The Product X

This is another stab at writing about the X, and what it can do. I wanted to start with the X at the product level. There will be later sections on the X as a tool for leaders, and the X as a critical tool for distributed decision-making, which is its ultimate superpower.

In the early 2000s, I worked at Electronic Arts (EA) on a game called The Sims. I started not long after Maxis (the developer) had been acquired by EA, and not only did the Maxis team relocate from Walnut Creek to EA’s large campus in Redwood Shores, it was also a time of tumultuous culture change as a small, progressive, “customer delight”-focused team got subsumed by a corporate behemoth. It wasn’t quite as bad as that sounds, but at least from my vantage point, it wasn’t a whole lot better.

I was a lowly peon at the time, but one thing I remember clearly was as one of the iterations of The Sims was being ramped up, the team leads had to put together a presentation on “The X” for the new EA overlords. This was a one-sentence description of what the game was going to be about. There could be an “inward-facing” X, which might reference other games as shortcuts and be a sort of “insider” exec’s elevator pitch, and there would be an “outward-facing” X, which was more like a marketing slogan that wouldn’t reference any other products.

At the time, this struck me as a sign of the EA execs’ laziness and the catastrophic end of everything that made Maxis special. Not only could they not be bothered by a detailed description of the game, they couldn’t even be bothered by an elevator pitch? They could only be bothered to read one sentence about the game we were going to spend years of our lives working on? I thought it was a reductionist sign of tremendous disrespect.

Years later, I changed my mind. A lot. And now, I think of “The X” as one of the most powerful tools in a product development arsenal.

What changed?

Me.

My understanding of it was always wrong. Yes, there was some degree of “Keep it super simple for the execs who have a lot on their plates,” but that wasn’t the main point. The main point was that the X was only partially for the execs. The far more important use of the one-sentence description of the game you were building was focus.

And that focus was for everyone at every level.

For the execs, it let them understand if the game we were talking about was aligned with the high level goals of the company.

For the team leads and decision-makers, it let them know if the decisions they were making aligned with the core purpose of the game.

For the individual contributors who were building the thing, it let them understand if their work was aligned with what the game needed to do.

For the audience, it let them know if the game was the right fit for them.

EA was a very “waterfall” company. Direction came from the top. Planning came from the top. You executed on whatever the plan was, and Producers and Development Directors would hold you accountable to the plan. The interesting thing for me is that while I learned of “The X” at EA, it wasn’t until years later that I fully realized its potential… and why EA’s approach to development completely missed The X’s superpower. The funny thing was that it took working at a much less corporate, much less organized, super chaotic place to understand why the X was important, and what it could really do.

There are three levels of the X that I want to focus on here:

• How the process of creating an “X” isn’t usually what comes first, but it does come relatively early, because it really helps you understand what you’re trying to build.
• How the X helps you, as a leader, prioritize your goals and communicate them to the team in a way that is clear and easily understood.
• The X’s superpower, which lets you get your entire team engaged in ways they’ve never, ever been before.

Creating The X

The first thing you do isn’t to sit down and craft one perfect sentence that describes your product.

Sometimes you’re starting with a problem. Like, “We want to use VR to help post-stroke patients through rehab in more engaging and effective ways.” That sounds like an X, but it’s not. It does some of the things that an X should do - it identifies an audience and a tool, and starts to define a goal. But it’s not specific. That’s fine. We’re just starting out.

When I was faced with that exact task at a previous job, the first thing we did was experiment. We knew the core idea was that VR could do things for stroke patients that weren’t possible in “real life”, and we had some hardware specs for some sensors we were required to use. But beyond that, there were almost no other constraints.

A previous team had done some mockups that were very clinical. It was like having a virtual yoga instructor in a sterile apartment guiding you through exercises, and you’d get some “virtual” feedback on how you were doing. I found it… uninspiring, even though it technically accomplished the goal.

So we talked to patients. We talked to therapists. We learned as much as we could about what people currently do to help post-stroke patients, and one of the most important things we learned was that even though therapy was proven to be beneficial, and would help people improve through one of the worst things that could happen to them short of death, people gave up on it. Even though the recommended “dose” of therapy was usually more than a year, people often quit in less than two weeks.

