Nesrine Changuel - We Should All Prioritise Product Delight! (with Nesrine Changuel, Product Coach & Author of “Product Delight“)

Let's imagine that there are some stakeholders that don't care and you need to get them on board what do they care about. What's their value they value retention they wanna people to stay longer do they value revenues and more monies. Then try to show that delight or emotional connections is gonna drive them to work that go and i just told you earlier just like a motion connection is a big driver. For revenue like twice 50% more revenue and 50% more referral and 50% more retention. Hello and welcome to one night in product the show where i chat to some of the brightest minds in product from across the globe to help you see product management in a whole new light. That sounds up your street don't forget to dive into the back catalog on your favorite podcast app or on youtube and of course follow subscribe share or drop me a comment or review it all helps keep the lights on. My guest tonight is Dr. Nesreen Shangell PhD Nesreen's had a sparkling career starting out the legendary bell labs as a research engineer before packing her bags to sweden and stepping into product management at microsoft working on skype. She soon hung up on that and hopped over to spotify then on to google in paris along the way she started thinking seriously about delight no not the sticky turkish variety but product delight an optimistic user-centered approach that's a bit of a clash with my good old-fashioned british cynicism. Anyways she's here tonight to talk all about a new book also called product delight now we can build products that spark genuine emotional connections. Nesreen thanks for coming and welcome to the show. Hi Jason excited to be with you. Hey it's uh it's going to be a good one i'm always in the mood for more delight and i'm hoping that you're going to provide some you know it's lacking in the world these days. Right so we're going to talk all about delight tonight so i guess you know in the spirit of being delightful we should get straight into it and talk all about product delight now i know you've spoken about this at conferences we've had calls about it before you've got a newsletter all about it it's also the name of your new book but let's just start with the basics what is product delight. So what is product delight the way how i described the light is the ability to create products that do not only serve for functional needs. It means that actually as users and we are all users for certain product we use product for different reasons. Some of that as we'll use products for the functional part of the product and other might also enjoy the emotional part or the emotional need that the product is honoring honoring for us. So let me give you an example like every time i go for a conference or workshop i always start with this very basic and simple question like what's your favorite product. And like i'm always fascinated by the variety of the answers and some people will answer based on the products that serve their for their functionality part others will answer based on the emotional part. And the even more exciting thing is that they don't even know why they feel like emotionally connected with the products and so. That's the essence of delight delight is when we. Like like products of course because the product is blending both aspects like the functional part as well as the emotional parts. Of course we're gonna cover a lot of examples but the idea is this one is that products. Are successful they stand out they become memorable and people loves them because they serve for both functional need and emotional need at the same time. So that's interesting because as you're asking that kind of question that you asked other people about like favorite products i start thinking about well you know what are my favorite products and you know obviously. Any product i've worked on has to be my favorite product but i do a lot of b2b stuff and a lot of that stuff is maybe stuff that's not things i would use on a day to day basis because i don't work in that industry or whatever you know don't work in a bank or. Things like that so then i think about some of the consumer products i know you've worked at spotify use spotify as example in the book and you know i use spotify pretty much every day. But then i sit there and think well does it delight me and that's an interesting question right and you know without wishing to you know put the boot into spotify but like. I don't know if it does delight me i mean the music delights me of course but then the music i can get from youtube or from other places so yeah why do i go to spotify okay well i go there because it's got a lot of the music and that's. Because they've signed distribution deals with all these different people and they can get the music and there's also the second order delight of well are they paying the artists enough and all the kind of arguments that people have about that. And i guess what i'm where i'm trying to go with this is like i use a lot of products that don't delight me just because they happen to have the things that i need in them you know i'm thinking about you know my. Accounting platform that i use for my company accounts and stuff like. I use them and they they're very functional and i guess i'm kind of delighted by the fact that i can do the things i need to do as quickly as possible. Maybe that's the type of delight that we kind of focus on there but i don't like sit at the end of a you know like log off of free agent or something like that. I don't have that kind of delight so is it like is the light kind of a spectrum of different types of. Forces and kind of emotions that you might feel yeah so as we're getting into the definition of delight i want to highlight that there are three pillars for creating this delightful moment that we all aiming for. So the first pillar is very similar to what you just mentioned it's about removing friction. Is that how can we create features within the product in a way that we can reduce as much as we can. What we call valet moment or low moment of emotions so for example if you even if you're using a b2b product or a content product or whatever software you using. All what we want to achieve is that we want to make sure that uses having as. As least like bad emotions moment as possible i'm gonna share an example within this first pillar before i move to the next two ones. So for example what i mean by removing friction is that the other day i was actually catching the train from paris to. To london so i was running late to get my order star. And so i ordered an uber and i went to my app and i ordered an uber and happens that the driver canceled within the way coming to my place so i get super stressed i didn't know what i do so i jumped into the first taxi that. Just happen to pass in front of me and i completely forgot about the app by the way. And so what uber did during that time is actually they assigned me a new driver and the driver came. He waited for me he couldn't find me went away so i was charged for the waiting time was charged for the trip that i didn't took. And when i arrived to the train station i actually realized this bad surprise oh my god like i was charged so many. So how much so much money so how can i go for a refund so i was like psychologically ready for writing a long support letter and saying hey i didn't took that trip please bring my money back etc. But the surprise that i realized during that time is that when i went to the app there was only two clicks. Request a refund which trip done that's it i mean would you. Qualify that as delight maybe that's not the delight that people are expecting like people think about the light as like these joyful moment or this confetti or whatever. This is one very essential pillar of delight like removing friction making sure that the we are reducing as much as we can low emotion. And remember that's the first pillar the second pillar which also for me equally important is by. Anticipating users need so it's about not waiting for users to tell you exactly what they want from the product but rather surprise them. Like showing them that we actually know exactly what they need and provide them features and