Should you prioritise product delight? | Nesrine Changuel

In this bonus episode of Talking Roadmaps, Phil Hornby speaks with Nesrine Changuel about her new book and the power of designing for delight. Nesrine shares how companies like Google, Spotify, and Skype infused emotional connection into products, why “deep delight” drives retention, revenue, and referrals, and how tools like the Delight Grid help product teams map functional and emotional motivators. Discover practical ways to prioritize delight in your product roadmap.

Nesrine is a product coach, trainer and author with over a decade of experience at companies like Google, Spotify, and Microsoft. With a background in research and a PhD from Bell Labs in collaboration with UCLA, she brings deep technical expertise to human-centered product design. From pioneering video experiences at Skype to creating emotionally engaging features for Google Meet and Chrome, Nesrine has made it her mission to help teams build products users truly love. Today, she teaches, speaks, and trains companies around the world on how to create delightful, emotionally resonant products. She’s also the author of the book Product Delight. She lives in Paris.

Here is an audio-only version if that’s your preferred medium - and you can access it through your favourite podcasting platform if you prefer (Apple, Spotify, Amazon).

In the next episode we’re back to product operations and talking to Jessica Soroky, S. Director Product Ops & Chief of Staff. So watch out for Season 2 - Episode 13!

• Transcript

  - And do you know that just wrapped this entirely emotional feature, there's no functional needs at all. Like if you think about it, it's all about making you feel good while using the product. This feature contributed in more than 20% app download in 2020, like one feature contributing in 20% extra app download, I don't think there are other feature that contributed so much.

  - Welcome to Talking Roadmaps. Well, today we've got a special event. Today, it's our first bonus episode. Today, I've joined by Nesrine and when she said her book was coming out, she's been writing it the same time as me, but she's beat me to the punch, she's got it done. We just have to have her on the show. So we wanted to invite her along to have a chat to talk about. Well, I'll let her tell you that. So Nesrine, introduce yourself and tell us about your book.

  - Hi Phil, thanks for having me. I'm Nesrine, I'm based in Paris. Let's say I call myself a product expert these days 'cause I've been spending most of my career building products between France, Sweden, and the US. So I've been building product like Skype, Spotify, Google Meet and very recently, Google Chrome. I have an engineering background in the very beginning and very start. And then I got myself even deeper in tech 'cause I did a PhD on signal processing and telecommunication. And last year I decided to leave Google and I am now fully 100% dedicated to helping organisations and product leaders building more delightful product and that's what we're gonna be talking about today.

  - If you're enjoying the channel, subscribe, hit the bell and give us a like. Love it, and yeah, it's interesting how I've gone the opposite journey just in the very recent months, gone back to doing the work from the coaching and consulting. Yeah, love hearing those big names, that's the one thing I never quite managed to get on my own resumes like the Googles, the Spotifys, the Microsofts of the world. I worked with them as a consultant but I never worked at them in my career, which is always an interesting dynamic. And I love this idea of talking about delight so looking forward to unpacking it. And that signal processing angle is a really, that feels very random. I did notice the doctor the other day and it's like, what's that in?

  - I mean there is a reason, I mean there is a story. I skipped the story part.

  - This is the story.

  - The story is that actually I did my PhD on video compression and signal processing as I said. So I've been a specialist in how to compress videos and audios and how to broadcast that on the air. And actually I started my career as a research engineer so I've been working at Bell Labs here in Paris as a research engineer for a couple of years. And then, the stories that I actually applied for a job for a research engineer in London as part of Microsoft. And guess what? I've got a call from a recruiter two months later, saying, "Hey, we know that you applied for a research engineer job. We have a PM job in Sweden working for Skype." I was like, what, what, what are you talking about? Like this is completely unconnected. And then they said, "No, but actually the job is the video PM job for Skype and we need an expert, it's a TPM job so we need someone who really understand the challenges behind compressing video and be able to challenge the engineers and understand their languages." And I mean Sweden, why not? So I actually went as, okay, what could possibly go wrong? Let's go and explore this path. And to be honest with you, I love the the idea as well because as a researcher, you only own the problem and never get to the solution. I mean, you prototype and as soon as the prototype is working, you hand it over to another person which is another department and you lose your baby, I have no idea what's going on. So I really love this jump of career. That's how I get to Skype. I've been a video PM for Skype for a couple of years, and then you guess what? Spotify, again for the media part, I've been a media PM for a couple of years, and then guess what? Google meet, the video part. I mean, you see, it's not completely random. I mean my skills and my experience has been very useful throughout my career so far.

