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The Digital Executive
Building Products People Love: Tetiana Kobzar on Gamification, Data-Driven Design, and Startup Growth | Ep 1127
00:15:39
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Tetiana Kobzar. Tetiana Kobzar is a founder, technologist and product strategist with over 15 years of experience bridging the gap between software and business outcomes. With a master's in computer science and hands on coding roots, she understands technology at its core. Real strength is helping startups transform ideas into products people actually want to use. In 2013, she founded Diversito, an award winning software development company that has since supported more than 65 startups across health tech, edtech and IoT. She also leads Cure Range, a health tech startup making supplement choices simple and effective. Well, good afternoon Tanya. Welcome to the show.
- [00:56]
B
Hi Brian, thanks for having me.
- [00:58]
A
Absolutely my friend, I appreciate it. And I know you had to get out of your busy schedule to jump on this podcast. Typically you're in London, but today you're calling out of the country of France. So we're about a six, seven hour difference from where I'm at here in Kansas City. So thank you again. And Tanya, if I could, I'm going to jump into your first question. You began with hands on coding and technical roles, but then grew into founding and leading Diversito. What was the hardest internal transition you had to make from doing the tech work yourself to letting go, delegating and leading the vision. How did you navigate all that?
- [01:35]
B
That's a very good question because indeed being able to do a good tech is very different from being able to run a successful business. And so I think that for me the biggest difficulty was to transition from the developer, from project manager to a business owner. And I needed to learn a lot. So because I knew good the delivery part, development, management, production, but business marketing, sales, finance, corporate finance and also HR recruitment. So all those areas I needed to educate myself about. So that's actually what is I am doing and I keep improving in all those fields. So that was like the biggest mental shift of like, you know, just doing a great tech is not enough and that was realized. And of course when you're growing, when you are getting more people in the team, you cannot do everything yourself. And you need to learn to delegate, you need to learn to trust, but not just give everything to the person and never check because you need to do it in iterations. So you delegate but you control and then you're delegating bigger chunks and you're less control. And that is like that the process that, that also is quite difficult after like being A good single contributor when you're managing the team and when you're managing the departments. So that's that hard thing.
- [03:10]
A
Absolutely. And my hats off to you for doing that. Obviously it's hard when it's your company, your baby that you built to delegate's hard enough. But then you had to learn a lot about the operations. You talked about HR and sales and different things, but you did it. You were able to step into that. And I know it was challenging, so I really appreciate that. And I was a developer in my. That's how I cut my teeth when I got into technology, by the way, so appreciate that. So Tanya, you emphasize the gaming that gamification is not just about points and badges. Can you walk us through a product where you work on where gamification or behavioral design made a real difference in. In stickiness or motivation? What principles or mechanics did you lean on most?
- [03:57]
B
Yeah, gamification and behavioral design is my passion because I started as a game developer and even like though my company, we work with like different industries and very few game games, but we do a lot of like gamification techniques. We do a lot of like, you know, motivational design and other things. And I believe that that's like the most important thing is how users feel using your application rather than the features they can do. Like, you know, even the ease of using your app is not that important as those emotions that user do and their motivation to perform their desired action. So that's why keeping this in mind rather than like the simple like the shortest path to the required action is very important. And like in almost all our projects, the gamification, especially with when it's like apps for kids, it makes a very big difference. So we have several projects that helped kids to learn better with the gamification. Like you know, when you're incorporating the learning objectives into the game, they are more like likely and more happily to do it. Now we have, we are publishing the very cool project with one of the biggest children's hospital in the uk. When we did the gamified solution that helped kids with their speech development. So that's like kids who have problem with, with their speech and they're going through the speech therapy to make them more engaged to practice at home. We created this, this solution, another very good example. It, it was a California startup we worked with and we created. It was like more designed for the elderly people or people who have some cognitive issues and who needed to have their like their cognitive abilities checked very regularly so that after stroke with dementia after some brain surgeries or something. And they like, they had a lot of like pen and paper tests and they hated to do them and they like and were not motivated too much to do their best because like they're all the same and they're boring. And so we replaced like I think that almost all of those pen and papers test with 29 mini games and all the. It's. So this also proves that gamification is not only for kids because those like, you know, elders, three people and they were anyway much more motivated to, to do the test. They were much motivated to do their best inside the game. So like, you know, instead of just pressing some button as fast as you could, you were pressing the button on the screen to run away of the like Angry Bird or something like that. So that is like much more. Or instead of repeating the words, you are just playing the spy who is overhearing the passwords and you are just, you know, you're progressing to the next level when you remember all the this not conn words in a row. So there are a lot of application, a lot of interesting cases and yeah, I'm truly believed that's a way to do software. Keeping the emotions and motivation in mind.
- [07:09]
A
Absolutely. I appreciate that and it's great to hear you were a game developer. I think that was always an aspiration for me when I was really young. But I like how you used and you understand that part of it, the gamification. But you used it and you said some examples there around Children's Hospital, obviously for their speech impediments. And then with elderly folks, there's always a way that you can bring in some sort of motivation with gamification so that you can actually help people that have some sort of difficulties and help them learn as well. So I really appreciate that. And Tanya, many products fail by building features nobody uses. Or what practices, research techniques or feedback loops do you rely on to ensure that your billing aligns with real user problems? When have you pivoted based on user insights or maybe ignored them wrongly?