solutions that would meet their needs. Again maybe we can illustrate that with an example and the best example could find for this was actually my recent experience with revolut. So revolut this banking app which actually started as like a simple app for converting money from a currency to another. And now of course it's growing so much it's surprising me every time i use it by the way why because like a couple of months ago i was on a trip for a singapore. And as soon as i arrived i actually realized that my french mobile plan do not work in singapore meaning that if i want to have international call i had to go back in time and have this roaming like it was high like incredibly high fees. And so what are the options go for a local sim or try to figure out something local. But the big surprise that i found that day is that if you go to revolut app there is something called e-sim and you can even buy an e-sim from revolut. And this is actually the essence of anticipating need i don't think there is any revolut user asked revolut for having e-sim. But the fact that revolut knows exactly their users they know that most of their users are expat they are international profiles they travel a lot. They started to put whatever an international user would need some of them would need e-sim. So that's the second pillar and we're getting to the third pillar which is also a big driver for delight which is exceeding expectation. So we said like removing friction we said anticipating users need. And the last is about exceeding expectation meaning that it's not only about serving what they ask for but go beyond and surprise them because remember actually delight. What we didn't say so far is that the light is an emotion and it's even a combination of two emotions so there are some theory that actually conceptualize delight. As a combination of surprise and joy if you're in the moment experiencing like joy and surprise. You are the light now. We want to achieve that joy and surprise by of course anticipating need that creates a surprise but exceeding expectation is exactly what will drive a surprise for a longer term. The best example that come to mind is actually i don't know if you're using edge but as you have a great surprise that i recently discovered which is. If you're trying to do a purchase and you add an item to your cart and when you're about to pay. I mean there is a feature called coupon and actually it auto fill. The coupon that they find out coupon for you they auto fill it when you are about to pay and like boom suddenly you're having five percent discount ten percent discount. This is not expected from you i was about to pay hundred euro for my coffee machine and i found out like a discount of ten euro why not easy. So these are for me the essence of waiting delightful moment. It's completely going beyond this confetti effect i call the confetti effect like the light is definitely not about this. Like joyful moment through confetti and easter eggs and aesthetic but rather about creating an experience where emotions are taking part as part of the core experience. Alright well i'm sold but i also do like a bit of confetti from time to time. I do think it's funny though because i was chatting to a friend recently a non-english friend talking about kind of the british psyche. And this idea that like british people i'm kind of mentioned at the intro kind of cynical and a bit kind of low-key. And like this is why things like nps don't work in britain because no one would ever dare to give anything a nine or a ten. Six or seven is like yeah yeah i've just got married or something like that so it kind of feels like there's this maybe cultural element there as well around like what delights who and what level of delight and their kind of expectations and what their baseline is as well. Do you think that product delight is something that does transcend cultural boundaries or is there some kind of optimization you might need to do in certain markets or certain types of user. Yeah by the way just to jump on your comments regarding confetti actually something that i'm describing quite well in the book is that there are different types of delight. And i'm differentiating between what i call the surface delight and that's exactly. Most but like every time people hear the word delight i think about the surface delight. The best example for surface delight is like the other day was my birthday and on my birthday my apple watch like pop it up with some balloons saying happy birthday. I mean why not i mean of course it brings some joy it's personal if you like someone is thinking about you but that's surface delight it means that it only taps. Into the emotional element only taps into the emotional need. The deep delight is when the feature is actually combining both elements it combines the emotional needs and the functional needs like both at the same time. So these are the two types like it's about deep delight and low delight now you ask about is it like universal is it like culture based etc yes i mean of course we need to adapt to the cultural aspect but. Interesting part is that independently where you work independently in which industry you are or which industry you are aiming your product is aiming for b2b or b2c. As long as you are serving for humans like that human using the product at the end of the chain or at the end of the journey that they deserve the emotion to be on it like i usually advocate for the b2h which is business to human rather than like b2b b2c. Because i mean this will have an impact this will have impact on your users users will remember you users will love you and they will stay longer with you and by the way they have been a. Study not to study but for studies and that's the fun part for studies by who by kept you mean i buy the lawyer by mckinsey and harvard business review actually the four of them study the exact same phenomenon it's about the impact of emotional connections on product adoptions. And it's really funny cuz i read four of them and they've been a consensus is very clear consensus consensus is that emotionally connected users. Are more likely to buy product from you to stay longer with you and to recommend your products so retention revenue and referral are doubled with emotional connections so. And these three metrics are key independent of the industry independently of the. Off the environment or the culture that we are operating. I'm again those types of kind of results i guess of the sorts of things that you know all business leaders are going to be interested in right now they want to get all of those hours of the of the are from the pilot metrics. But that still does start to feel a little bit. Kind of b2c or at the very least p.o.g. kind of p.o.g. b2b where you've kind of got the because there are some products out there that obviously heavy sort of sales driven culture behind them or sales driven go to market motion. And there's people don't get to see the products until they've already companies already bought them and they probably don't even get to choose what they get to use because they just get sort of handed it down by someone up on high. Now obviously there are still humans in that equation but some of the humans are making the decisions for those products are very much you know either procurement teams or they're the business sponsors are not the people that are gonna be using it day to day. So is there also like this other kind of potential angle on product delight is like yeah sure we want to delight users all product managers should want to do that. But do we also want to delight the buyers and the kind of the stakeholders of the users and maybe kind of have to try and delight different people in different ways is there anything to that at all. So if the question about like how can I influence this concept within the organization or how can I get buy in as well from these stakeholders who don't necessarily care about the emotional connection. Like if I'm selling like a supply chain solution to a CISO a large company and they just want a product that does something that solves a problem takes one of their problems away but they don't 100% care how it does it and they certainly don't care. Certainly not about confetti but probably even if it's that easy