2  Introduction

Product designers commonly use design systems to build products.

In software engineering, there are software design patterns.

Product managers until now haven’t had a similar set of modular, reusable concepts. This is the Incentive Pattern Library.

This is a work in progress.

3 A Taxonomy of Incentives

In economics class, traditionally you are taught about the expected utility hypothesis. People (agents) are posited to decide on which actions to take based on which action will provide them with the maximum number of “utils”, and hence maximum utility.

We can reframe this slightly to be in terms of incentives. Each option an agent (in a product, a user) has offers some set of incentives. That set might be comprised fully of positive incentives, fully of negative incentives, or a mix therein.

The sum of the incentives will determine the action a user takes.

Any particular agent is always experiencing some set of available incentives. This set of incentives always results in some action. That action can be to take no action, and in fact in this framework the default incentive being experienced by an agent is the status quo preservation incentive.