Events

We’ve all been in a bad meeting. Actually, we’ve probably been in a lot of them. A good meeting is hard to get right — but Miter, an early-stage startup committed to improving meetings, is using thoughtful design to change that. Informed by behavioral science, organizational behavior, and human psychology, Miter is developing software to help people organize and lead better meetings. 

Miter CEO David Feldman has led teams at Gmail, Facebook Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger and co-founded Emu, a smart messaging app acquired by Google. Dave holds a CS degree from Harvard and somehow still runs a good meeting.

As a seasoned go-to-market leader, Miter COO Damian Wisniewski has built a career around meeting with people. He’s built multiple sales practices at early-stage startups and previously worked at LinkedIn. Damian holds a Mathematics degree from Harvard, an MBA from MIT Sloan.

Dr. Ashley Whillans is an assistant professor at the Harvard Business school, advisor to Miter—and a friend of Irrational Labs. Her research focuses on the links between time, money, and happiness. She is the author of Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time & Live a Happier Life. An expert on time management, she wouldn't schedule a meeting that could have been an email — so you can be sure this event will be worth it.

Product Design with Psychology in Mind

Is it true that 'time is money'? What can we learn about the psychology of time that can help us make smarter decisions?

Join Colin West for insights into time perception and behavior change drawn from an original field experiment on time poverty — at this Irrational Labs open event.

Who is Colin? He’s a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management, and a behavioral scientist at Irrational Labs.

He has also worked with the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, a US nonprofit based in Nairobi, focused on advancing and applying behavioral science in the Global South. 

Don't miss this chance to gain practical insights into time perception that you can use in your work!

What's Worth More – Time or Money? A Field Experiment with Colin West

Billing is complicated—but it doesn't have to be. At least PadSplit Behavioral Product Manager Shea Fallick and PadSplit VP of Product Mimi Kim thought so.

PadSplit provides a formalized way to sublet and rent a room in a shared apartment, helping to make more housing available for low-income earners. It's an important project, and it's been successful. But as they've expanded, they found that Customer Experience team members were fielding a significant number of billing questions from hosts and renters through their online program, and the volume of questions had become unmanageable. Hoping to reduce customer support costs (and ease the strain on their team), they leveraged behavioral science principles to make the process smoother.

Using new behavioral research from the University of Oregon, in conjunction with the product development cycle, they created new views of their members’ finances for admins and members. The result? They gave their Customer Experience team 350 hours / month back.

This event is an opportunity for behavioral designers, UX researchers, CX experts, and behavioral scientists interested in the PadSplit model, to learn about how they applied behavioral principles to their work, and ask questions along the way.

How PadSplit Simplified Billing and Gave its Team 350 Hours / Month Back

Can behavioral science save us from bad marketing? New platforms and algorithms, metric myopia, and funnel vision make marketing hard—but Buffer Senior Product Marketer and Nudge podcast host Phill Agnew has a solution: human psychology.

Join him to learn about 7 behavioral science tools that will turbocharge your marketing. Phill will share his insights into driving positive behavior change—while building brands and experiences that people love. 

You’ll leave this event with actionable ways to apply behavioral principles to your work—and cure marketing misery. Don’t miss out!

7 Behavioral Science Tools to TurboCharge Your Marketing | With Phill Agnew of Buffer

Need behaviorally informed advice on your course, work, website, or product?

Whatever your question, Irrational Labs CEO & Co-Founder Kristen Berman has answers.

Drop in and get direct access to Kristen's brain during this month's drop-in hours.

🎟 Ask Kristen Anything 

How do you spread positivity in your workplace and create more wellbeing? Louis Alloro has a few ideas—big ideas. A social entrepreneur who creates and facilitates evidence-based learning experiences, he's an expert at helping teams dig deeper and reach higher.

Since 2008, Louis has trained and certified thousands of practitioners and workplaces in applied positive psychology and wellbeing science. His passion? Helping companies, cities, and campuses form Wellbeing Coalitions that can change conversations and behaviors for the better—at scale.

 and The Change Lab and a senior fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Wellbeing at George Mason University—and we're excited for him to share his insights.

Don't miss this event if you want to learn how to use positive psychology to make your workplace (and workforce) happier and healthier!

6 Ways to Refresh Your Workplace in 2023 | Louis Alloro of The Wellbeing Lab & Hone

Incentive design is tricky, and easy to get wrong. But when is it appropriate, and when not? And how do you design incentives that actually work? Richard Mathera shares his insights using examples from real cases where the Irrational Labs team designed incentives using behavioral science.

? As Managing Director at Irrational Labs, he leads the company's healthcare practice and formerly led its financial decision-making work. Richard has overseen dozens of behavioral economics projects and experiments with commercial clients.

Don't miss this opportunity to learn about incentive design from an expert and senior behavioral scientist! 