  - Yeah, it's interesting. I guess I've got a similar foundational thing, like I started my career very much in automotive technology and I keep being brought back to it. I don't actually care about the automotive industry but I have so much depth of knowledge that I can go in and quickly start having an impact. But it's, yeah, that's the role I'm doing right now, yet again. Yeah, I mean it's really interesting, kind of that, I do find there are certain things early in your career or early in your life even that start to influence things. I've realised in my own sort of life recently, I really care about visual design on things. And I realised when I was 16 to 17, I did a course called graphical communication where I did exactly that subject, I went deep and I spent hours every week in that space. And it formed part of my brain, part of how I think and my approach to things, like there's a whole shelf back here full of design and drawing books, nothing to do with product.

  - Yeah, passion drives a lot much faster and much deeper as the skills, that's what I usually say. But I think the best is to combine, if we find an area where we are extremely passionate about and we are skilled, I mean that's the icky guy and it has a name, and I think I'm in there now. I mean that's the shift that I made very recently with a bit of anxiety whether it will work or not and I'm super excited that I'm doing it right now.

  - It's okay, that sounds like you're experiencing some delight. Well, let's go there. So tell us the headline thoughts behind, kind of, let's introduce the concepts.

  - You've been curious about my experience, how things have been flowing from a role to another, but actually let me tell you how things came to my mind and how I became so vocal about this topic before I get to what it is first. So I've always been passionate about public speaking, and you know me and we've been meeting in many conferences before and we're gonna keep meeting in many upcoming conferences. And that's something actually it started very early for me 'cause when I did my research as a research person, you travel the world to go and present your work and that's something that got born very quickly on me. And when I moved to PM, I had to find a topic, I had to find something to talk about. I mean I had to keep that passion and that's the passion that I really had today. And one day, on stage, someone asked me the following question, said, "Hey Nesrine, you've been on these companies as an insider like at Skype, I mean as part of Microsoft, as Google, as Spotify, could you tell us something that you've seen in common or a pattern that you've seen while building product in these companies?" And it was a quite tough question because I didn't have an answer at that time. It's like, yeah, I've been an insider for almost 15 years and hey, what's the pattern? What's the thing that I've seen in all these three companies? So I sat down and I started thinking about the best answer for that. And I came to the following conclusion, which is I was not really thinking about it because I was too much into it, but yes, there is a pattern and there is something in common, which is the fact that these companies like Microsoft, Google or Spotify invest heavily in not only creating product that function well, but product that connect emotionally as well with users. So just think about Skype. Skype of course is a video call or communication tool, but before that, it was also way to stay connected with loved ones and Spotify is the same or even Google Meet. And even during my Google time and that's something I rarely talk about, I was the delight PM. So at Google, we sometimes hire PM just to bring delight to the product and that's how I learned the foundation and the concept behind Delight. And when I left Google I was like, hey, this is, yeah, I mean that's a common practise in big companies but it's not that much well known outside and people need to be educated toward this topic. It's not like luxury or something that it just, the best of the best can afford it. It's like we can put it in action, we can make it actionable. So I started like consolidating all the skills and all the experiences I had into some pieces or some document and some blogs until it became like a book recently. And the idea is like how can I make all companies and all industries benefit from emotional connection and build standout products? So that's the story behind becoming so vocal and evangelising delight nowadays.

  - I love it. I mean if I think about my own journey to how I came to the subject time writing about, I started with Teams. I decided no, everyone's doing Teams 'cause I heard a lot. And so I went somewhere else and then I found I couldn't write the book and I ended up going back to Teams which is why I'm writing about Teams with decisions at the heart of them, which was the other subject. But it's like, it's all about empower Teams to me is good product work. And so I found myself going back again to that core thesis that has always been part of how I think of the work. So I can see that similar thread that I've gone down and tried to go away from and brought and and come back to.

  - Yeah, I mean in my case, I was completely convinced. The only risk I saw was like, hmm, what if people would say, "Yeah, of course, you're building for Delight because you work for Google or because you work for Microsoft." But we are a small startup and I mean that's not our priority or whatever. So for me, that was the biggest fear I had. So I had to talk about Delight with other companies and smaller scales and different industries in order to see other perspective and not only build the book from my own and unique perspective. So for example, I had chance to interview people from Atlassian, from GitHub, from Lego, from luxury industries, so that was part of, let's say putting things on paper process. So I get to consolidate and get input from different places, so I wanna make sure that this foundation will work for everyone.

  - I mean, as we joined, you actually mentioned some delight you had in using Riverside, the tool we're using now today to record. And I guess it's not that long ago they were pretty small but they built some of that sort of thing maybe you could, you know, tell people about that example that of what you commented.

