Duck Tales: How we use mental models and operational defaults to improve decision making (Ep.39)

In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Marc (VP, Engineering) discuss how we create, communicate, and challenge operational defaults to make better decisions at speed.

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Beah: Hello and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, the technology, and the people who help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. Today, you are going to hear about how we work, I guess, or one facet of how we work, which is using operational defaults and I have with me Marc, who is going to who I’m going to interview about operational defaults. Marc, do you wanna introduce yourself?

Marc: Yeah. Marc, I’m on the engineering team at DuckDuckGo.

Beah: Okay. That’s about all you need to know. and I’m Beah, I’m on the product team if if you haven’t seen me before. okay, cool. Well let’s jump in. What even is an operational default?

Marc: Yeah. Yeah, so defaults are I would say a deceptively simple concept. at at DuckDuckGo we’re always trying to leverage mental models to help us move more quickly and think more clearly and and things of that nature. in that context, the default effect is seen as a negative, right? And and I think we’ve all seen that in apps and in different places. Here we’re trying to leverage the the upside of that, where we’re basically taking any decision that you can make ahead of time that generally is true or has a right answer eighty percent of the time, we’re gonna call that a default. for that other twenty percent, we wanna leave room for our folks to be able to make exceptions, ideally very thoughtful exceptions.

Beah: When you say default is a negative in the app, you mean like, you know, if you get an Android phone and the default browser is Chrome and the default search engine is Google and it’s really hard for another player like DuckDuckGo to to break through th those defaults. Is that right? Yeah. Okay.

Marc: yeah, exactly. There’s there’s in Gabe’s book of mental models there’s the default effect and again it’s generally negative, but like I said, in this case we’re trying to use defaults as as