to use to be honest they just want it to solve the problem and I've certainly worked on a bunch of products in the past. Yeah across my career that you know have all the kind of the sins of B2B enterprise focused product and I'm sure you've logged into a few in your time as well. It kind of feels like delight is the furthest from their mind as possible or at least that level of delight but it kind of feels like there could be a different level of delight like almost like an organizational delight of some sort which obviously sounds kind of depressing in a way but like how can you delight an organization but. This way because yeah there's this all this talk about in sales for example the need to kind of make the person that's buying it make the champion look good you know solve their needs which are maybe different to the user's needs or different level to the user's needs. So I'm just trying to think if like delight abstracts up away from just making an individual user or group of users feeling happy but trying also to make the people that have to make the or have to sign the check to make them happy and delighted as well. Yeah so actually when i started this project i mean i'm calling product delight as a movement or as a project because when i started this i was convinced because. I mean i've been working in this environment for years like at least 15 years at spotify and then at google both google meet and then google chrome and. Actually just for the information like during my time at google i was the pm for delight like my mission was to make sure that google meet was delightful. But then actually i realized that there are some concepts and there are some like actionable tools that could be like. Use outside as well like people can benefit from that but i was actually aware that. The environment where i work is more like a. Consumer face so i really wanted to get what's the perspective on what's the view of other industries toward this topic like how do complete non consumer product. Would operate and perceive this this movement or this project so what i did actually i interviewed a lot of leaders from different organization and different type of industries. So i interviewed people from hardware i interviewed people from business tools and for example people from atlasian or from into it. Or slack i mean these are considered like more b2b words and the third like bucket that i interviewed well like complete and let's say. Heavy product like for example github or snowflake these are like absolutely not consumer. Faced products so how these companies perceive the light and do they even care about emotional connection i mean i can see that these companies to be successful so. Is there a successful my hypothesis was like. They're probably they care about that and actually there was no surprise because what really what i really love during this interview is because. These companies consider and value emotional connection as much as they do they even had like information like what i discovered like dropbox to have a pillar called cupcake. GitHub has a metric called doof and d stands for the light so the light utility usability and product market fit so they care. So much about the light when it comes to their product. Same for atlasian like recently when i chatted with them they care. Actually the bar is getting higher now like people are so exposed to b2c products so we actually expect from our b2b product to be also somehow. Emotionally connected connecting and delightful so they start to realize that it's not only about providing that functionality that. only by providing that functionality that users are waiting from the product, but also creating a connection that allow people to stay. We want users to stay. Now, the question is that how can I get buy-in and how can I get this like as much joy and delight from the stakeholders? For me, there's something called a concept called perception versus perspectives. Are you familiar with perception versus perspective? So perception is our view. I mean, we as engineers or product manager, we value delight. We value emotional connection. Designers, by the way, value a lot emotional connection. However, let's say other stakeholders like sales, by the way, even sales care about emotional connection. So let's figure out a department that doesn't care. We all know sales people don't have emotions. Just kidding, sales folks. But they sell emotion. They don't sell features. The best salesperson are those who manage to sell emotion. And that's why we are buying the best cars, not based on their functionality, but sometimes for the emotional connections that we care about. Anyway, so let's imagine that there are some stakeholders that don't care and you need to get them on board. And for me, that's how you start to use perspective instead of perception. Perspective is that what do they care about? What's their value? They value retention. They want people to stay longer. Do they value revenues and more monies? Then try to show that delight or emotional connections is going to drive them toward that goal. And I just told you earlier, just like the emotional connection is a big driver for revenue, like twice, 50% more revenue and 50% more referral and 50% more retention. So if you can get into that culture and bring in some features into the product that show that you're getting closer to these stakeholders goal, then you are putting yourself into their perspective and then they will start to see value into whatever we're talking about today. Well, fair enough. Again, I'm sold. I'm hoping everyone else will be as well, but let's sort of pivot slightly into the book, although it's not much of a pivot because it's talking about all of the same things. It's obviously pretty self-explanatory from the title and what you've already said about Product Delight, but you know, the book Product Delight, what's the sort of record core value proposition and who should be buying it? Yeah. So, actually, how did it start? So when I, when I started even thinking about Delight, I didn't thought about it as a book. I started talking about it in conferences and I quickly realized that actually this topic is very well known among designers and marketers and even sales. I mean, that's why I mentioned sales because salespeople are somehow educated toward the emotional sales disciplines. Designers are really good and there are even a lot of books toward like emotional design and designing for emotions, et cetera. These are great resources. But when it comes to business and product managers, I think the only thing we know about is Canoo and Canoo we're even getting the wrong thing about it because a lot of people consider Canoo as a prioritization tool. So they start by prioritizing must-have and then performance. And maybe one day we will get to Delight. And what is Delight? I don't know, but Canoo said there is a Delight. Anyway, so why is that a problem? Is that you have different disciplines and function in the organization that don't talk the same language. I mean, you have marketers and designers who are pushing for emotional marketing and emotional products, but then you have business and product talking about money and revenues and whatever other KPI we care about. So my first goal was to align and make sure that we are speaking the same language, make this as a common goal and even advocate for a culture of Delight. So this book is, yes, it is operational because it comes with tools and frameworks and techniques and step-by-steps ways of working, but also, which is for me even more important, it's for CPOs and head of products and people who want to put in place a culture of Delight because it's not a one-off. It's not the one feature in the roadmap. It's not something that you do in your quarterly planning and then you forget about it. I mean, having been spending years at Spotify, I know exactly what it means to have a product culture. It's something that you advocate for, you live by and you repeat and you hear like regularly so much that it becomes part of your way of reasoning and your way of thinking. So if leaders can take this responsibility seriously, they will put like the Light as pillars in their strategy document. They will talk about it in their ritual. They will check