  - Honestly, this is very small example but it makes them an impact. So what I've been talking about as an example is like when I was about to join Riverside, instead of saying, wait few seconds or you see the rolling or whatever. You get a small message saying, "We are rolling the red carpet for you." I mean it's as simple as a small message but the impact is that I felt valued. I felt like, hmm, something special is gonna happen here so I'm gonna be on field broadcast and it's gonna be like something quite big. So these are small details, of course we can get deep into what Delight means, but this is what I call usually the surface delight. This is just small features that allow people to feel positive emotion toward the product. So for example, the other day, I have my Apple watch and on my birthday, I've got that small pop-up with balloon saying, happy birthday in the screen, why not? You see? But this is one type of delight, this is what we call the surface delight. What I usually am more advocate for is what I call the deep delight. Deep delight as we are getting now into the real topic is about creating features that at the same time, solve for functional needs but solve it in a way that allow to create this positive emotion at the same time. So it's combining both emotional needs and functional needs into one feature and that create the well-deserved emotional connection that we're looking for,

  - As you used Apple as an example there, I know there's one that, I think it was Marty Cagan used in a session where I was chatting with him a while ago, of Apple again, where he talks about when your AirPods or iPod, yeah, his iPods, when they turn up and you order them through your account, they just connect straight to your phone because they've already synced that to your account in the background to automatically pair so you don't have to manually do anything. And that bit of delight takes a huge amount of coordination across the different teams in somewhere like Apple. But, yeah, just makes a pleasure to bring the tool, the products into your world.

  - And there is a theory behind that because let me tell you something, that we have not got chance to talk about theory, but because people hate theory. But I will give you just a small piece of theory behind Delight. Delight is an emotion but it's what we call level two emotion because there is, I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of Plutchik, like the wheel of emotion. So Plutchik actually is a professor who put all emotions into a wheel and he categorised emotion into primary emotion and secondary emotion. So delight is a secondary emotion which means it's a combination of two primary emotion. And could you guess what are the two primary emotions that combine and create delight?

  - I'm gonna guess something like being happy, and possibly surprised?

  - Yes, you did! Oh my god, okay, you're well informed. Actually, delight is a combination of joy plus surprise. So just think for a moment. If you are experiencing at the same time, a happy surprise, you are delighted. So in the examples that you just gave, let's think about Apple seamlessly works so effortlessly from a device to another things connect in a complete easy way. Actually, you are surprisingly happy because you are surprised by how easy this turns out to be. And so you're delighted, I'm not saying that it's simple, I mean there's a technology that is very heavy behind that to work in such easy way but you are experiencing delight because you are positively surprised.

  - Yeah, although I think as a heavy Apple user, I'm starting to get used to or expecting that sort of thing almost normalised. And so the level that's required to surprise me is going up.

  - And that's habituation effect, I mean we need to get out of the theory, but again, habituation effect of course is exactly what you're talking about is when we get surprised the first time, our level of expectation will be the same as what we experienced before. So it gets higher and higher and higher. And so it's really important to keep innovating and keep on surprising our users in a complete continuous way.

  - I mean I quite like geeking out on the theory but maybe we shouldn't spend too much time there for the purpose of our users, our listeners I should say, 'cause we want to make sure we delight them. Yeah, the risk of being a little theoretical, I know you have a model called the Nine Delighters, maybe that's high level enough, maybe you could introduce that and give us a bit of flavour, something practical we can use.

  - First, before talking about the Nine Delighters, I wanna introduce what's the very first step everyone need to do in order to introduce themselves to the concept of Delight. And then, Delighters are actually tools that could be used on like a way of building products. So as a PM or any product organisation, the very first step that need to be taken is to pay attention to both functional motivators and emotional motivators of our users. Let's think for a moment, I've been building Spotify for many years and Spotify users do have many functional needs and functional motivators. For example, they wanna enjoy high quality music, they wanna listen to our podcast, they wanna search for a song, these are what we call functional motivators. However, it could be also, I could use Spotify to serve some of my emotional needs. I wanna feel less lonely, I wanna feel productive, that's how I work or I wanna feel connected, these are what we call emotional motivators. Now, if you as a PM spend some time trying to understand and distil this kind of information and have your full list of functional motivators and emotional motivators, you are on a good path because when you build products, and when you build features, you need to think whether this feature is solving any of those motivators. And equally, from a functional side and from an emotional side. And then you ask me about this Delighter things. Actually, the list of Delighters is a list of nine potential ideas that people could implement into their product. One of them is for example, personalization. And we had to use personalization quite a lot on Spotify. One of the most used feature at Spotify is Discover Weekly. And the reason why people loved it is because there is this concept of personalization into it. So it's one way of delighting your users. So I don't think we can go through the list of nine but I can probably talk about my favourite, my very, very favourite among the nine. My very favourite is called Humanization. And the reason why I love it is because the one that could make the biggest impact in your product, what does it mean humanization? Think about the following, how might the experience could be better if it was done by a human being rather than a tech product?