🎟 How to Design Incentives That Actually Work Using Behavioral Economics with Richard Mathera

Behavioral Design member exclusive! Join behavioral scientist turned dating coach and author of the bestselling 

 Logan Ury for a Q&A session on everything you want to know about the behavioral science of dating:

As Director of Relationship Science at the dating app Hinge, Logan conducts research to help people find love. After studying psychology at Harvard, she joined Google, whose behavioral science team she helped run with Irrational Labs Co-Founder & CEO Kristen Berman.

This event is available to Behavioral Design members ONLY and is sure to get spicy, so don't miss out! 🌶️ 

Q&A With Logan Ury ("How to Not Die Alone") 

? You need to know how to influence human behavior.

Julie O'Brien has the key to this: behavioral design. By marrying behavioral economists' insights into human behavior drivers with design thinking's focus on empathy and innovation, behavioral design provides the 

tools product people need to meaningfully impact behavior

In this event, Julie will explore 3 ways that behavioral design expands on design thinking—and offer 

 for product teams to understand causality during the design process—and 

As Head of Behavioral Science at U.S. Bank, Julie bridges the worlds of academia and design. She understands the fundamental mechanics of how humans operate - and uses that to solve hard problems in products that have a real-world impact.

Don't miss this chance to learn about behavioral design from an expert on the psychology of products!

How Behavioral Design is Changing Product Development | With Julie O'Brien of U.S. Bank

How is AI shaping behavioral science, product design, and behavioral design? What can you do to stay ahead of the curve?

Join Irrational Labs behavioral scientist and futurist 

 to learn 3 ways artificial intelligence is impacting the field—and how you can navigate AI innovatively and ethically as a product manager, marketer, or designer.

If you want to keep on the cutting edge and supercharge your product development process with AI and behavioral science, this event is for you!

3 Ways AI Will Change Behavioral Design

Ever wonder how you can incorporate Behavioral Science in your organization?

Jen Koo has done it—and the insights she gained blaze a trail for others to follow.

As a behavioral scientist & VP of Experience Design at one of North America's 

, she overcame internal resistance and fear of change to bring behavioral science in-house.

The result? A cultural and organizational transformation.

Join this open event and get Jen's insight into how she embedded behavioral science practices in one of North America's largest financial institutions.

💡 How to use behavioral principles to 

💡 Which workplace incentives actually 

💡 Why reducing barriers to experimentation is the 

value of behavioral science interventions

💡 Lessons from embedding behavior change 

Looking to improve your business and user outcomes? Don't miss this chance to 

—and discover what our members are raving about.

3 Lessons from Embedding Behavioral Science in a Large Company

Looking to improve your healthcare product using insights from behavioral economics?

 will draw both from the foundational concepts of behavioral science and her experience working with healthcare products to reveal how you can "design better, behaviorally."

This member exclusive is a must-attend for anyone in product who works in healthcare, has taken our 

, or is just interested in understanding how to apply behavioral science to their work. Don't miss!

3 Behavioral Science Insights to Improve Your Healthcare Product

Ever wondered how—as in REALLY how—to apply behavioral science to product?

Rachel Rosenberg, Senior Behavioral Scientist at Indeed, will walk you through the behavioral design process from start to finish using the example of how her team solved the problem of job seekers not showing up for interviews.

This might be our most practical and comprehensive dive into the behavioral design process yet. Don't miss it!

Behavioral Product Design at Indeed: From Definition to Design

​Need behaviorally informed advice on your course, work, website, or product?

🎟 Ask Kristen Anything

Traveled lately? You've likely used a travel app, but how was the user experience? Behavioral scientist Erin Mahoney is spending a year traveling the U.S. as a digital nomad, so she's gotten a lot of practice recently identifying key behavioral areas where we can make travel better—and how certain products can help with this!

Join this exclusive Behavioral Design member event and learn:

✅ Which products are getting travel right (& which are getting it wrong)

✅ Cracking price & budget behaviorally for travelers

✅ How the pain of paying plays out for digital nomads

✅ How  for user choice (what to do, where to stay, how to get there)

✅ Which behavioral principles you can use to have a better summer vacation this year

✅ How to leverage social connection and the messenger/authority effect to have more fulfilling travel experiences

This member exclusive is a must-attend for all fellow travelers in space and time—including (but not limited to) those who work in travel or experiences. If you're currently planning your summer vacation or are just curious about how behavioral science plays out in this exciting space, this event is for you!

What Behavioral Science Tells Us About Traveling & How You Can Do It Better

It’s not always easy to bridge the gap between academia and applied behavioral science—but when we do? ✨ Magic happens—and so does a whole lot of experimentation 🧪

As Co-Director of Duke University’s CommonCents Lab and Principal at the Center for Advanced Hindsight, Mariel Beasley works at the crossroads of industry and academia. She oversees the lab’s partnerships with financial institutions while working to diagnose behavior challenges, design behaviorally-informed interventions, and then test them via RCTs. 

