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Guest: Leidy Klotz, Professor at University of Virginia.
Host: Kevin Mako, founder of Product Startup and the leading expert in hardware startup consulting. A hardware entrepreneur since 1999, Kevin has advised more than 1,500 founders and built and scaled MAKO Invent through its acquisition by TriMech in 2024.
Why Better Product Design Often Means Less
Behavioral scientist Leidy Klotz explains why teams default to adding features and how deliberate subtraction can produce simpler, stronger product experiences. The episode also explores MVP definition, product requirements, cost and complexity tradeoffs, validation, and launch sequencing.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- Science explains why we don’t think of subtraction
- This is a problem baked in evolution
- Simple is hard, and requires improved cognition
- Balance Bike / Construction Cinder Blocks
- How do you do Subtraction better
- Give yourself Reminders
- Next time you have a design decision to make, try and think just as much about subtraction as you do about addition
- Build subtraction into your design process
- Put design rules into play for being great at subtraction
- First you have to think of it, then you have to choose it.
- Highlight in your design what is not there
Episode transcript
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Read the full episode transcript
Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from a university professor and bestselling author on how the behavioral science
Kevin Mako: of subtraction is so important in physical product design.
Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors,
Narrator: product developers, manufacturers, and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial
Narrator: idea to getting your product on store shelves. taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business.
Narrator: Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small
Kevin Mako: product businesses.
Kevin Mako: Now, onto the show. Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Leidy Klotz to the show. Leidy has his PhD in behavioral science and is a professor at the
Kevin Mako: University of Virginia. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling design book called Subtract. His research has been featured in
Kevin Mako: many publications, including the front cover of Nature magazine. Today, Leidy is going to share
Kevin Mako: some valuable knowledge on how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers can both understand
Kevin Mako: what it means to think about subtraction in your product development process, but also to learn
Kevin Mako: what the best practices are for ensuring world-class subtraction thinking for your next product. Now on the episode.
Kevin Mako: Hi, Leidy, welcome to the show.
Kevin Mako: Hi, Kevin. It's great to be here. Great to have a fellow lecturer on the show. I understand that you teach in the engineering
Kevin Mako: program behavioral science with studying in the school of design.
Leidy Klotz: So I'm an engineering and architecture professor. I study the science of design and most of my intellectual contributions are in behavioral
Leidy Klotz: science. Before we scare your listeners away, we promise not to lecture.
Kevin Mako: That's great. Well, look, it's great to have the academic approach in here. And you've also got a lot of real world experience in this subject. You've authored the book.
Leidy Klotz: Give us a bit of a history to how you got here. Maybe I'll go back to college because that's a, you know, a relatable spot for people. But I majored
Leidy Klotz: in civil engineering in college. I was always interested in the built environment, so how physical things come together. Plus I didn't.
Leidy Klotz: I realized I was going to have to take organic chemistry and more electrical engineering classes. If I went that other route, that wasn't appealing. So I'd always been
Leidy Klotz: interested in the physical world and how we build things in that world. After college, I did construction management for a while.
Leidy Klotz: So building school construction projects and got to see how those came together. I spent a ton of time when I was doing that, mainly managing the design process.
Leidy Klotz: So I think that's where I really got interested. It helped reinforce my interest in all these things that happen before the physical
Leidy Klotz: thing goes into the world that are incredibly influential in what that physical thing looks like and how it serves the people who are using it.
Leidy Klotz: And so schools, for example, you think, oh, the way the school gets built is the contractor shows up and puts a crane and then starts erecting steel into the sky.
Leidy Klotz: And it was like, no, way before that, there are people who are, figuring out if his school should even go in this place and what pink colors the superintendent
Leidy Klotz: likes. And so I just found that whole messy design process fascinating in design being all these
Leidy Klotz: people who are contributing to taking something from how it is to how they want it to be. And I liked that job, but I also thought that I would like doing teaching and research.
Leidy Klotz: I really enjoy working with young people. And I really enjoy the more kind of theoretical,
Leidy Klotz: philosophical questions. And so as I was doing that, I figured out how I'd go back for my PhD, study design with my PhD.
Leidy Klotz: I studied architectural engineering, basically all the engineering that goes into a building. And then after I got my PhD and had my faculty position, you've got a lot of
Leidy Klotz: flexibility. And I just thinking about, okay, where's the place that I can have the biggest impact on the things that I care about?
