Nacho Parietti · Behavioral designer and fractional CPO · Montevideo
Before you spend on building, we find out what people will really do with it, what will stop them, and what to design so they do it. For founders, product teams and public programs.
Most products and programs don’t fail for lack of features. They fail at a behavior. And when people don’t do what we expected, it’s almost always one of four things:
People aren’t lazy, dumb or bad. Something in the design didn’t let them. Finding which of the four it is, before building, is my job. Often the person who pays for the product is not the person who has to use it, and that’s where the gap opens.
Five ways to work together, from a quick look at one flow to leading product with your team. We pick the smallest one that answers your question.
One flow, looked at closely: where people drop off, which barrier explains it, and what to try first. You get a short written diagnosis and a ranked list of what to test.
The whole product: every actor, the behavioral funnel from first contact to the behavior you need, and the barriers at each step. You get the map of actors, funnel and barriers, in writing.
For ideas before they’re built: the ANVERSO models applied to your case, and the scope. You get a behavioral MVP definition: what to build, for whom, and which behaviors it must produce.
About eight working sessions with your team, over two to four weeks. Your experts bring the domain; I bring the method and run the process.
Part-time product leadership for teams that need a head of product but not a full-time one. I set the behavioral goals with you, decide what gets built and in what order, and review what ships against the behaviors it has to produce.
Where it fits, we test it: variants, a control group and a measure agreed before we start.
I work in Spanish and English, remotely or on site. And if it needs building, I’m also a programmer, so that’s on the table too.
Doctors, researchers and specialists turning what they know into a product.
Where the one who pays, the one who prescribes and the one who uses are three different people.
Programs that only work if people do something: book, show up, keep going.
With an adoption or retention number that won’t move.
I designed the nudges for an experiment to get more women screened for cervical cancer. The test is free and quick, yet around six in ten women in the target ages hadn’t been screened in three years. Framing the message around risk or around benefit made practically no difference. What changed things was removing the errand: a link to book the appointment online in a couple of taps.
Source: Cuesta, Delgado, Gallegos, Roseth and Sánchez (2021), IDB Working Paper IDB-WP-1180, Inter-American Development Bank. Every product is different: this is a case, not a promise.
A telco’s field app for crews working on utility poles. An oil sensor for old motorcycles. A box of pasta that turns dinner into a game against tantrums. Different products, the same question: what behavior does this need, and what’s in the way?
A talk that teaches the audience to see behavior the way a designer does. Real stories, no jargon, and one idea people take home: when someone doesn’t do what we expected, one of four things failed.
From a half-day session to several weeks: your team applies the method to its own product, with me facilitating.
I’m Ignacio "Nacho" Parietti, a behavioral designer and programmer based in Montevideo, Uruguay. I got into behavioral design through games, then gambling, and then years of consulting.
I’ve worked with dozens of companies and organizations designing products and programs. I kept seeing the same thing: experts with brilliant insights and no method to turn them into something people use. So I wrote the method down.
Everything I do rests on the ANVERSO models, which I wrote step by step in The Behavioral Startup. If we work together, it’s our shared reference.
Thirty minutes, no deck: you tell me the product and the behavior that isn’t happening, and I tell you honestly whether I can help.
Or write to nacho@thebehavioralstartup.com