In other words: Mariel makes the magic (and the research!) happen every day.

💡 Dig into the CommonCents team’s process for conducting comprehensive behavioral research that improves financial decision-making

💡 ​See case studies from academic research applied directly to real-world financial orgs

💡 Learn why the peaceful coexistence of behavioral economics research and applied behavioral science is key to the advancement & growth of BOTH fields

There’s lots to learn—regardless of whether you work in FinTech, you’ve taken our 

, or you’re simply curious about the overlap between industry and academia. Don’t miss out!

From Lab to Product: Deep Dive on Research Methods in Behavioral Design

Drop in this month for a live teardown of Instagram. Afterwards, Kristen will answer all your behavioral design questions. Or you can also just show up and soak in insights :)

🎟 Instagram Teardown + Ask Kristen Anything

Ever wanted to learn a musical instrument, gain fluency in a new language, or reach peak physical shape? It's easy to intend to do things, but it's much more difficult to actually act. As product professionals, the challenge is even greater: fostering motivation at scale for the behaviors your users want to complete. Behavioral scientist Lisa Zaval has advised top companies across a variety of industries on the topic. Now, she's here to share her wisdom with you!

​Join this exclusive Behavioral Design member event and learn:

✅ The best ways to incentivize users for greater motivation

✅ The history around human motivation and why it's relevant today

✅ Why it's so dang hard to keep yourself and others motivated

​This member exclusive is a must-attend for all members working in Health and Finance with a focus on encouraging difficult behavior change. Anyone who wants to gain motivation for something in their personal life will want to tune in as well!

🎟 7 Product Design Hacks to Increase User Motivation

So, you've gotten a few quick wins at work using behavioral science - now what 🤔? When you're ready to start using it to scale the impact of your product, you're going to want to hear from some folks who have done it well before. Luckily, Elizabeth Kim is here to help! 

Elizabeth started her career as an executive assistant to Dan Ariely while pursuing her degree in Psychology at Duke University. Since then, she has led behavioral science teams at 

 (Walmart) and Spotify. Throughout her career, she has scaled structures and processes that leveraged behavioral science to make life better for users and companies more profitable.

Join us on May 26 at 9am PT to learn how to:

💡 Use AI to gain behavioral insights about users

💡 ​Build and scale a behavioral science flywheel that optimizes for business and user impact.

💡 Influence product managers and company leaders to use behavioral science and experimentation in the product development process.

She'll also share stories of how this actually worked at Spotify — and much more!

If you're working in product management, design, data science, or business strategy, you have a lot to learn from this event!

How to Scale a Behavior Change Flywheel In-House Using the 3Bs

​​Need behaviorally informed advice on your course, work, website, or product?

Drop in this month for a live teardown of Calm. Afterwards, Kristen will answer all your behavioral design questions. Or you can also just show up and soak in insights :)

🎟 Calm App Teardown + Ask Kristen Anything

Have you ever cried to a brutal break-up song 💔 or lit up after seeing an adorable puppy 🐶? If so, you probably experience emotions! And your users generally do too 🤯. 

In this EXCLUSIVE membership event 🎟, Irrational Labs behavioral scientist Monica Zhang will be teaching us about how emotions impact decision-making in the wild and what we as designers can do to help. As it often goes in the world of behavioral design, we can make a big impact here 💥.

Join us Friday, June 23rd at 10 a.m. PT to learn how to...

✅  Contextualize users' emotions to better understand your product design challenges

✅  Incorporate a behavioral science toolkit to help your team design for emotion

✅  Position your product to influence the emotions that your customers come with to both of your advantage

✅ Two key strategies to utilize your consumers' emotions effectively 

This talk is perfect for product managers, designers, engineers, data analysts, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who is working with users at scale. Come get emotional with us 😭 😍!

🎟 Emotion by Design: Harnessing Emotion to Enhance User Engagement

How do you make research an integral part of the design and development process, so that your product truly solves the problems of the people it's meant to serve? Ethnography – a qualitative method for collecting data about people – has an answer: co-creation. But what is this, exactly? Join Karen Faith of Others Unlimited to learn:

• How a leading health care brand repaired trust by addressing failings in the patient-provider relationship

• Her process for partnering with real users to inform and iterate on her work

• Why empathy is a "practice, not a feeling"

• How to address trust in brand/consumer relationships through collaborative design

• and that's just the tip of the iceberg!

An ethnographer and strategist whose work has guided teams and initiatives at Google, Amazon, Indeed, The NBA, The ACLU, Blue Cross Blue Shield, The Federal Reserve Bank, and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, among others, Karen Faith is the CEO and founder of the New York-based empathy training company 

Karen's TEDx talk on Unconditional Welcome has received over 1M views. She has taught her approach to students at Penn State, Juilliard, KU, Chapman University, and the National University of Singapore – and you're up next!

This is an opportunity to explore product design from an empathetic, innovative, and predictably irrational angle. Don't miss out!