CEO of Miroma Project Factory Kat Jade Robinson Shares Her Daily Routine
As the global CEO of digital development studio Miroma Project Factory, Kat Jade Robinson spends her day thinking about how she can change your behaviour.
04:00 Wake up, write down five or six tasks on Asana and Slack then have a snooze.
05:00 Long walk [in Sydney’s Peakhurst] and feed the animals: two cats, four ducks and a human [Robinson is six months pregnant at the time of the interview].
07:00 I can fit in three calls with Los Angeles. A client might say: we need a website. But we find they actually need an interactive PDF. Sometimes it’s putting aside what’s financially best or the desire to use a shiny, new technology when we know the client won’t maintain it.
The dichotomies are exciting. We built an app for Philips’ sleep division – to help those with chronic insomnia – but one of the first things the Woolcock Institute sleep therapists tell you is: put your phone in another room at night.
07:30 Drive time to Surry Hills. No news – my day is full of absorbing information. I yell out texts in the car. Siri scrambles the messages but at least my friends know I miss them.
08:30 Read emails from the London team. We often work with vulnerable cohorts: people with disabilities, mental health disorders, addictions or those who are in abusive relationships. We worked on Baby Buddy for a British charity to try to engage both partners in the pregnancy journey; unfortunately there’s a folklore in some parts that if a pregnant woman keeps smoking she’ll have a smaller baby and therefore an easier birth.
We’ve built a wearable device that listens to biometrics and heart rate and provides intervention when it detects stress. A soldier designed it; he was contemplating self-harm but then his friend texted. His watch vibrated and it stopped him.
09:00 Meet with the augmented reality and design team. How do you visually communicate so people are not just reading but participating within a story? You consider how people learn. Myself, I will not read instructions regardless of how important the cabinetry is.
09:30 Sydney team’s daily stand-up. We’ve been given a grant to build a web-based platform to help veterans return to work. The solution is gate-and-stage, like a choose-your-own-adventure book. You do a piece then another piece unlocks and guides you to another area. To learn, people need to absorb information then come back.
“Gamification” is a misleading word. One of our products, My QuitBuddy for smoking cessation, is chock-full of it. As you progress through the product, a visual of your body changes into a more positive colour. Numbers flick over, telling you things like how much money you’ve saved. When you have a craving, there are games that require both thumbs to activate. Photos from your own phone remind you why you’re doing this.
10:30 Meet with behaviour change specialist Lynette Reeves. We have to listen to what the client’s experts in the space want to achieve. When we built a product for the Stimulant Services unit at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital, for people who use methamphetamines, we assumed it would be to help people resolve their use. It’s not. S-Check offers tools to self-reflect on whether the person’s usage is escalating or declining. Some people will choose to participate in that pathway and this provides safeguards and railings.
The government grant for Avow was to approach the problem of domestic violence in a radically new way. Most perpetrators don’t believe they should be punished. Usually only one breach per Apprehended Domestic Violence Order is recorded; often people go home to get a bag. NSW Police give people this tool to help them notice their triggers and understand the fundamentals, such as what happens when you get arrested? When do you go to court?
11:30 Conversation with our head of production about an automated payment system then a walking meeting with the head of culture, operations and people to talk about renovation plans.
13:20 My diary’s open – the team can get access when they need it – but I block out a large chunk of time daily for focused work: forecasting, new tenders, board documentation. I don’t check email. I clear my inbox in the morning, follow up at day’s end and get work done in between.
16:00 Catch up with sister agency Maker Lab in Singapore, which provides staffing solutions to Google and Netflix. There are 19 agencies in the Miroma Group and it’s important we share regional trends. We see differences in the way accounts need to be serviced; UK-based clients are usually more formal and the timelines are a little longer.
16:30 Review a white paper by our LA director about how content consumption is changing with the introduction of more AR/VR worlds. Much of the internet is inaccessible for those with disabilities. Seeing how that will play out in yet another space interests us.
18:00 Drive home. I always ask Siri to find a podcast using a keyword from an interesting conversation that day.
19:20 Call with our London-based financial director. We’re a global business so when something changes pricing, how does that affect pricing in the US, the UK, Australia? We do a lot of skunkworks – research and development on new technologies. Sometimes we can claim R&D tax rebates.
20:30 Cook with my partner, Charlie [Ainsbury, a food and beverage creative director], who’s telling me which glassware is coming into fashion. Catch up on 45 WhatsApps on the family feed. I use all the tricks of the trade to de-escalate stress: chunking work, taking stock of the good things (a weekly task called “High and Low”) and Self-care Sunday, which is gardening.
22:00 Read three pages of Good to Great by Jim Collins. Some bosses whose companies go from “good to great” prioritise longevity and the cause of the business above their own self-propulsion. Magnesium. Eye mask. I’m asleep at 10.30. I used to be able to run on three or four hours’ sleep but definitely not in my 40s.
Good game
Kat Jade Robinson says, at its rawest, gamification means using game-based mechanics to create a sticky product. So when something built to encourage positive behaviours nudges you to complete a task, that’s its behavioural element. “The gamification piece might be, once you tick off a goal, a sparkly unicorn jumps out,” she says. “It’s the layer on top that makes you feel rewarded as you go along.”