  - So almost a reverse, going back essentially instead of almost saying, what if I did it as a concierge test, how much better would it be?

  - Absolutely, and by the way, when I worked at Google Meet, I mean I joined Google Meet in a very tough time, really, really tough time. I mean my day one at Google Meet was the very beginning of COVID in Europe. And what a tough time, like for Google meet of course, from a scale perspective and make sure that we are adopting to this new way of using the product. But for me, as a PM, the very first thing that I had to do is like to dig into what's the emotional impact of this new behaviour, how people are feeling. I mean people start reporting they felt bored, felt low interaction, et cetera. So we had to address these emotional needs. But now that we are talking about humanization, one thing that we did a lot at Google Meet is that we rarely compare Google Meet to Zoom or to Teams or whatever. Do you know what do we compare Google Meet best to?

  - I'm gonna guess because you've already said not the big competitors in the video conferencing space, a conversation with a friend in a pub or at a cafe.

  - You're not too far, actually, we compare Google Meet to how it would have been done better if we were all in the meeting room. I mean, what's the biggest competitor for Google Meet? The very biggest, biggest competitor is we are all in the meeting room. We don't need whatever tool, right? I mean for example, for Spotify, our biggest competitor was the radio in the car. It was not this or whatever. It was the radio was our number one competitor. So we actually compared our meet experience to how would the experience would have been better if we were meeting all in the room. So we felt like people will not have barrier, people will interact freely and openly. So if you compare, do this kind of comparison, you will bring your product to a higher level. And just to close on the story because I told you I love it, it's my best. I had chance to talk with a product director from Dyson. And at Dyson, I mean, Andy told me something very similar. He said we rarely compare Dyson to other vacuum cleaner. We compare our product to how it would have been done better if we hired someone, a real human to clean the house. Because if you hire a physical person, like a real person, you will probably tell that person to start with a certain room, to clean in a certain way, and the robot was not able to do that at that time. So we get inspired by this kind of recommendation et cetera to enhance the experience of their robot. And so that's the concept of humanization as a Delighter.

  - I love it, it's an interesting one for me because I've been a remote worker since '08. So actually the idea of being a meet in a meeting room, I actually think of it as a lesser experience, for me personally. But I love remote working, it's just my preferred mechanism. But I've grown up using tools like this for so long that this is my norm now. In fact, when people say, oh, we should get together for a meeting, for a workshop for example, it's like, but that means we're gonna do all the logistics of getting to that place. I can spin up a mirror or a mural board and we can do this right now and have a great experience as long as you've got a great facilitator. And I think that's what in many cases, many people are missing or missed online. But that's like also, I guess a personal preference, I'm a very much a remote first mindset person. But as you were talking through all of that, I was sat there thinking, this sounds a lot like job theory. Like I've got functional jobs, I've got emotional jobs, I would typically add status jobs into there as well. And yes, if I am, when I'm thinking about jobs theory, I'm not thinking about well how do I compare to another similar product? I'm thinking the other thing like a pen and paper is often the largest competitor or Excel is the largest competitor. And so it took me into a very similar space, maybe you could unpack how that compares, how that, you know, that thought process.

  - Yes, so there are a bit of similarity, there are some inspiration, I mean all these are like within the same goal which is to create something that make people feel good about them while using the product. And I love this example, usually when there is this example I read recently that cigarette is competing with Facebook or Facebook is competing with cigarette, which are not supposed to be within the same space at all but they are competitors because some people would take cigarette to relax or feel and then you get that feeling through scrolling into your Facebook feeds as well. But I mean, just to make it clear, I mean I love the concept of job to be done and I love the fact that it's including the emotional part as well but rare are people who end up doing and including it when it comes to finding solutions. I mean we always see functionality taking over most of the time. And that's why I actually created a tool that I call the delight grid. And the delight grid is the next step of the job to be done. The delight grid is as simple as a grid where you place on the horizontal side all the emotional motivators and on the vertical side, all the functional motivators, you end up having a big table, right? And then, when you look at your roadmap or your backlog, you will take these features and place them in the delight grid based on what this feature is solving for or what motivator is it addressing. If it's only addressing functional motivators and none of the emotional motivator, then you are in a bucket that I call the low delight. If your feature is addressing only an emotional motivator, think about the red carpet thing, there is no functional motivator there at all. Then it's within the surface delight bucket. If you create a feature that is solving for both, I mean think about the solution that fit into the middle of the table where it's solving for an emotional motivator and a functional motivator, then you are into that sweet spot that I call the deep delight.

