of love.
If you identify as a company that puts your customers first, you’ll develop customer-first habits, like you’ll actually listen to your users. Every company says they listen to their users, but companies with a user-centric identity prove it with the atomic habit of listening over and over again.
And when you listen to your users, you’ll build things they actually need, and then they’ll buy those things because they need them, and they’re delighted that you listened. You win because they win.
When I consult with startups, I always ask, are you listening to customers? Yes is always the answer, but the team’s daily, even weekly, actions often tell a different story.
The real reason habits matter is that every action you take is a vote for the type of person or company you wish to be. So, do you identify as a customer-centric company? Do you take those actions that prove that? Because people will love you if you do, or you can be like my cable company and just say you’re listening.
The four laws of behavior change
Establishing your identity is step one, but to make habits stick, James Clear shares a framework for optimizing every step of the habit loop. He calls it the Four Laws of Behavior Change. There’s a law for each step of the habit loop, with practical tactics that enable good habits, while the inverse of each law can be used to break bad habits. Here it is in a nutshell:
To create good habits:
The 1st law (Cue) → Make it obvious.
The 2nd law (Craving) → Make it attractive.
The 3rd law (Response) → Make it easy.
The 4th law (Reward) → Make it satisfying.
In reverse, it looks like this:
To break a bad habit:
Inversion of the 1st law (Cue) → Make it invisible.
Inversion of the 2nd law (Craving) → Make it unattractive.
Inversion of the 3rd law (Response) → Make it difficult.
Inversion of the 4th law (Reward) → Make it unsatisfying.
The book goes into great detail for each law, making each one super actionable so you can start creating good habits and breaking bad ones today. I have personally used most of the tactics in my health quest, so I highly recommend checking out the book for all the details. But back to product management, there is one more idea I want to leave you with.
3. Your environment matters
Don’t underestimate the power environment has on how people behave or the products they use.
Your environment is a critical factor in the habit loop. In Clear’s Four Laws of Behavior Change framework, the tactics behind the first (Make it obvious) and third (Make it easy) laws are largely about designing your environment.
B = f(P,E)
A person’s behavior is a function of the person in their environment. Yay, science!
The habit loop starts with a cue, so make that cue an obvious and visible part of the environment to cue desired behaviors more often.
Habits don’t exist with the actual action, the response, so priming the environment to make those actions as easy as possible will make the response more likely.
An ideal environment will subconsciously trigger an easy response that leads to success.
For product leaders, this means we should design environments that make desired behaviors from our team obvious and easy. To achieve that customer-centric identity we talked about earlier, you need to design a customer-centric environment where it is dead simple to talk to customers. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Build feedback loops into your product directly so users can continuously tell you how they feel about your product, and send that feedback out in an automated report to your team.
Schedule weekly user interviews to get regular feedback on things you’re building.
Ask the customer-facing teams in your company for a brain dump on what they’re hearing from customers. Better yet, can you get them to CC their automated reports to your team?
Add “What have we learned from users this week?” to your weekly product team meeting agenda to peer pressure all the PMs to actually talk to users.
Design an environment where customer empathy is inescapable.
And remember, the real reason habits matter is that every action you take is a vote for the type of person or company you wish to be. If you want a product that is successful with customers, your company's environment must be centered around the customer, and you should be able to show the actions you took this week to prove you are a customer-centric product team.
Check out Atomic Habits by James Clear for more.
You got this!
If you’re looking for more product management lessons, here’s how I can help!
📚 Product Management Foundations course. My 9-week training program will set a strong foundation for your product career. This is a self-paced course with optional 1-on-1 sessions with me.
📺 PM Crash Course (free). A fun, free playlist of videos to introduce you to the basics of product management.
📖 Product Influence course (free). Learn simple influence principles and frameworks to take your product career to the next level.
🙋🏻♀️ 1-on-1 coaching. Book a 1-on-1 call with me for personalized coaching. You can also book time with me on Skillshare!