in their roadmap planning and check if there are any type of surface Delight or deep Delight and give attention to this kind of concepts and that's why like I see it from both sides, like from the operational IC level where PM know exactly what it is and also from the leader side and the founder sides who want to have a real personality and a real brand for their products. There's an interesting question there though around like the bottoms up versus top down thing and I know obviously you say that you try and cater to both appetites within the book and that's obviously great because it means that anyone can pick it up and doubles your sales, you never know. But at the same time, like how the book could be used to start to drive some of those changes could be from either of those directions, right? Like you could have one individual contributor, a company pick up the book, say, oh, hey, these have got some good ideas in and start to try to introduce those kind of in one little stream and see if it takes and then maybe get it kind of propagating out. The other option, of course, is that CPO, VP of product, they kind of get the book and they read it and they start getting excited about it and they almost try and kind of blanket put across the company if they can get buy-in from their leadership. Do you see either of those as being more likely to work or do you feel that either of them could work depending on the kind of the context on the ground? Honestly, I've tried them both. So I'm going to share two examples. One is like when I actually coached the PM who doesn't at all have the buy-in from the manager and he wanted to give it a try and then show the results. And the other way around, where actually I was coaching founders and CPU who actually managed to successfully install a culture of the light and both worked. The only thing is you have to take it like slow, slowly and put the perspective view instead of the perception view as we described it earlier. So in the first case, what we did actually together with the PMs, like, Hey, my problem, she started by showing me her roadmap and I looked at the roadmap, it's all about migrating from system A to system B system conversions, blah, blah, blah. Yes, we all have to do these kinds of things. And we have, I mean, I'm not saying that you only have to have a delightful roadmap, but how can we tweak a little bit that roadmap to make it, to add into it, like some small delightful features as well. So what we did, we actually started by listing together, what are the motivators of their users? So what we started doing is that we, we took a pen and paper and we list what motivate your users on the functional level, and then what motivate your users on the emotional level. Let me give you an example. If we can see the Spotify as an example, people would go to Spotify to listen to music or to search for a specific song or to listen to a podcast, or they want to go check for Jason's session with Ms. Reen or, I mean, these are functional reasons. And at the same time, sometimes people would go to Spotify for other complete emotional reasons. They want to go there because they want to feel less lonely, or they want to go there because they want to change their mood, or they want to go there because they feel more productive when they are, or connected. I mean, these are emotional needs. So that's the very first step. We start by listing both the emotional needs and then the functional needs. Then we looked at the roadmap and said, Hey, look at this roadmap. Well, let's take these opportunity one by one and let's check which, uh, this opportunity mat or solve for which of these needs, like, is there any connection? Cause if there is no connections, we're probably not even on the right track. But we found out that most of the features are solving only for functional needs and none of them is really solving for whatever, uh, emotional needs. So we try to work on these features in a way, like how can we enhance this functional aspect? I'm not saying that we should not do them. We are gonna do them, but in a way where we can add some emotional element into them. So can we add some personalization? Can we add some fun aspect? Can we, uh, I mean, there are some, what I call in the book, the lighters, some tools that we can add into the, these features to make them more into this deep delight rather than only functional. So that's what we did together. And of course we try to make some balance of some functional feature versus deep delight versus low delight or surface delight, and we ended up having a nice bouquet and I mean, the reason why this for me was successful is because we didn't change the way of working or the tools or the framework that the company was so used to. We just changed the way how we think about features by introducing the concept of emotions into the actual features themselves and these roadmap was operated, they managed to put in place and then we started tracking the success, like the adoption, the retention, the revenues, et cetera. That's the first phase. The second phase where actually leaders, we try to like, I tried to work with leaders and that was even a complete different story because with leaders, we started saying the leader reached out to me and said, Hey Nisreen, I need your help to craft OKRs and product strategy. Absolutely not about emotion or whatever. And I said, yeah, I mean, we did a couple of sessions about strategy and OKR, but quickly realized that the product is lacking personality and lacking a brand. So actually the product that we've been working on was a platform that helps artists like a newborn artist or musician to find curator so they become more known in the artistic field. So I asked the founder, the following question, I said, Hey, do you think your users are proud about using your product? Are they proud enough to tell other artists and musicians to use your platform? And the answer was, actually, I think, no, I think they're not proud to tell others because they would feel like little and they will not feel like they would feel unsuccessful and they need help from us and, and that was the beginning of a very nice discussion and a complete shift in the strategy. Actually by himself, after two weeks, he came back to me, said I was not able to sleep well because I was, I kept thinking about this question, like, are your users proud enough to tell others? And he said, I think we need to have an entire strategy about how can we make our users proud enough so they become ambassadors and sponsors of our platform. And we completely shifted from the discussion of OKRs and product strategies and vision into this entire big pillar that became the driver of the product. And of course, then since he was so convinced, he put that in place in the teams and organization and it came naturally. He was so convinced that that's the thing that will allow his product to win. So these are two complete different examples. In the first one, take it step by step, small steps and show results. In the second, make sure that founders are completely on boarded and it's aligned with what they want to achieve. Do you have to ask, just for the record, with that second example, whether that hypothesis was found to be true or if they're still trying to work it out? You mean, actually what we work was that was the goal. The goal is how can we make sure that the artists who are using the platform are proud enough to share. So we actually put in place some program of sponsorship where they become like ambassadors. If they bring in more artists, they get like badges, et cetera. So we work together on these kind of elements. And of course, they are growing so much now. It started in France and now they are growing in the US. They are having bigger and bigger scale because they realized that the word of mouth and the referral is their success of differentiation. And I mean, look at wrapped, for example, like the biggest success of wrap is not only from the retrospective that you're receiving toward the end is by the fact that you feel cool enough to share it with your friends and to share it with your community. I mean, it depends. You might not feel cool, depending on what you listen to. But that's one of the elements that you every product need to consider. Like, are my users proud enough so that they can tell the world about it? Yeah, and I'll buy that. And just for the record, half the songs on my Spotify wrapped. I'm pretty sure the kids put on to the Alexa speaker and they certainly weren't things that I was listening to. