Just Add an Egg

Just add an egg.

My favorite product story of all time is about Betty Crocker cake mix.

In the 1950s, baking a cake from scratch was the only way to do it - but convenience was all the new hotness.

So General Mills launched a line of instant cake mixes under the famous Betty Crocker brand. Just add water and you're good to go! Huge success, right?

Total flop.

After a frenzy of panicked research sessions, they re-engineered the product to make it LESS convenient, requiring the home chef to add water and an egg. The cake mix was relaunched with the slogan "add an egg" and was wildly popular.

Why?

The simple act of adding the egg created a genuine emotional attachment to the final product, the cake. The home chef could claim, with pride and without guilt, to have "baked" the cake.

In a world where agentive technology and user experiences have advanced at an incredible pace, powered by generative AI, this lesson is more critical than ever.

When almost everything can be automated, what human touches do we choose to keep in our digital products and experiences? What do we explicitly require the user to do, so that they feel emotionally invested in the experience? (especially if the output is something creative and perhaps something previously thought of as a purely human domain)

Every product is adding AI.

Don't forget to ask your users to add an egg as well.