Leidy Klotz: I care a lot about sustainability in the built environment and sustainability in the things that we design. So how do we design things that don't
Leidy Klotz: ruin the planet and that make life better for, you know, people. So when I got my first
Leidy Klotz: faculty position, that's when I really said, okay, like there's a huge opportunity here with kind
Leidy Klotz: of the intersection of behavioral science, all these new advances that people are coming up with in terms of how we think and decide and how we use decision-making shortcuts
Leidy Klotz: and how can we pull the best knowledge from behavioral science into design because this is two fields that don't
Leidy Klotz: often talk to each other, but design would have a lot to learn from behavioral science and vice versa.
Leidy Klotz: I mean, behavioral science, a lot of the questions or ideas that they study could be design things.
Kevin Mako: And that's where we'll get into subtract. That's amazing backstory. One of these things I find that in the world of design and engineering, something that's often
Kevin Mako: forgot is the human factor. Right. The people coming up with the products are humans. The people designing the product are humans and the people who are buying it are humans.
Kevin Mako: And this is where the element of behavioral science comes into play at all levels, right,
Kevin Mako: from the initial onset, all the way through to design engineering and then selling the product at the end of the day.
Kevin Mako: So figuring out that human factor actually weighs into a lot of the decision making
Kevin Mako: along the way and is a really important consideration, which is why I was very excited to bring you on this podcast. And you've got a really popular book in the design industry.
Kevin Mako: It's called Subtract. It's great book. It talks about this whole concept of thinking of subtraction as opposed to addition.
Kevin Mako: So can you talk to us about what is the overall concept behind this idea of subtraction when you're developing a product and when you're trying to get something
Kevin Mako: to market and also how that applies both overall and in modern standards of what's the science actually telling us today based on what you're researching on the back end?
Leidy Klotz: I was playing Legos with my son when he was about he was three at the time and we're building this bridge and the problem we had was the bridge wasn't level.
Leidy Klotz: And so I turned around behind me to add a block to the shorter column to make the level.
Leidy Klotz: bridge. And by the time I had turned back around, my son had removed a block from the longer column. And so that right there is subtracting, right?
Leidy Klotz: You've got this situation that you're trying to make better. In this case, we're trying to take a crooked bridge and turn it into a level
Leidy Klotz: bridge. And one of the ways to do that is by adding something to the situation. I thought to add a block. And the other way is to take something away.
Leidy Klotz: And that's what my son stumbled upon in that moment. So that's the definition of subtracting. And I think it's really important to
Leidy Klotz: have the definition there to reinforce that definition because I think one of the reasons we don't subtract is we often conflate it with less. And subtracting is an action, right?
Leidy Klotz: This is the act of taking something away. Less is the end state. Less is something has been taken away or nothing has been added in the first place.
Leidy Klotz: So they're related concepts, but subtract is the action and the design activity that has to happen. We spent two years doing this research and I did
Leidy Klotz: it with some behavioral science colleagues, Gabe Adams, Ben Combers, and Andy Hales,
Leidy Klotz: who are here at the University of Virginia. And Andy's now at University of Mississippi. The research
Leidy Klotz: was featured on the cover of nature, which for an academic, that's like the pinnacle of
Leidy Klotz: what you can do with your research. And never happened to me before. It'll never happen again. And what we found was that people basically, when
Leidy Klotz: you're thinking about design or trying to change something from how it is to how you want it to be, you think a lot of like I did in that moment with the bridge.
Leidy Klotz: You say, okay, what can I add?
Leidy Klotz: And you move on, add something. And if my son hadn't been there, I would have just added, never thought twice about subtracting and just moved on and been happy with it.
Leidy Klotz: So our first thought, the first thing that comes to mind when we think about how we can make something better is what can we add to it. It's not that we can't subtract.
Leidy Klotz: It's just that our first thought is what we can add. And that's the new science. We did that with there were 18 different studies, all sorts of things with Legos with writing.
Leidy Klotz: We did a miniature golf hole trying to make a miniature golf hole harder, easier. People would add stuff either way. And they would add even when it was wrong. So,
Leidy Klotz: for example, we made a Lego structure where people had to protect a stormtrooper from a masonry block. And one way to do it was to add eight blocks to the structure.
