How to Coach Yourself and Others Beware of Manipulation | Page 259

The Manipulation Matrix
I offer a simple decision support tool for entrepreneurs, employees, and investors to be used long
before product is shipped or code is written; even before customer development has begun. The
Manipulation Matrix does not try and answer which businesses are moral or which will succeed. Nor
does it describe what can and cannot become a habit-forming technology. The matrix seeks to help you
answer not, “Can I hook users?” but “Should I attempt to?”
To use the Manipulation Matrix, the maker needs to ask two questions. First, “Will I use the product
myself?” and second, “Will the product help users materially improve their lives?”
The Facilitator
When you create something that you will use and believe makes the user’s life better, you’re
facilitating a healthful habit. It’s important to note that only you can decide if you would actually use
the service and what “materially improving the life of the user” really means.
If you find yourself squirming as you ask yourself those questions or needing to create a preamble
starting with, “If I were a…” STOP! You failed. You have to actually want to use the product and
believe it materially benefits your life as well as the lives of your users. The one exception is if you
would have been a user in your younger years. For example, in the case of an education company, you
may not need to use the service right now, but are positive you would have used it in your not so
distant past. Note however that the further you are from your former self, the lower your odds of
success.
While I don’t know Mark Zuckerberg or the Twitter founders personally, I believe from their welldocumented stories that they would see themselves as making products in this quadrant. There is also a
long list of companies creating new products to improve lives by facilitating healthful habits. Whether
getting users to exercise more, creating a habit of journaling, or improving back posture, these
companies are run by authentic entrepreneurs who desperately want their products to exist, firstly to
satisfy their own needs.
But what about when an addiction to a well-intended product becomes extreme, even harmful? For a
product in this quadrant, I agree with Paul Graham in saying the responsibility falls to the user. In any
normal distribution, a small percentage of people will be on the extremes. If the designers make a
product that they would use themselves, and they believe it improves the lives of their users, they have
fulfilled their moral obligation. To take liberties with Mahatma Gandhi, facilitators “build the change
they want to see in the world.”
The Peddler
But heady altruistic ambitions can at times, get ahead of reality. Too often, designers of manipulative
technology have a strong motivation to improve the lives of their users, but when pressed, they admit
they would not actually use their own creations. Their holier-than-thou products often try to “gamify”
some task no one actually wants to do by inserti