  - And I mean we're in products, we've got another two by two or for our analysis. I love that example as well. There's another one that I'm aware of. Mobile phones competing against sweets with younger people. 'cause ultimately, it's a budget consideration, we are we gonna buy a mobile phone, or a top up for our mobile phone, or are we gonna buy this sweet treat? And what do we value more?

  - I mean, at the end of the day, it's a matter of what do we value, what are the priorities of our values? But also what makes us feel better about ourselves? It's a matter of prioritising feelings as well because our actions are driven by our feeling. And that's proven by theory and by practise.

  - Okay, I love the idea of this grid, but we're in products, we're always told measure things. How do you measure this stuff?

  - Yes, that's a good question, that always comes on stage and I dedicated an entire chapter by the way in my book about how to measure delight because I understand that delight is very important and people get it very quickly. But then the question is, okay, how do I convince my CEO or my CPO that this is the thing that we need to invest on and they only care about metrics. The good news is that actually delight is measurable. The only thing that people need to have in mind is that it will not impact your KPI immediately. Because when you start investing on Delight, you're investing in your brand, you are investing into the personality and you're investing in the perception, how people will perceive the product and so they feel better and they stay longer. So it will impact your KPI but usually, you're not gonna see it on your next release but be patient. So that's the number one rule. The good news is that, I mean, while writing this book, I was lucky enough and I was super happy when I found this, is that big giant, a really giant studied the exact same phenomenon within the same time period. And you know who are these giants? Capgemini, Deloitte, McKinsey and Harvard Business Review. I mean I found four full reports with thousands of users being interviewed within the same topic, the impact of emotional connection on product adoption. So I spent weeks trying to read and understand the full reports, and you know what? I was really happy to see that there've been a consensus. And the consensus is that emotional connection impacts three key product metrics. Number one, retention. Emotionally connected users stay longer within your product, 50% more. So 50% more likely to stay longer with your product. The second, which everyone love is revenue. Actually emotionally connected users are 50% more likely to buy more products and services from you. And the third one, which everyone loves as well, from a business side which is the referral or word of mouth because emotionally connected users, just think about it for a moment, I mean if you are emotionally connected with the product, then you are 50% more likely to actively recommend the product among your friends, families and colleagues. So if you invest in emotional connection, you end up doubling revenue, referral and retention which like, these are the key product metrics that everyone want to move even by 1%.

  - I mean, it's making me think of my relationship with Sonos. So I have a lot of Sonos equipment in my home and I used to actively recommend it all the time, I used to talk about how wonderful the onboarding experience was and how great it was and you know, then I'd buy more if I redecorated a room, I'd set up that room now with the right equipment as opposed to anything else. And then they screwed up the application and it became painful. The onboarding experience was no longer this one click and it all just worked. It was uncomfortable. I lost the delight and I stopped recommending.

  - It's natural, right? Nobody will recommend a kind of product. You will recommend product that you feel comfortable and happy with. And actually, it applies even for bigger than products like for places for vacation or even for people worker that you hire someone to work for you. If the person do the job very well but he is making you feel frustrated, then you'll not recommend that person.

  - Random sort of side story, so I have my 20 year wedding anniversary next year and I'm going back to Mauritius which is where I got married. And when it came to where to get married, we were looking for somewhere tropical, and in the end it was a recommendation from some friends of where they'd got married when they'd done the same thing. And even to down to the same hotel that they got married in because it's like, well I know that they had a great experience. I trust their judgement , I trust that I'm gonna have a great experience and the delight I experienced in my wedding, it's like I've said, go to this place many times. Is there a risk we do too much? We spend too much time, we over-engineer delight, it takes over from actually just delivering the value and we invest too much.

  - I don't think there is a risk to invest too much in delight because we are usually on the other side of the spectrum. Believe me, most companies are investing too little. If you find a place where they're investing too much in the delight, then please let me know. However, there is a risk which is the fact that Delight is not an excuse to build features that are disconnected from impact. I mean it's not because Nesrine is talking about Delight, let's make sure that we create a feature that is supposed to be delightful, randomly delightful and make sure that we ship it as part of our roadmap. I'm advocating and that's why I spoke about the Delight grid. I'm advocating for creating features that Delight users within a full alignment of their motivators. And these motivators are the reason why a product or user is using a product. The other day, I was talking to a company and the company told me, "Hey Nesrine, look we are having a great feature, if you shake your phone, you get some snowflake falling." It's like, yes, but why, who cares? I mean I see that some engineers like spent maybe a day or two and I mean, first it's not even discoverable, why not? But no, so it's really important that whatever delightful feature we build, it's a matter of making the people that use the product more valued, more heard, more seen, and or sometimes especially in the B2B space, we build delightful feature to make people feel better version of themselves. And that's why we use like sophisticated tools sometimes because we wanna feel ourself, better PM, better facilitator. You mentioned Miro earlier, I mean one of the reason why I love Miro is because it makes me feel like a better facilitator, things are easier there, right?