Leidy Klotz: The other way was to subtract one block. And people added eight blocks because of the way we set it up. And again, the reason is not because people are stupid.
Leidy Klotz: It's just because our first thought is, what can we add? We solved the problem by adding or we think we've solved the problem by adding and we move on without considering
Leidy Klotz: the other option. This is the part that I like about talking to designers. Some people are like, well, why is that a problem?
Leidy Klotz: And designers immediately understand that, well, you're missing out on half your options if you're overlooking this basic way of making change. So that's some of the new
Leidy Klotz: science. And then the book delves into some of the other reasons why we might have evolved this decision-making shortcut.
Leidy Klotz: I mean, for a long time, adding has been beneficial just in terms of passing down our genes, right? If you acquire food, you're more likely to make it through lean time.
Leidy Klotz: Throughout the history of civilization, for example, you know, think about the first product designers. The problem was that there wasn't any stuff at all.
Leidy Klotz: So adding was the better way to make change for a long time. And now some of these opportunities we have to subtract are relatively new.
Leidy Klotz: And so it makes sense that our minds might be wired to think of adding first.
Kevin Mako: Try to summarize the first half of the book in five minutes. They have to get the book to see the full package, right?
Kevin Mako: One of the things that first comes to mind, I think, of developing over a thousand products over my career to Mako Design is two terms that we use quite consistently.
Kevin Mako: One is feature creep.
Kevin Mako: And that's a big one in product development. Generally, by inventors and ideators, they want to add all kinds of features and it creates
Kevin Mako: something that is really a negative experience to actually develop. and even for the end users at the end. So feature creep is a big one.
Kevin Mako: The other one is something that we took pretty aggressively at the firm too. It's we call it smart minimum viable product.
Kevin Mako: How do we make sure the product is launched with the minimum amount of features that are solving the pain point that they've discovered,
Kevin Mako: but doing that in a really high quality manner, which is very different from tech, which is get something out there and then fix it later.
Kevin Mako: Well, in hardware, we kind of take the opposite approach, but either way, it comes back to the same philosophy. It's very difficult for designers and innovators and inventors
Kevin Mako: and ideators to subtract as opposed to that human desire, as you've mentioned, as you found in all these experiments that you've run with
Kevin Mako: real people in an academic setting, you found that that is true human nature, is that you've got this natural urge or this desire to add things, even if it's wrong,
Leidy Klotz: as you said. And that's very, very powerful, something that everybody consider in design. And one of the things you'll recognize this immediately, right?
Leidy Klotz: And like one of the reasons we add and it's hard to take away is because
Leidy Klotz: we want to display competence. And I was surprised when I did the research for the book, how biological that is. I knew that we wanted to display competence.
Leidy Klotz: I didn't know add like this
Leidy Klotz: evolutionary origin to it. So if you think about Bowerbirds, those are the birds that build the ceremonial nests.
Leidy Klotz: And the male Bower birds build these nests and the female Bower birds go and look at
Leidy Klotz: the nests and then decide which male to mate with based on which nests they like best. And then the female Bowerbirds go and build a nest to shelter the young.
Leidy Klotz: So the whole purpose of these initial nests is just to show that the Bowerbird that built them is competent, can interact effectively with the world.
Leidy Klotz: That ties almost directly sometimes to feature creep, right? It's like if you've added something to the product, it shows that, hey, Kevin did this. What a cool idea by
Leidy Klotz: Kevin, whether or not it actually serves the customer is another thing. But, you know, I struggle with this in writing.
Leidy Klotz: You know, I write 200,000 words and then it ends up as a 70,000 word book. And it's harder to remove the words than it is to add them emotionally.
Leidy Klotz: But if you recognize that, you know, hey, I've got this kind of investment of competence in the thing that I've added that can help you overcome that and take away.
Leidy Klotz: Also, it's not that you can't show competence through subtracting, right? But I would argue that you might have to do more subtracting.
Leidy Klotz: So if you think about some of the famous design, you know, the iPhone is a really cliche one. I don't even use it in the book.
Leidy Klotz: The thing that was noticeable about the iPhone was the lack of features, right? And so that displayed competence through subtracting.
Leidy Klotz: And I think sometimes by subtract, if you subtract just a little bit, nobody notices.
Kevin Mako: But if you subtract a lot, people do take notice and you can display competence in that way.