- [08:02]
B
Yeah, you're absolutely right. So that's what I'm always saying, that we cannot improve something that we are not measuring. And so that's why it's very important to measure as much as possible, to collect as much data about user behavior as possible. That is also one of the things that I always recommend to my clients and that's often overlooked when you start the project and you are in a rush to, to do the features as fast as possible and release them to the People is to start with the logging as soon as possible. So collect all the user activities inside the app or inside the product. It could be done. There are like multiple tools that help to do it. Like you know, Crashlytics or the similar ones or the internal just server logs of the user user activities, what they did. Even if you are not going to process it right now, better to have this data and when you need it, you have access to it and you can visualize it. You can see where users get stuck. What screen do they spend the most time at? Very important is like the crucial thing is what screen or what functionality or what part of your application. People close the app or they go somewhere else. Because that is the most like problematic thing that you need to address. Because like when you are losing attention of your user. So that is like a very, very big opportunity that they are not coming back. Because probably something in the app is not. I mean especially if they are leaving before completing the action that is needed to be done on this screen. So that is like all those data and you need to analyze it regularly. So we did a lot of this especially in the game like app when you see when you have different levels or different mini games and you see that for example statistics and you see that in some level. So people play until some level and then they not playing further. So that means that you need to look inside and you need to either make it easier or more interesting or you know, so they're having some problem there. Also there are like, you know, if you're working with Vampire solution, there are multiple tools that help you also even do the like heat maps like mouse flow or similar. So when you see where they spent most of the time with their cursor where so you it's. You can even see how they are getting confused if they go there and then they okay, now they're moving to the other direction. So like yeah, absolutely. I absolutely agree. You need to measure as much as possible and you need to analyze this data also like as often like as possible. And also any feature, any idea, it should be treated as a hypothesis. So as a assumption that needs to be either proven right or proven wrong. So never just invent some feature and go for it without like, okay, so what we are trying to achieve with this functionality and how we can say if we achieved it or not. So it should be some measurable goal and we need to check if we are getting what we are expecting of it.
- [11:11]
A
Thank you, that's very helpful. And what I really took away from this is you're really focused on that, on the customer and the customer experience. What I really liked to hear is that you actually look at the logs to see what people are actually doing, which is very helpful because a lot of times business requirements as you know, just don't always cut it. Sometimes there's things that are missing or not explained well or not translated well. So I appreciate the insights there. And Tanya, the last question I have for you today. For early stage founders or product builders without big budgets, what minimal set of tools, processes or mindsets would you recommend to start building something people want and then scale it? What mistakes do you see new founders repeatedly falling into?
- [11:58]
B
So from my experience what I see is in my recommendation is to start with mvp, always with the minimum viable product and I mean minimal but still viable. So if you're especially in the limited budget and you don't have like all the time to do it. So just what is the like the main feature of the of your app? What makes you different from the other sponsor that already available on the market? So why users would want to try it? But let's have it only like one main feature first because like often especially like you know when they're startup founder, they're inspired and they have so many ideas and they want to and all of them seem to be very important but they are like covering the very different areas of problem that we are trying to address and they are like sometimes they even like combination of all the apps existing in one thing but it's like it's not the right way to go because like you need to deliver something, you need to see, you need to measure that we discussed in the previous question. And also you need to make sure to pivot early as well if you, if you see the need of it. So like you know this, this one thing that I really recommend to focus on this minimum viable product and another thing that I also see a lot of first time founders, they miss this part is to think what is going to happen next after you have your software built so you have your product and what are you doing with it with it because like get new users is very hard and expensive task. So you need to understand how you at least like roughly you need to plan how are you going to get the new user. So user acquisition is something that often overlooked by first time founders. The second and third time founder, they are much more practical, much more structured in this part but it's not enough to build a very good software for people to use it because there is so much noise now so much. Every day, I don't know, hundreds of new apps appear on the App Store and it's like so, so difficult to stand out. And even if you, your app is absolutely brilliant and or your idea is awesome, you still need to gain this critical mass of users to start the organic growth before that. It will be like, you know, very, very hard. And that is something that you need to include in your business strategy even before the development.
- [14:45]
A
Thank you, I appreciate that. I know there's a lot of entrepreneurs, developers, technologists in, in our audience here on the podcast, so. But just to take away you, I think you see hit the nail on the head there with having that mvp. Minimal viable product is so important. And be prepared to make changes, accept feedback, obviously early on, and then you need to pivot sometimes to be prepared for that. But it is a crowded marketplace out there. You've gotta, you've gotta get that critical mass of users, as you said, and start to build that organic growth. So I really appreciate the feedback and the insights. Tanya, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
- [15:28]
B
Thank you for having me, Brian. Have a good day.
- [15:30]
A
Bye for now.