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. But, you know, you've just used a bunch of examples. You obviously have loads of examples and interviews through the book as well. And I guess it's refreshing in one way to see that, you know, someone isn't just talking in kind of theory, but they're actually going out and sort of coming back with stories about times where this has worked or where people have tried it, et cetera. But I'm always slightly concerned with examples, not just with yours, but just in general for the kind of potential for cherry picking. So you sort of sit there and say, okay, well, I've gone out and found the 10 examples of when product light was the thing that really kind of helped launch this company into the stratosphere or keep it there if it was already there. But actually there's another 50 stories of companies that kind of maybe went, you know, for want of a better word, too far into delight or they kind of went the wrong direction or they left other things out or whatever it was that they did, or maybe just even just adding and focusing so much on delight didn't help them at all. And we kind of don't talk about those ones because of course, A, they don't support the story, but because B, you probably never heard of the company either. Were you concerned about cherry picking as a danger or making sure that maybe you had kind of counter examples or maybe examples of times where people explicitly didn't choose delight and it caused them to not succeed? Yeah. So I've been talking mostly about the good part of delight and if it was all good, I mean, yes, it's the delightful part of delight, but if it was all good, then everyone will, I mean, if it comes with zero risk, then everybody will, we'll give it a try, but of course it comes with some risk and I would love to add maybe some stories or some example where it can, or it might go wrong. And even myself, I mean, we love successful stories, but we also love listening to some less successful ones. And I'm going to share some of you of course, because the very first risk I see, and for me, it's really important that we're talking about it here. Since emotion is, delight is an emotion, it's really important to take into consideration inclusiveness. Like inclusiveness is a really key in this particular element. Why? Because what makes me happy is not necessarily what makes you happy. And I might be happy with something that might not make me happy tomorrow or in a month or whatever. So it's really important to ask yourself the following question, could this feature or this product be harmful in any way? And the reason why I emphasize on this is because there've been a lot of initiatives, like supposed to be delightful initiative that ended up to be very anti-delightful. I call it the anti-delight concept. So here are some examples. Like the first example come to mind, come from Deliveroo, you know, the delivery company. I mean, I love the fee, the product. I love the experience, but they did something last year. And it was specific for France where it was mother's day. And on mother's day, they actually sent a campaign. It was supposed to be a marketing campaign and where you receive a notification on your phone. So in your phone, you get a notification. It looks exactly like a message call from your mom. And when you click on it, you say, Hey, it's mother's day. Think about your mother, send her a flower. Deliveroo can do that for you. Amazing. Bingo. I think you see exactly where I'm going. Because this feature had the worst press coverage ever. Like people really took that seriously bad because not everyone perceives a missed call from their parents the same way. Some people experience joy, some other would experience grief, other would experience sorrow, whatever. So people get extremely disappointed, like up to the point that the company had to apologize on official press or whatever. So the initiative was supposed to be delightful. It's about creating some joy. But it was not inclusive enough. We see the same example with like gesture reaction. Like when people are doing like FEMBAP and suddenly you have these fireworks happening behind you. Stupidest feature idea ever, by the way, whoever, whoever came up with the idea of this deserves to be taken out the back and covered in tar. Ridiculous feature. Yeah. I mean, the reason why I'm talking about that is because it was actually released by Apple on their new OS system update. And it happens to be released when I was working for Google Meet. So we had so many complaints from our users saying, Hey, Google Meet. Why do you have a gesture reaction? Like, please kill it. And we're like, it's not a Meet thing. It's an Apple thing. Please go ahead on your Mac and disable the feature. Why? Because like it's been a lot, yes, I guess you're experiencing bad experience with that on your podcasts and sessions, but also like people are having therapy session with their doctors and they show their like hurt finger and suddenly what a great moment you're having fireworks happening around you. Like this is completely non-appropriate. So there are actually a long list of what are the things that are really important to take into consideration. I'm even calling it the light excellence checklist. It includes of course, inclusion, but also includes other elements. Like for example, is it aligned with the business and the user's needs? I mean, the light is not an excuse to add confetti or to add like Easter eggs or joy or colorful elements. It has to be aligned with what the business want to achieve and what the user want to experience. And by the way, we've been talking a lot about confetti. I want to, I want to share a counter example, something where confetti actually makes me happy. The example comes from Airbnb. I use Airbnb as a user, like as a host, but also as a guest, but also as a host. It has a place that I have a place that I put on for rent. And something that I care a lot about is to have the superhost badge. Like I really care a lot about that. I do my best to make sure that the experience is great. And actually when I get this superhost badge, I have to maintain it so that every three months, Airbnb will reassess based on review and experience. And so every three months, if I'm re-evaluated to remain superhost, I open the app and the app turns into confetti. It says like, congratulations, you're a superhost again. Honestly, I mean, this is lightweighted and I feel like the app is celebrating this effort with me. And this is a moment where I accept confetti. It's like, yes, I mean, I've been aiming for it. I achieved it. The app is celebrating it and recognizing my effort. So be mindful when confetti makes sense versus where it doesn't make sense at all, and make sure that it doesn't bring distraction. I mean, don't be the clippy. I guess we are at the same. I mean, don't be the clippy. I guess we are the same age. We know what clippy is. Don't be the clippy. Oh, come on. Don't don't do clippy like that. We're not clippy. No, that was fine. Big up for clippy. But it is funny what you say. I mean, maybe fun is the wrong adjective. But what you're saying around some of the kind of the ways that things can go down slightly not as intended. And I certainly remember from my past when I was working on a mental health app, there was a big push for some of the kind of gamification, almost, to some extent, sort of, you know, prompts and streaks and stuff like that. But you sit there and you think, well, actually, do we want to start to encourage, you know, addictive or kind of disappointment behavior in people because they missed out or because they're trying to do something around something that's a fairly sensitive area for them, for people that maybe are the most vulnerable that might kind of react poorly to this. It doesn't make it a completely bad idea. But it definitely, I mean, it was something that we didn't go with in the end. But like, it was definitely an active discussion on how can we do