Kevin Mako: It's interesting that you mentioned the word competence because subtraction from anyone who's in the design world is difficult.
Kevin Mako: I love your example about condensing a 200,000 word book down to 70,000 and how much increased difficulty that is.
Kevin Mako: I think of the design slogan we had of our firm, brilliantly simple design, because true
Kevin Mako: intelligence in design is being able to solve the pain point in the most simple way. It should be so good that at the end of design, when somebody looks at it, they go, oh, yeah,
Kevin Mako: of course, that's obvious why it was done that way. And that's how it works. And that's how it should work.
Kevin Mako: And that is really the most difficult part of getting it to that point in time. And I think that's where people who aren't in the design world as much, they might oversee that
Kevin Mako: and not understand, like to get to that simple output that you see on so many products out there took a considerable amount of work and thinking to figure out how
Leidy Klotz: to subtract and to subtract the right things in the right way in order to eventually get to that perfectly simple solution to that pain point. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's so good.
Leidy Klotz: And that's the other thing that this kind of easy misconception to have is that simple is easy, right? And in fact, what we're saying is that simple is harder.
Leidy Klotz: So number one, it's, it's more cognitive effort. It's not that you can't think of subtraction. It's just you have to go past your initial default. But then it's more steps, right?
Leidy Klotz: I mean, so if you're doing prototyping, for example, with a product and you, you know, you do these iterations and you've got a product that basically
Leidy Klotz: works. And then it's more steps to say, oh, would this also work without this piece or without this other piece? And so, yeah, you're exactly right.
Leidy Klotz: More effort goes into it and there's less to show for it to the untrained eye. One challenge I pose in the book is like,
Leidy Klotz: do you get people to recognize that, the users and clients, right? I mean, if you think about this
Leidy Klotz: with the built environment, with buildings, for example, if you're an architect and you say,
Leidy Klotz: oh, actually what you need is a much simpler building and the building ends up costing less
Kevin Mako: to build and your fee is tied to the cost of the thing, you've actually just given yourself less money for doing more work.
Leidy Klotz: It's something as designers we can kind of battle at a systemic level too. What are some of the examples that you've seen that really highlight this idea in physical
Leidy Klotz: products of subtraction as opposed to addition? My favorite example is, will always be, I think, the strider bikes. So these are the little bikes for basically two-year-olds, maybe
Leidy Klotz: even younger. My daughter wrote it when she was younger than two. And it's a small bike. It looks just like a regular bike, except it's got no pedals and drivetrain.
Leidy Klotz: And how they work is the little kid pedals at like a Flintstone vehicle with their legs. And then the kids can balance, which is the surprising thing. I remember
Leidy Klotz: my son was riding it around his great aunt's convent. She's a nun. And she's like, what? It was more
Leidy Klotz: conceivable to her that there was like some magic like levitating thing in the bike that some inventor had come up with than just that this little kid, no, he can actually balance.
Leidy Klotz: And so it's an amazing invention. It's added like two years onto kids bike riding lives. And I like it for a lot of
Leidy Klotz: reasons. One is because it shows that we overlook subtraction. I mean, think about all of the bikes that were sold over the last 100 years and, you know, all these innovations,
Leidy Klotz: fatter tubes, fatter tires, more gears, training wheels. And nobody thought, hey, what if we take these tires away? Would this be a
Leidy Klotz: better bike for a certain segment of our population? And so it was overlooked for a long time when it finally was realized.
Leidy Klotz: It changed that market and made things better for a bunch of little kids. And And the other thing I like about it is you mentioned the humans before, right? And I think one of the
Leidy Klotz: things that really makes that design work. And the inventor is Ryan McFarland. And Strider Bikes is his
Leidy Klotz: company. And he talks about his design process in my book. And he's a father, too. And he said that
Leidy Klotz: the designer in him was thinking about the bike, but the father in him was thinking about the kid.
Leidy Klotz: And that's when he realized that, oh, like the kid can provide the balance, right? So we don't need the training wheels for balance. The kid can do that.
Leidy Klotz: We just need to make them able to propel the bike, which they can by pushing it with their legs. And so it was by considering not just
Leidy Klotz: the product, but the person using the product, that this subtraction became a viable option. And I think
Leidy Klotz: that's something that would hold true in a lot of different cases. I mean, even I'll tie it into writing and then shut up.