  - I mean it's really interesting you saw we're focusing on that deep delight and I absolutely agree it. You just made me think about Tony Fadell, I don't know if you've read "Build" or if you've watched "General Magic," the movie that goes with it and where he talks about the lemon that walks across the screen in the Magic Link device. And that's that surface level delight, like the engineer spent ages coding something where it was an animated emoji essentially before we had emojis and animations on a handheld device. And it was cool but it served no real functional purpose.

  - Do you want a better example? Maybe something that you're, I mean that's a great example but something that I personally worked on and it's like shaping the brand and the personality of an entire product? Wrapped, Spotify Wrapped. I mean for those who, I mean it's very popular but for those who doesn't know, like Wrapped is this retrospective that you get toward the end of the year where you see like what's the most listened song and artist. And it's all about making you feel how cool you are, so that you can share it with your friends, et cetera. And do you know that just wrapped this entirely emotional feature, there's no functional needs at all. Like if you think about it, it's all about making you feel good while using the product. This feature contributed in more than 20% app download in 2020, like one feature contributing in 20% extra app download, I don't think there are other feature that contributed so much.

  - So what you're saying is that surface level delight still created value?

  - Could create value, yes, it's a combination of the three. And I mean we didn't get to the roadmap part because I think it's really important that our listeners get it right here. I'm not saying that we should only build deep delight or we should only build service delight. What I've seen from my experience, the best product, the real best products are those that create a nice bouquet of the three type of delight. And I came up to this model that I call the 50-40-10. 50-40-10 is a recommendation where if you look at your roadmap, you need to see 50% of your features as low delight which is the pure functional features. And yes, don't get surprised, I'm here to tell you the majority need to go to functionality because that's how the product will function, otherwise nobody will come to your product. 40% is this effort that you're gonna do to move these only functional to deep delight. I mean add some emotional element by adding humanization, adding personalization, adding fun, adding I mean these Delighters that I list in the nine Delighters, great. And 10% for surface delight, only 10%. Don't spend 50% of your time in writing, rolling the red carpet for me. And this is supposed to be like a few days work and it's necessary because I mean it makes people smile, make people feel good while using the product. So 50-40-10 is a recommendation to look at your roadmap and see, am I investing enough in delight or not?

  - I love it, you've already answered one of my questions, right? We couldn't be on a channel called Talking Roadmaps and not ask you about how to use this in a roadmap context. And so we have a lens a little bit how I use also the three horizons of growth lens when I'm thinking about, longer term, bigger kind of genuine new things versus growth, versus core business, so I can see. Now I need a matrix of those two things all overlaid against each other, maybe.

  - It's not a matter of a game like competing, it's a matter of combining it all like-

  - Precise, that's why I mean put them on two axes and how do they map to the two different areas of delight and my growth, shall we say? But yeah, okay, I like it. Are there any special techniques around how we really discover deep delight? How do get ourselves there?

  - I will disappoint you. I'm not gonna come with a magical tool or any new technique that you never heard about. However, you'll quickly realise that the very best technique to uncover delightful features is by uncovering the emotional needs and the real functional needs of our users. And the best way to do that is by talking to your users. I mean just think about- I'm gonna give you an example. Just think about the best gift you got. Was it the one that is the most expensive or the most random or the one that you just needed for functional job? For me, the very best gift I got, like for example, like a couple of years ago, many years ago when I left Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs, my ex-colleagues offered me a box for how to bake macaroons, very simple. I don't think it cost like millions or whatever. It's just very simple, very basic, but made me feel heard and valued. The reason is because I spent days telling them how much I failed doing macaroons and how I cared about succeeding at least once these macaroons. And you know what? It was a nice touch saying that we heard you. I mean, I felt like heard, seen, and valued as well. And the same goes for product. If you want your product to be received with that joy, it need to be treated as a gift. And the best gifts are those that get with deep attention. So you need to pay attention to your users, talk to them regularly, pay attention to their needs, their feeling. For example, I did a lot of users interview where I asked them about: tell me about how you felt during the product. Tell me about the last time you used the product and walk me through your feelings throughout the journey. And since we're talking about examples, I love hearing examples here. Like my last product before I left Google was Google Chrome. And I had to address one of the biggest challenge of Google Chrome. Could you guess which one is the biggest challenge for Google Chrome? I'm pretty sure you're experiencing that challenge, nobody's not.

