Dear friends, 

In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate. 

I’m doing it because a) I love reading, it is the way that I get most of my ideas, b) I’m already sharing those ideas with my team, and c) I would love to get your perspective on those. 

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💡Must-read

👉 Starbase Tour and Interview with Elon Musk (Everyday Astronaut)

1. Make the requirements less dumb. The requirements are definitely dumb; it does not matter who gave them to you. He notes that it’s particularly dangerous if an intelligent person gives you the requirements, as you may not question the requirements enough. “Everyone’s wrong. No matter who you are, everyone is wrong some of the time.” He further notes that “all designs are wrong, it’s just a matter of how wrong.”

➡️ Crucial learning for all Alaners about challenging expertise!

2. Try very hard to delete the part or process. If parts are not being added back into the design at least 10% of the time, not enough parts are being deleted. Musk noted that the bias tends to be very strongly toward “let’s add this part or process step in case we need it.” Additionally, each required part and process must come from a name, not a department, as a department cannot be asked why a requirement exists, but a person can.

3. Simplify and optimize the design. This is step three as the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist.

➡️ How do we simplify our needs? Remove parts? 

4. Accelerate cycle time. Musk states “you’re moving too slowly, go faster! But don’t go faster until you’ve worked on the other three things first.”

5. Automate. An important part of this is to remove in-process testing after the problems have been diagnosed; if a product is reaching the end of a production line with a high acceptance rate, there is no need for in-process testing.

➡️ How are we approaching this approach to quality?

• Musk restated that he believes everyone should be a chief engineer. Engineers need to understand the system at a high level to understand when they are making a bad optimization.

➡️ I really like that. I think it is super important that everyone understands the full Alan strategy, to not optimise only for local. 

• Musk noted that they are moving extremely fast as “if we operate with extreme urgency we have.

• A chance of making life multi-planetary. It’s still just a chance, not for sure. If we don’t act with extreme urgency, that chance is probably 0.” Shyamal Patel, the director of Starship operations, added to this stating that “I tell the crane operators ‘what would you do if there was an asteroid heading to this planet in 8 days?'”

🏯 Building a company

👉 Gamification of Chinese consumer tech (lillianli.substack.com)

• Every time I glanced around in restaurants or on the underground, someone was playing with a digital, and frankly, obese cat (OK, stocky). In the fragmented off-hours, people fed the cat, amassed items for it, visited their friends' cats and lavished attention on their virtual companion. This was Taobao's Singles Day cat game, and in exchange for spending time in this virtual world, people received real-life coupons in return. 

➡️ Could we do something similar and fun with the Alan Mascot?

• Every Chinese super-app has a mini-game or two tucked away in its offering. 

• A very general statistic notes that the average person has 40 apps installed on the phone. Out of that 40 apps, 89% of the time is split between 18 apps.

• There's a natural limit to mobile time, and attention is directed towards the top apps.

• Mobile mental real estate is scarce, and every app is looking for more time and attention.

• If a utility app is suddenly made entertaining, users will mentally switch viewing engagement from being a chore to leisure.

➡️ We tend to see ourselves too much as a utility sometimes in my opinion. 

• This means that adding entertainment to a product brings it into competition with every other entertainment vice out there. Netflix's true competitor is Roblox. If you're in China, everyone's true competitor is Tencent’s Honour of Kings, aka the mobile version of League of Legend. If you’re Alibaba, rather than try to face-off Cao Cao with faster delivery, why not do it with a cat?

• As a product booster, gamification features open up new dimensions for an app, specifically retention, acquisition, monetisation and user segmentation. 

• First popularised by Amazon, the principle is that a company should start in a high-frequency usage category to encourage a user habit before leveraging the resultant organic traffic to move into subsequent categories. 

• Games and gamification of apps are retention machines when done well; people check in on their progress and make sure their friends haven’t surpassed them. While they are there, they might also utilise other functions in the app too. Gamified features are often used to train users on certain usage behaviours (be it posting more content, using different features sets or inviting their friends), under the guise of points accumulation. 

👉 Scott Belsky (Behance) - Focus on the First Mile (Join Colossus)

• In the first 30 seconds of every product experience, every user is lazy, vain and selfish. They want everything to be done for them. They don't want to read something.

• Even the most cumbersome enterprise products I believe are successful when they make their users look good to their bosses. So, some enterprise products I advise to have an export function, where you can export a spreadsheet that is editable. That looks beautiful, that is editable by its users so that he or she can then get it, make it look like it's theirs, save it as a PDF and send it to their management team. And then suddenly it's like, "Oh my goodness, who did this level of diligent analysis?"

➡️ How do we make our admins look good?

• If 95% of people that come to a landing page and have certain behaviors that suggest that they're engaged enough to take the next step are not taking the next step, there is a concrete reason. And then the question is, as you optimize to make it better, are you asking the questions we're talking about? Is the copy helping them understand their immediate utility, as opposed to the long-term value looking from this product? Laziness, vanity, and selfishness. Or is this customer feeling secure with what we're offering?

• Great design is ultimately manifested as small things that make a big difference.