this in an ethical way. But then you start to think about some of the other examples of stuff like that. Like, you know, how can we make a nice engaging app that people get excited about? And then Duolingo is obviously a nice example that everyone always trots out because it's kind of almost perfected kind of gamification and engagement to kind of keep you coming back and doing something which in theory is kind of a boring thing to do, like continuously learning a language. It does get a bit old reading the same sentences again and again. But at the same time, if you can kind of gamify and kind of give some personality to that as much as possible. It kind of feels though, to some extent that there is a danger in that kind of case to almost prioritize delight over everything else. And by that I mean, I don't actually think that Duolingo really helps people learn languages that much. I think it really helps them to kind of have a social proof that they're trying to learn a language and kind of just kind of keep them coming back to it. But I'm not 100% sure that anyone actually gets the promised benefit out of that. Now Duolingo obviously do because they're getting all of the money from the subscribers, including myself, let's face it, because I do as I say, not what I do, right? But just this idea that you can actually go too far, prioritize that type of what we might call confetti delight or gamification alongside it, almost at the expense of the initial kind of core job to be done that the user actually was going in for. Yeah, something that we really want to clarify here is that delight is absolutely not about gamification. Gamification, of course, is a very well used technique in different areas where it might work somewhere and might not work somewhere else. But thank you for bringing this concept of avoiding addictions. And this is something actually I had a great discussion with Marty Kagan about. So when I asked Marty Kagan to review the book and give his feedback, he came exactly with your concern. He said like, we want to make sure that we respect the ethical part and delight is absolutely not about creating addiction, but rather about creating good emotion, which is a complete different thing. So that's why, I mean, I'm not talking about gamification in the book. This is not the technique that I'm advocating for, even if it might work, as you said, in some product and it's bringing success from others. But the way how I describe delight is about creating features that is aligned with user's value. I mean, we really need to dig very, very deep into what do users value most. Are they like valuing the social aspect? Are they valuing like connections? Are they valuing whatever they can value about? It's really important to list that and then map that to what motivates them. And then the features are about solving for those and aligning with those. It's not about, I mean, if they don't care about social aspect, we don't want to force them into getting to the social aspect. However, if they care about security and making sure that they feel better about themselves, then we need to align the solutions toward that path. So it's really, really different. I mean, these two aspects of addiction versus emotional connection for me are complete opposites. One is about people are feeling happy about themselves and others are about people are completely unhappy about their self. And I want to share an example here because like we all know that the campaign of wrapped was a big success. And of course it was a such a big success that it contributes so much in the app download. Like Spotify gained so many users just from wrapped, which is insane for a feature that is completely emotional. There's absolutely no functional aspect into it. But the fact is that this was successful, made a lot of products trying to copy it. Like we see wrapped almost everywhere. Like it's really crazy. And some of them are successful, but a lot of them are completely unsuccessful. Why? I'm going to give you an example. Let's, let me tell you, Jason, like, Hey, you're wrapped says like, you've been watching 20 hours of video this week. What did you feel about that? How would you take that? Well, I mean, it depends what the videos were, I guess. But yeah, like if I'm, if it's YouTube or something like that, or YouTube shorts or TikTok, I'd probably feel that I'd probably wasted at least a decent percentage of that time, right? Absolutely. I mean, that's the first impression you get. Like maybe I could have a better use of my time. However, if I tell you, Hey Jason, you learned three skills today. You learned about public speaking. You learned about being a better facilitator and I'd say better communication. That has a different impact on you because then you're, it's aligned with your value. You value learning, but you don't necessarily value wasting time. And that's what most products didn't get when it comes to route. It's not about sharing information or data. It's about sharing information that people care about, care about so much that they would feel happy about that kind of information anyway. So this is just for the context of like aligning with users value in order to create happiness and emotional connection. No, absolutely. And you know, I think that obviously a big prerequisite there is actually having data in your app that people care about, like that is actually socially valuable or business valuable. I'm also thinking of things like the, uh, in Gmail and Google calendar where you get, Oh, you've been in X amount of meetings this week or something, you know, I guess, you know, there's a certain type of hustle person on, on Twitter or X that would probably want to share that sort of stuff. But for me, that's, that's just between me and my, me and my therapist. So let's talk briefly then about making this real. And obviously you've got the product delight model in the book and you've got the delight grid, which you talked about kind of in passing earlier where you're talking about the, uh, functional motivators and the emotional motivators and being able to kind of lay these out. That kind of feels to me like one of the, the kind of the core frameworks in the book that you might not necessarily see in other, in other books. It's like, cause you know, there's a lot of stuff in the book you talked earlier about sort of Kano and different ways of measurement and, and different ways of classifying and different techniques. Like there's a lot of stuff there that you might call kind of not necessarily standard or not standard enough, but definitely known concepts from before. But then you've got the delight grid as part of that, but you've kind of got this process that you've mapped out around kind of making this real kind of a four-step process as far as I understand. Identifying motivators, defining product opportunities, identifying and categorizing solutions, which is where the delight grid comes in and then validating those solutions. So I wonder if you could kind of talk through just kind of a high level, kind of the kind of the steps that you go through in a bit more detail to try and take a product that maybe is already a little bit delightful, or maybe it's not delightful at all, or maybe you're trying to work on a new thing. Some of the things that you'd need to do at each of those stages to actually kind of make this real rather than like nice sounding theoretical words. Yeah. So when, uh, so I mentioned earlier that actually when I joined Google Meet, I became the PM for delight. Actually, many products at Google, like including search, Chrome, uh, meet, they, they have a, of course, like a team that actually focus on making sure that the product is delightful, which is something that I never heard about before. So before my Google time, I was working like as a regular PM at Spotify. What I mean by regular is like, you have a backlog. No, I mean, at Spotify, we used to include like delightful features. Like we introduced a lot of fun aspects, but it was competing with other elements. Like at Google, I had the luxury to only work on delightful features. What I call regular is like, when you have a backlog where features are competing with each other in terms of priority and you have to find the balance. And that's the