  - The memory, hogging that it has of when I have too many tabs open?

  - Tabs management, absolutely, I see someone is suffering. I mean, we've seen from data that a lot of users are having many tabs opens and more particularly on mobile 'cause I was taking care of the mobile challenge, like people open tabs and leave them open for random reasons. Some are organised, they leave them open as a reminder. Some others like, eh, just open a new tab. And so of course, from a technical perspective, that's not great because you end up having a heavy app. From a performance memory perspective, you don't want that. And at the same time, it's absolutely no way to go ahead and close tabs on behalf of users. Like people will hate us, it's a matter of trust. So I gotta interview many people asking them about, "Hey, tell me about how you feel all those tabs open. Walk me through how you navigate to find the tab open," et cetera. And I love these moments because these are the moments where I listen actively and I realise that there are always surprises. Like people are sometimes felt like frustrated, anxious. You see those emotional cue when they lean forward, lean, I mean, what do they experience from an emotional level. And also some people had to say something funny sometimes, like, "Oh sorry," some had to apologise. Say "Sorry, I usually don't have so many tabs open." It is like, really? So you take note of that 'cause these are insight and you should not just listen and go and pass and build your feature. So we created a feature that we called inactive tabs. It's available today on Chrome iOS. Inactive tabs is a group of tabs where every tabs that has not been visited for more than 21 day is stored there. So from a thumbnail perspective, from a compression, we can do whatever in those group, but people know that their tabs are safely stored there. They can go and pick them whenever they want.

  - I remember that feature appearing. It confused me for a while, have to be honest, but then I realised what it was doing. It's like, "Oh my tabs are still there. I just have to..." It is one more click.

  - Okay, it's ah, it's a relief. Nobody took my tabs away. It's funny how we realise the relation between users and their tabs. People see it as a really, really serious relationship.

  - I'm someone who leaves them open as a, "I need to go back to this." It's a very much an organisational technique for me. It's like, I want to keep that and I want to keep it more reactive than a favourite. A favourite is like, it's the cool box, and this is like that "I'm gonna go back to it in the next month or two." And so definitely, there's a different behaviour that I've learned there over the years. And no big surprise, no silver bullets. Discovery is discovery. We've gotta find both types of jobs and/or both types of needs, the emotional and the functional ones. I just wish you had a silver bullet. It would make life easier.

  - Yeah, there is maybe one that I describe, it's not a silver bullet but it's a technique that we've been using it at places like Google and Spotify. It's called motivational interviewing. Have you heard about motivational interviewing? I mean, it's a technique that is first got initiated from hospitals domains and people trying to get rid of being addicted to stuff. So it was a technique that used by doctors, et cetera. And now it's very much used in products as well. And motivational interviewing is a four-step techniques where it start by trying to ask open-ended questions. And then, trying to repeat what people have said to confirm whether it was said correctly or not. And then, you try to add additional question. And then, you summarise. I mean it's a four-step technique. And motivational interviewing, as its name is holding, it's about identifying motivations behind usage of a product. It's not about identifying the pain as most people are investing their time in. It's not about identifying the pain points and the needs, but identifying the deep motivation behind using the product and without applying these five why's and sometime aggressive techniques, but it's more a conversational and empathy-based technique that we can apply.

  - So it sounds like something I've been doing without using the name. 'Cause that very much, I guess, I'm looking for pains but I'm more looking for the why, why did they do that? Which to me is the motivation without asking the word why because we all know it's accusatory and a bit of aggressive. So we're exploring and I think it was Chris Voss who taught me that in one of his negotiation books.

  - Yes, I have bad relation with five why's 'cause some people will receive it positively. Some people will start to shut down completely from the second why.

  - It just makes me feel like I'm dealing with my six-year-old daughter 'cause she'll ask why say those times, and then I'll get frustrated as a parent. You know, we're using this grid to think about how we're roadmapping our elements. We're putting it, we're thinking about the ratios of different types of delights in there. Do you use any particular ways of visualising delight during the customer journey or in terms of how we kind of look at it from that top level view?