🗞In the news

📱Technology

👉 The crypto backlash hits Discord (Plateformer)

• Last week, I tweeted something deliberately provocative (and, in retrospect, dumb): a (sincere!) question about how much of the disdain for blockchain projects came from people who are beginning to feel too old to learn a completely new set of technologies. What I learned from the (outraged) responses is that many people of all ages have been thinking deeply about the blockchain, and they understand what it is and how it works, and they hate the whole idea of it. More than that, they are determined to fight it: to not give an inch, on Discord or elsewhere, to the imposition of artificial scarcity on the digital world.

👉 Chris Cantino Thread about NFTs and brands (Chris Cantino)

• Yeezy NFTs that only unlock with purchases from Gap stores, or NFTs that unlock exclusive features for Tesla vehicles.

• Splitting up NFTs into individual shares gives more people exposure to blue-chip assets, like owning a piece of a cryptopunk.

• 12/ Loyalty Exchanges As brands and creators seek to reinforce loyalty, community behavior will be rewarded with NFTs. Did the member contribute content? NFT. Complete surveys? NFT. Make a purchase? NFT. Tokens are more liquid and bragworthy than traditional discount codes.

• 13/ R&D Brands and creators will exchange NFTs for insights on product development: pain points, marketing claims, roadmap and more. The NFTs will unlock early access to product releases and potential profit sharing. Brands will track and maintain these key relationships.

• 14/ Content Submission. Users will submit content like short form videos, reviews, and tutorials in exchange for NFTs. It’s a marketing flywheel. Rights can be programmed into contracts so that the use of the contributor’s content in advertising could yield them future profits.

• 16/ Education and Customer Support. Upon demonstrating exceptional knowledge of a brand’s product, users can receive NFTs in exchange for onboarding newbies into the community, or providing support. This can be exponentially more impactful than a brand employee doing the same.

• 17/ Bounties Creators and brands will drop unique quests within communities, rewarding completion with NFTs. This could be anything from completing a questionnaire, to referring members into the community, to attending events. Bounties can be highly competitive, or open wide.

• 18/ Leaderboards NFT communities will gamify by highlighting the performance and participation of top holders.

🏥 Healthcare

👉 Digital-Health Startups Are Booming. Their Customers Are Overwhelmed. (WallStreet Journal)

• Corporate-benefits executives, the main customers for these startups, say they are excited about technology that can lower costs and improve employees’ health. But the explosion of activity has spawned a glut of startups pitching redundant or overpriced services, they say.

• “We are inundated,” says Meredith Touchstone, director of benefits at CarMax Inc. “We already have these very big portfolios of vendors. And with all this new stuff coming into the market, there’s no way to assess, literally thousands” of digital-health services now available.

➡️ We think there is a massive opportunity to be the single entry point, the one stop shop. 

• Measuring results for digital-health services is tricky, say benefits executives, in part because many services struggle to prove they can lower costs or improve care.

➡️ We believe that we can help companies on that. 

• Erik Sossa, who recently retired as head of benefits at PepsiCo Inc., says digital-health services work best when connected to a company’s existing health plan, so doctors can see patients’ health histories. That was one reason Pepsi stopped using Teladoc for telemedicine services, Mr. Sossa says.

• Employers are asking digital-health providers to integrate with their insurers and expand the conditions their products address. Employers are also pushing the services to stop charging a monthly fee for all eligible employees and instead charge when employees use the service, since many of these apps go unused, benefits executives say.

• “Many employers prefer working with one party across critical disease areas,” he says.

• Care navigation—apps that coordinate other health apps—is another area of growth and deals. Grand Rounds, which started out as a provider of second medical opinions, has jumped into the area and added telemedicine, merging with Doctor on Demand. A competitor, care-navigation firm Accolade Inc., last month bought 2nd.md Inc., a service for second medical opinions. Accolade also said last month it would buy PlushCare.

👉 Google announces health tool to identify skin conditions (The Verge)

• Launch a pilot later this year.

• People can use their phone’s camera to take three pictures of the problem area — for example, a rash on their arm. They’ll then answer a series of questions about their skin type and other symptoms. The tool then gives a list of possible conditions from a set of 288 that it’s trained to recognize. 

➡️ Should we integrate into Alan? What is our cost of dermatology claims? It could be a great in-app experience. What do you think?

• The company obtained a Class I medical device mark for the tool in the European Union, designating it as a low-risk medical device. It has not been evaluated by the United States Food and Drug Administration.

💚 Alan

👉 Lubomira Rochet joins Alan’s Board of Director (Blog - French)

• Lubomira Rochet, ex-CDO at L’Oréal, is a recognised leader with close to 20 years of experience levering digital tools to transform business.

• She brings an important technological dimension and an ability to think in terms of platforms and ecosystems.

• Her experience and her ability to rethink the consumer experience will help Alan in his endeavour to build a fairer and more human health experience.

• Welcome 💚

👉 How to shorten Sales Negotiations with Linear Optimisation (Blog)

• Interested to learn about how we leverage Hackathon and use maths to optimise our sales processes?

• Read this article from Arnaud Buisson (data) on how to build a tool to shorten Sales Negotiations with Linear Optimisation.

👉 Design collaboration at Alan in 2021 (Blog)

• Almost 2 years ago our Design Lead, Edouard Wautier, wrote about Design Collaboration at Alan.

• In this new post, discover how the design community evolved since to best support the organisation throughout its scaling process