reality, by the way, because I understand most companies cannot have the luxury of having like a, like a delight team in their organization. But actually when I joined this delight team, that's where I realized that, Hey, it's much more than a buzz word. Like there are techniques, there are ways of working, there are steps and structures and process that we can actually follow in order to create this, this very nice goal. And so I started actually talking about it. And I remember it was my, the first time I talk about that was at product ties a couple of years ago, and I gave a talk about the light. I had no intention about writing a book, by the way, at the time. And I started talking about it. People luxury, like, like connected with the concept. And I had one of the, someone from the audience said something quite interesting at the time said, Hey Nasreen, I mean, this is really beautiful what you're saying, but I feel like you are Google and you're Spotify and you're Microsoft. And that's why you can allow yourself to work on the light, but we are smaller company. We don't necessarily have the money or the time or the resource to focus on that. And that was for me, a trigger, like, no, because I'm leaving it from the inside and there are techniques that we can make them actionable for the outside as well. So I, that's what the trigger to create this delight model, just to give you the context of where, where it was born, because for me, I was obsessed about the fact that I wanted to be actionable. And that's why it's a very simple four steps. The very first step is something that we actually covered so far, which is the first step is about identifying the motivators. Like what motivate our users to use the product. And that's, that's the essence of segmentation, by the way. And segmentation is very familiar. People would segment their personas based on the demographic side or based on the behavioral segmentation. These are good, but not good enough. And the best segmentation is what I call the motivational segmentation, meaning that you segment your users based on why do they use the product. And remember, there are this functional wise and the emotional wise, and this is the foundation. That's the basics. The second step is to convert those motivators into product opportunities. I mean, you take this motivator and say, how can I, from this motivator, think about a potential product opportunity? For example, when I worked for Google meet, actually what I didn't mention so far is that when I joined Google meet, I joined Google meet right when COVID hit Europe, like the exact period and exact time. And so as a new PM, I had to address the new emotional needs and emotional challenge of being back to back in a remote environment. So we interviewed a lot of users and we asked them about the emotional impact, a mostly negative impact. And in that case, we actually focused on demotivators. And we heard a lot about low interaction, boredom. There've been even a term that was born during that time called zoom fatigue. Like people started like expressing zoom fatigue. So we started by identifying these emotional demotivators and we tried to see how can we solve them in a way that we can allow them to feel more alive, more present and less bored. So for example, we introduced features like raise hand or we introduced features like, you know, the emoji reaction, not the gesture reaction. The emoji reaction is like, when I send you this heart or in order to, for people to feel like less distant and can interact with the audience without like interfering or unmuting yourself. These are features that we developed by converting motivators or demotivators because sometimes it's easier to find demotivators than motivators into product opportunities. Now, step number three is about categorizing solutions. And that's where the tool called the light grid helps a lot. Because remember, the first step is about identifying motivators. It's all about listing these motivators in a grid where you put the emotional motivators on the X and the functional motivator on the Y axis. And then you take your potential solutions and map them into that map or that grid in order to categorize them into surface delight, deep delight. And the third category is what I call low delight, which is functional only. So that's the step number three is to have a view and categorize in order to make sure that you have a balance. Because what I want to highlight here is that the best products are those who have a nice bouquet. It's a nice combination. It's not only about having deep delight or surface delight or low delight. It's the best roadmap is the one that includes the three of them. And the last step, which is step number four, which is for me a really important, it's called validating delight. Because remember, we spoke about risks and actually listed all the potential risks, including inclusion, distractions, business impact, measurements. That's part of the delight excellence checklist, in order to make sure that we're not going to create any harmful or bad experience for the users. So these are the four steps. Yeah, that makes sense, obviously. And I've gone through all this myself to try and kind of pull it apart myself and see where it could be used with teams that I work with. But when you talk about that balance, do you have an idea about what the ideal balance between the three different types of delight is? So as you say, you've kind of got your surface delight, which is the kind of confetti, I guess we talk about. You've got your deep delight, which is the deeper stuff that actually kind of makes things painless or engaging for people. And low delight, they've got to be able to log in and stuff like that. So that's kind of the table stakes features from the Kano model, I guess. Do you have a kind of idea about like, on average, what a good breakout between those three, like what percentage you put into each part of your portfolio? Or is it so variable across different types of company that it'd be impossible even to kind of put a finger in the air? It can vary, but I came up with the model I'm calling 50-40-10. So the 50-40-10 is actually a recommendation. It's not like a, or call it the guidance. It means that if you look at your roadmap, you should find 50% of low delight, which means pure functional features. That's probably surprising because hey, she's talking about the light for an hour and now she's saying 50. Yes, of course. I mean, I'm not here just to create emotion. The product has to function well. And 50% is about like, for example, when I worked at Spotify, it's about improving search because search was not good for a certain period of time. And we had to work on migrating things to make search much more efficient. And we introduced features like search by lyric. I mean, these are like low delight and very essential. So that's the 50%. 40 is for the deep delight, which means it's still functional. It has to like serve for functional reason, but in a way that it's also delightful. It includes the emotional motivators into the way how it was crafted. Like for example, think about Discover Weekly. Discover Weekly is an example of deep delight because it helps you identify or like be inspired, but also in a personalized way. So you feel valued and like connected as well. And the 10 is for the surface delight. 