Leidy Klotz: But in writing, if you leave things out, what you're hoping will happen is that the reader will fill those things in for themselves, right? You know, so Hemingway had this
Leidy Klotz: theory of a mission and try to put just the bare bones of the story in
Kevin Mako: there so that, and then rely on the reader's imagination. And so in that case, that's the human that he's designing for. So I think
Kevin Mako: that's a really powerful principle that allows for subtraction. That's great. The strider bike
Kevin Mako: example is so powerful too, because it was 100 years of bike manufacturing. Everybody trying to come up with innovations and companies coming out of the woodworks and coming out
Kevin Mako: with all new things, everybody trying to capture various pieces of the market. And it was missed for that amount of time.
Kevin Mako: And eventually somebody came around and made a massive business out of that super simplification of something that's been around that could have been invented a hundred years ago.
Kevin Mako: And it's very recent. And I think that's something that's very profound. As a quick side note, you hear it in the industry occasionally where an inventor will come up and
Kevin Mako: be like, you know what, everything's been invented, right? Is my idea really novel? Absolutely. Everything is not been invented.
Kevin Mako: There will always be innovation for human history that will continue to occur to the end of time. So I can't imagine looking at that example and thinking about your
Kevin Mako: own invention ideas and looking at it and thinking anything other than there's something new or novel or unique or a different way of spinning it.
Kevin Mako: And a simplification can be one of those ways,
Leidy Klotz: not just in a addition, which is what probably most of the people, I would even say on our show, talk about is things that they're adding or changing or combining.
Leidy Klotz: But that example right there is a way that somebody took something, subtracted it, and made a fortune off it as a business. Yeah.
Leidy Klotz: And before people write in your comments that the first bikes didn't have any pedals, that is true.
Leidy Klotz: But that's also the example of like this kind of the first bikes also weren't able to be ridden by two-year-olds. And so it took this evolution.
Leidy Klotz: of, okay, adding stuff, adding stuff, adding stuff, and then realizing, oh, to make it even better, we can take things away.
Leidy Klotz: And one of the other, like, ancillary studies that we did was just to look at patents, so you can comb all the patent data that Google has.
Leidy Klotz: So I think that's, like, back to 1975 or something. And we looked for additive and subtractive synonyms, basically, in there.
Leidy Klotz: And we, the eight most common additive words, the eight most common subtractive words. And additive words are way overrepresented. in innovation.
Leidy Klotz: I don't know enough about that whole process. I'm sure there are other reasons why you would put additive words in.
Kevin Mako: It gives you a better way to claim novelty, for example.
Kevin Mako: But the fact that these additive words were way more likely than the subtractive words as the kind of differentiating
Kevin Mako: things with pet and suggests that there's untapped opportunity in that specific type of
Kevin Mako: innovation. With this podcast episode, you're showing everybody a new way to look at the world. A lot of the time with these innovations, as we look back in history,
Kevin Mako: it was quite obvious. Everybody was looking left and then somebody looked right. And that's
Kevin Mako: exactly what we're talking about here is looking at your project, looking at your hardware innovation that's coming out or that you're redeveloping or that you're thinking about
Kevin Mako: your next version of and thinking about how could I remove things to add simplicity, both in from a user standpoint, a marketing standpoint and a production standpoint.
Kevin Mako: The beauty of all that is if you can figure it out through great design, which is really what it will take to get there, than what you can do is save a lot of time and money.
Kevin Mako: And even arguably, we talk about it a lot on the show too, it's arguably easier to market something that's simple and direct, especially when you've got a huge global population.
Kevin Mako: You can really hone down on the people. Like you mentioned, the bikes.
Leidy Klotz: Sure, maybe in the early days there were bikes with no pedals. And it was just marketed to everybody, but that didn't really fit.
Leidy Klotz: Now there's a niche demographic, which is two-year-olds, that could really utilize that simple strip-down bike. Now, that's a smaller demographic than all bike riders,
Leidy Klotz: but with a huge population around the world, that makes a massive business opportunity for that inventor that came up with that idea.
Leidy Klotz: That's interesting because I was just talking about this stuff at a conference and people were like, well, how do you sell less? And I mean, my response was basically
Kevin Mako: people who sell stuff are good at selling anything, right? You can sell stuff that's not good for people, right?