Why? What we found was what you might expect. Physical therapy is boring. It’s frustrating. If you used to be able-bodied and now you can’t move one side of your body, physical therapy is a constant reminder of how disabled you are now, and how different your life is from what it was. Progress is slow. Over two weeks, you’re likely to see almost nothing. So people gave up.

This led to two insights:

• VR and games would be really useful for this, because one thing that VR and games are both very, very good at is providing rich, over-the-top feedback when you do things.
• Being reminded of their disability and not seeing progress was the big reason people quit.

As we experimented, we began to understand that one of our main goals was to make therapy fun. Which sounds obvious, but the deeper insight here was that we couldn’t make therapy fun. We had to make something that was fun, but also happened to be therapeutic.

This was why the initial prototype I’d been shown with the sterile yoga room hit me the wrong way. It was therapeutic, but so was regular PT. If a patient engaged with the sterile yoga room, they’d run into all the same problems they did with real-life physical therapy. They made something that technically addressed the need, but they completely missed the problem.

So as we experimented, we tried something different. Stroke patients tended to be older. They tended to be people who at a point in their life where a big part of their identity was helping others. So instead of going to physical therapy, which often required many people to help them, from getting them to PT to the therapist themselves, in our VR experience, we put them into an environment that was populated by a bunch of cute animals, and the therapeutic activities they’d do would be explicitly helping these animals with something they needed.

The activities would be mechanically identical to established, proven therapy activities. Sorting boxes, reaching for objects, etc. If a therapist asks you to reach for a cereal box and put it on a shelf - something you’ve done over and over again in your life but now find impossible, it’s a stark reminder that your body is broken and the gulf between where you are and where you were is vast. It’s not just discouraging, it’s soul-crushing.

However, if a tiny adorable bird flies down from the sky and lands on a tree stump in front of you, and you reach down to pick it up and put it in its nest, where it then sings happily for you, it’s a Disney Princess moment, where you’re fulfilling a kind of universal fantasy that’s rare, if not impossible, for most people to experience in the real world. It’s captivating and delightful, and at no point in that process does it remind the patient how disabled they are. In part because we can put the nest at a point we know the player can reach, or we can “amplify” the motion of the arm in VR so that it tricks their mind into believing that they’ve moved their arm more than they have. We created lots of tools to experiment with the best ways to encourage patients to feel successful and want to continue.

The point here isn’t, “Look at this neat thing we did,” it’s that this kind of thing happened because we experimented with patients and therapists, we learned what the true underlying problems were, and found interesting ways to address them. And over time, we began to see a common thread that ran through our approach to what we were building. We understood rehabilitation didn’t need to be arduous and painful. There’s something insidious in how people think about rehab - that putting in enough work will make you better. That if you’re not better, it’s because you didn’t have the moral character to do the work. I hope that’s not how you see it - but it is a common perspective.

For us, we realized that the fundamental “core” of our product was rooted in play. When you’re a baby or a toddler, whether you’re a human or a puppy or a lion, you learn through play. You wrestle with your siblings, you play-act hunting or chase or house. You learn to manipulate your body through play - simulation of real-world activities with low stakes and no risk. Add the exaggerated feedback of videogames and VR to that.

Engaging, effective rehabilitation for stroke survivors rooted in play.

That was our X. And it completely differentiated what we were doing from every other medical company under the sun, because while there will zillions of companies trying to do “VR for medical”, most of them didn’t come from a gaming background, or really understand how to use VR at all. Our approach married the deep experience of a collective person-century+ worth of AAA game development with similar levels of medical expertise.

Our goal was to keep players engaged. It had to be medically effective. It was focused on stroke survivors, because that dictated some of the specific kinds of activities we were doing, and it was rooted in play - simulation of real world activities with low-stakes/high feedback.

Where’s “VR”? Shouldn’t that be part of it? Maybe. But I think in this case, it was better to not call it out explicitly. If we found more effective, more engaging rehab solutions rooted in play than VR, we shouldn’t be constrained by that. If VR was the best solution (and in our case we believed it was), then great.

So the X wasn’t the first thing that we did. We would never have gotten to the understanding of what the X should have *been* had we not done the research and blue-sky experimentation first. If we’d had an X we’d made, all the discussions with patients and therapists would have been biased toward our “goal” rather than the critical conversations that led us to that goal.

(that's it for now)