10% is for these confettis when it's meaningful or for these like surprise when it's about the design or the UX. Only 10%. So it's again, it's a recommendation. It's the way how I see the best roadmap to function. But if let's imagine for your next roadmap, like quarterly planning, you don't have this percentage. It's still like good enough because again, it's a way to remind ourselves like, okay, even if I don't have it this quarter, maybe next quarter I can catch up. It's all about reminding our users that there are human behind the products and we care this time. Maybe we couldn't care as much, but next time we will care for sure. It kind of feels like there could be some element of sort of trend over time as well. And obviously these numbers could potentially move depending on like what it is that you're trying to respond to in the market. So for example, maybe you've decided to go all in, like I think you said earlier, like you can persuade someone that being more delightful is going to be a force multiplier, et cetera, that maybe they might decide to go 20, 30% even in the surface delight, because they feel that their kind of their front end is just not at all engaging at all. But then maybe that pairs back over time and they start to focus more in other stuff. I guess what I see a lot of out and about on my sort of B2B travels is probably, I don't know, sort of 70, 30, zero or something like that. So I guess just trying to work out how to balance that and what direction it should be traveling. I guess to your point, there's not like one answer, but just kind of keeping an eye on it and understanding and kind of putting things into place or into whichever percentage on purpose, rather than just defaulting to just doing one thing or the other and just kind of having a grip on it is kind of the key there. Absolutely. But when you talk about, for example, validating solutions, one thing that immediately pops up into my mind these days is, of course, the rise, the inexorable rise of AI and the fact that now everyone's vibe coding everything and throwing stuff out there. And to some extent, just putting stuff up and seeing if it sticks. And it kind of feels like that on the one hand is a way to really helpfully test whether things are going to work, whether they're going to be delightful. But on the other hand, it's a potential excuse to just throw any old garbage up and just see what happens and maybe even negatively impact on delight. Do you see there being kind of more of a risk in that area that people are going to be putting up just any old random, non-delightful stuff that maybe doesn't cover any of the boxes? Or do you think there is kind of a net opportunity for people to get more stuff out there and test it and try to be more delightful? I feel like I'm one of those rare people, not talking about AI, we're probably together in that space. I try not to talk about it too much, but I think it's an important trend. Thanks for bringing it because honestly, there's something quite interesting in what you said. Because remember, we build product for two reasons. What I started saying is that we build product for the functional reason and for the emotional reasons. And what we see with AI is that there is an acceleration for the functional part, that we can code in hours, we can create products in days. And the functional part is very highly accelerated and improved. However, there's this second side where nobody cared about so far, which is the emotional side that AI won't be able to accelerate. At least not able enough nowadays to accelerate the emotional side. So that makes the topic even more important because functional side is improving anyway. Now, what happens if we don't care about the user's emotion? That will create robotic product. Robotic product that we won't connect with, we won't enjoy using, we won't love. Let me give you one more. We've been enjoying using a lot of examples. So here, one more. So when I- Hit me, hit me. Yes, one more. So when I worked for Google Chrome, I had to work on one of the most challenging problem for, let's say, browsers in general, which is managing tab, how users are managing their tabs. And so I've been working for the iOS team and I spent some time trying to understand the connection between users and their tabs. And I found out that it's not a connection, it's something called relationship. Because people really relate so much to their tabs in a way that they would never accept that the app would close tabs on their behalf, for example. It would be like so dramatic. They don't accept the app to reorder tabs, for example, on their behalf. It's so dramatic. So those kinds of information, we managed to get them through regular interaction, regular conversations. And even I had some session with the users telling them to show me, for example, how they would find the tab in their tab grid. Like if they have like hundred tabs open, how would you find the tab? And some of them felt frustrated. Some of them felt like even the need to apologize because they had so many tabs open. And these kinds of information, you can only get them if you have this human aspect, like if you care about the user's emotion. Would an AI agent be able to detect this shame and frustration and relationship? Not yet. So from my perspective, it's really good that we are able to accelerate the functional side when it comes to building products. But I see it as a risk if we do not inject the emotional contribution from our sides so that we keep creating these enjoyable products. Here, here, well, you know, again, whatever we can use to get the best out of these tools without kind of offloading all of our thinking to them and expecting them to do our jobs for us. Because from personal experience, definitely an accelerant, but not the replacement, not quite yet anyway. But you know, maybe GPT-6 would be the one. Well, you know, I'm sure we could talk about this stuff for a very long time, but I do have to let you get on with the rest of your life. So if people want to come and find you after this, find out more about your work, find out about Product Delight in general, or check out the book, where can they come and do that? So they can reach out on my website, nesrine-shangel.com. They can also know more about the book on productdelightbook.com as well. I actually started recently a sub stack called Delight Tips, where I share what I found as delightful examples or stories and tips, so they can subscribe and follow as well. Something actually that started to happen recently and I'm enjoying it so much is that as soon as I start to talk about delight, people are randomly sharing their personal and sometimes professional stories about delight. So I enjoy reading them. If you have a delightful example of stories, please share it with me. They can connect on LinkedIn as well. I'm always responsive on LinkedIn. And again, like delight is a movement. I see it as a movement more than a topic because when I started actually writing about this topic, a friend told me that there are two ways of writing about things. Is you're writing a solution about the solution for a known problem. Let's say you're helping people how to ramp up with AI. It's a known problem. You have to ramp up with AI. Or you are writing about the solution for an unknown problem. And I feel like I'm into this second area. People are not necessarily aware that they need to invest a lot of their, like at least some of their time into creating this emotional connection because it's so much worth it. And there's actually a famous quote by Jeff Bezos. He said it a couple of years ago, by the way. And he said, a lot of times I get asked about what's gonna change in the next 10 years and rarely what's gonna remain in the next 10 years. And he said, I truly believe that it's much more worth it to invest on things that will remain than things that will change because that's worth the investment. And I believe that emotions is gonna remain for sure. So it's definitely something that we need to maintain and keep it around in order to create a delightful word. So since it's a moment or movement, I hope that we can spread the word and we can talk more about that. And I'm happy, of course, to teach it. I teach it both in academia, but also in organizations. So I organize what I call delight days. So delight days is a concept inspired by hack days from Spotify, where we actually introduced the concept, but also play with it. Like we allow people to go crazy, come up with some delightful features and do it in a complete playful way. Nice, well, as it's a movement, I'm expecting to see some kind of product delight manifesto coming out soon and some t-shirts with revolutionaries on as well, but step by step. Well, I will link all of that into the show notes. Hopefully you will have a few people heading in your general direction to become suitably delighted. Nazreen, it's always a pleasure to chat. Congratulations, obviously, on the book, and I'm sure it'll make a few people think differently or at least try to think a little bit differently. And obviously you and I will keep in touch, but as for now, thanks for taking the time. Thank you, Chisholm. Thank you.