Kevin Mako: But I hadn't thought of that argument that actually there's an advantage in trying to sell less and that you've got, you can hone your message even more. It's a simpler thing to
Kevin Mako: explains that's that's interesting i was on a podcast with uh john lee dumis of uh e o fire a really
Kevin Mako: amazing podcast huge i i think it's one of the biggest if not the biggest entrepreneurship
Kevin Mako: podcast in the world we were talking about hardware on the show and one of the big things that he advocates is focus because the more that you can focus
Kevin Mako: and find your niche find something really specific the exponentially easier it is to sell that thing because you are very targeted to the exact and
Kevin Mako: specific people who are looking to solve that one pain point and you're the one person who is focusing on solving that and only that pain point.
Kevin Mako: So they're more likely to choose you, even though you're new. Your product maybe doesn't have any or many reviews. Maybe it's a pre-sale thing. Maybe they don't know of your brand.
Kevin Mako: All of these things they may overlook if you can target their pain point specifically and narrowly and hit only that.
Kevin Mako: And when people look at it and say, yeah, well, it's a small niche demographic. Think about the global population.
Kevin Mako: I always challenge people when they say that, when they're looking at the scale, of their business to look at it. And I challenge them to say, do you truly believe that in the
Kevin Mako: next two to five years, you can saturate just that small market you're looking to achieve
Leidy Klotz: worldwide? If you really think you will, then yes, okay, maybe broaden your horizon. If not, then focus on that.
Leidy Klotz: And once you start to win in that market, now you can look to expand the product to other markets after you've not only conquered that, earned a lot of money from that,
Leidy Klotz: but also have got a whole bunch of feedback from people on that specific pain point that you were looking to originally solve.
Leidy Klotz: That's a really, I mean, people, they talk about that in the book industry, too. It's, you know, there's enough readers, right? Get the thing that you're doing right
Leidy Klotz: and get it out there. The other example I really like, and I think your listeners would too, is the building block.
Leidy Klotz: And so for almost all of history building blocks, we're solid. And there's this woman named Anna Anna Kaichline, who was one of the first licensed
Leidy Klotz: architects in, I think the first licensed architect in pencil also had like an engineering slash product designy type background she invented some
Leidy Klotz: toys i know you had a toy designer on as you're one of your previous yes and so she was a very much
Leidy Klotz: a designer and she she studied the way that people were the work the workmen who were putting the buildings together with the solid blocks and she realized that if she kind of
Leidy Klotz: created what she called the k block and so it's like this hollowed out block that could also be kind of fractured at the corners to make it more, more adaptable for building.
Leidy Klotz: So she's, again, the reason I'm adding that detail is because she's, she came to this by thinking about the users. In this case, it wasn't even the users of the building.
Leidy Klotz: It was the people who had to put the, put the thing together. And so her block became the precursor to those ubiquitous, you know, CMU blocks that you see. They
Leidy Klotz: look like a squared off figure eight. And there are these hollow building blocks that everybody builds with now. They're lighter. They're less expensive.
Leidy Klotz: They use less energy to, to, to fire, you know.
Leidy Klotz: And they also, they also perform better in the building. The, you know, the block
Leidy Klotz: plus the air void is actually better thermal performance than a solid block.
Leidy Klotz: And so again, you know, this, this notion that, hey, there's nothing new to invent for the history, and for all of
Kevin Mako: human history, we've got solid building blocks. And Kikeline, I mean, I think she was like the 20s. She served as a volunteer spy in World War II or World War I.
Kevin Mako: So she was a remarkable person. So yeah, it was around the 20s that she came up with the hollow block and it's just, you know, obviously a better product for building.
Kevin Mako: So that's another of my favorite kind of
Kevin Mako: hardware subtractions. Really good example. And of course, to get there, it required great design to figure out how exactly that would work.
Kevin Mako: And one of the things you highlight is she looked at not just the end user being the building or the people in the building and improved thermal
Kevin Mako: properties, but also the person that was putting that in place and found out if I could make their
Kevin Mako: job easier, save them money, give them a cheaper product that performs better, they're going
Leidy Klotz: to change the game. And that's exactly what happens through subtraction. So if we're thinking about
Leidy Klotz: our own products and for all the listeners out there, based on all the research you've done over the years on this subject, how do you subtract better?
Leidy Klotz: How do you think about subtraction and be really a leader at the forefront of kind of this theory of subtraction so that they can apply this
Leidy Klotz: to their designs and their thinking moving forward? And one thing that worked in our experiments, and I think works in the real world, our reminders.
Leidy Klotz: And so people are kind of part of the way there on the reminder, listening to this podcast, they're putting subtraction top of mind. And then
Leidy Klotz: hopefully they'll, you know, the next time they have a design decision to make, they're less likely to overlook it.
Leidy Klotz: I'll say that these reminders in our experiments didn't prove very like transferable.
Leidy Klotz: So just because you are reminded to subtract in one context doesn't mean you won't overlook it in another.
Leidy Klotz: So I would say that a thing you could do to make those reminders more likely to work for you
Leidy Klotz: is to think about your own design process and see how you could build those into the process rather than use them as like a one-off. You're always remembering it.
Leidy Klotz: So this isn't a design example. But when I do my to-do list, I also force myself to write down stop doings, right?
Leidy Klotz: So whatever you're, and that forces me not to overlook subtraction in my social life. but so if you can build those reminders into your design process
Leidy Klotz: that can be really um really helpful in a good way to to find more of these options that we might otherwise miss um the book also you know
Leidy Klotz: if you the book is seven hours of listening if you listen to it on uh on audiobooks and you know
Leidy Klotz: that would be a little more of a kind of rearranging of your mental uh mental furniture to
Leidy Klotz: help you think about subtraction more but i think the the reminders is a good a good good first step. Also, rules.
Leidy Klotz: I mean, so reminders are very, okay, this leaves it up to you, but I think that I talk about the game, Jenga in the book
Leidy Klotz: and compare it to Legos. And so Legos, basically what we do with Legos is build, right? And Jenga is essentially just building blocks, right?
Leidy Klotz: But the rule of Jenga is that the first thing you have to do is subtract. The first thing you have to do is take away. And that very simple rule makes it so that you don't
Leidy Klotz: overlook subtraction. It also creates very different behavior in this overall building block game. It gets taller and taller,
Leidy Klotz: but it doesn't take up your whole living room as our Legos do. So rules is another one to the extent that you can put rules in place for yourself or for your teams.
Leidy Klotz: That would be a good way to stop overlooking it.
Leidy Klotz: And then I'll say one last thing is that it's what first you have to think of it, right? And then you have to choose it.
Leidy Klotz: And there are barriers to choosing less as Right. You might think, oh, it would be good if I took this feature off, but then nobody's going to see
Leidy Klotz: like the client's not going to want to pay me for it because it's going to look too simple.
Leidy Klotz: And so I think in those cases, it's, you know, helping people see the, helping
Kevin Mako: people see the extra effort that goes into taking away, helping people overcome this tendency to think that more is better. Also kind of reframing subtractions, right?
Kevin Mako: So highlighting what's cool about what's not there, right? So highlighting the simplicity, highlighting the streamlines. nature, highlighting the things that have been cut out.
Kevin Mako: So things that are kind of maybe viewed in a more positive way than subtracting is a good way to help convince people that choosing subtraction
Kevin Mako: was a good option. Those are a number of great tips. Lots of notes there. I was taking a bunch down
Kevin Mako: as well because it's so useful to look at all these different elements to consider the subtraction
Leidy Klotz: side in addition to the addition to the addition side. I think it was Warren Buffett that said something along the lines of you write your to-do list, your top 25 things
Leidy Klotz: you have to do and then you strike it across them all 20. That's the similar concept, right?
Kevin Mako: And that can apply to anyone in their design thinking.
Leidy Klotz: Of course, to really get to understand these topics in depth, your book is the place to go for this. You literally wrote the book on subtraction and that is the title. So where can
Leidy Klotz: people go to buy the book and to learn more? Anywhere books are sold, there's a audio book. I mean, if you like Amazon, it's there. If you like the independent books,
Leidy Klotz: stores it's there too. There's an audio book, a Kindle version. So wherever books are sold, and the publisher did a good job. Getting it out to libraries too.
Leidy Klotz: Much appreciated for your words of wisdom on the show today. Thanks again. Thanks, Kevin. This is great. So fun to talk to end
Narrator: your audience. Likewise. Talk soon. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast,
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