  - I personally use a lot of the customer journey map. Customer journey map is a great technique to identifying what we call the peak moment and the valley moment. So when we are experiencing the product from a journey perspective, by the way, that's a very good practise. People need to see the product from a journey perspective, not from an API or a feature perspective, how people are perceiving the product throughout the journey. And I've been like helping people doing some workshop with user journey maps. And I realised that a lot of companies do the user journey map but they forget or they ignore or they don't prioritise the emotional curve, which is the most important piece of the exercise. So when I moderate or help people with the user journey map, I try to emphasise the importance of identifying the peak moment and the valley moment, why? 'Cause these are the moment where we can connect with users at the emotional level. Let me give you an example. I use Airbnb as a host and also as a guest. And as a host, one of my biggest goal or objective is to keep my Superhost badge. I mean, that's something that I work very hard to get that one. And every three months, Airbnb reassess my ability whether I can remain Superhost or not. And guess what? Every three months, if I remain Superhost, when I open the app, confetti pop up. I mean it may feel surface for you, but honestly it feels like the app is recognising the effort, is celebrating a moment with me. So these are like small feature that you can add on peak moment. However, there are also some valley moments and these are also options and opportunity to connect with users. So think about the dinosaur in Google Chrome. I mean, when you are experiencing low internet or no internet, instead of having a blue screen saying No Internet, you got a chance to play with a dino. So I mean, the idea is to look again on how do you want the experience to feel? And the peak and the valley moments are key moments that we can use in order to connect with users.

  - Yeah, there's a great book called "The Power of Moments" that is one I remember reading many years ago and always trying to think about that. It's the peak and end, I think. It typically talks about as being the things you've gotta really take care of. And when I'm designing workshops, I very much design with those in mind. And I also early on in a workshop make a point of introducing, you are gonna have some lows. We're gonna do this activity and you are probably gonna feel a bit bad here, that's okay. And in fact, when you're doing a workshop, you can scaffold that by explaining it. It's a lot harder in a product. 'Cause saying, "Oh, you're gonna feel bad when I ask you to enter all this detail when we're onboarding. Not quite so easy."

  - No, no, I mean, I like this concept of peak and end, but I think it's really important to add the valley or the low as well because these are experiences anyway. And there is an example that I heard and learned from Aarron Walter. So Aarron Walter is the author of "Designing for Emotion." It's a lovely book that I read couple of times. And he, in his book, used one of the less expected delight to find product, which is TurboTax. TurboTax is just a product for filling in your text. There is nothing less delightful as filling in your tax, like annual tax. And he was telling a story in his book that I really loved where he was sharing the story of a lady who was like trying to fill in her tax info on the app. And at some point, you need to put your marital situation. And it happens that this lady lost her husband the year before she's actually doing this exercise for the first time of her life. So she changed the status from married to the new status. And instead of moving to the next step, as nothing happened, you gotta pop up saying we are really sorry for your loss. We understand this is tough for you. We're gonna try to make this experience as easy as simple for you. So this is a combination of what I told you humanization because if you've been talking to an agent and telling them that you lost a loved one, it's really rare if that person just moved to the next step. The minimum is sorry for your loss. And at the same time, using that low moment to offer this humanization option of delight.

  - So maybe it's a loaded term, best practise. But if you had to choose, identify, and know one piece of best practise or at least good practise when it comes to designing with emotion in mind and how to operationalize it, what would it be?

  - So there's nothing that can be done without identifying the real emotional and functional motivators. So I think the very most important thing that people need to have in mind is to make sure that they have their list written somewhere and they use it as as a working document. Like every time you have a user interview and are an opportunity to talk to users, try to fill in and update that list. That's the basics, that's the foundation. And then, it's not just a document somewhere on your drive. Every time you're doing prioritisation or you're doing road mapping exercise, try to map your features to these lists so that they are living document, they are like references, not just like a list somewhere again. So to start, I would say, it's really important to identify the motivators. And the next step, which is extremely important, is to make sure that your features are mapping for those motivators. There's nothing worse than developing great features that are not connected by close or by far to these motivators.

  - Bit like how many teams also create many features that don't map up to the organisational goals and objectives. It's like, why are we doing these things? If you've got clear goals, drive towards them. What's the biggest mistake you see people making when it comes to trying to add delight?

  - Mm, so I spoke about one which is trying to use it as an excuse for bringing features that are disconnected from impact. No, boom, don't use delight as an excuse to add shake to snowflake feature. The second, for me, it's a risk. It's not a mistake. And I think it's worth mentioning it here because it's really, really important. When we talk about delight, we talk about emotions. And when we talk about emotions, what please me and make me happy is not necessarily what make you happy. Emotions are quite personal. They are quite different from a person to another. So inclusion is extremely important in that sense. And even more important when we are building for delight. Let me give you an example. Like when we build last year, there've been a feature that was developed by Deliveroo. And Deliveroo, it was only in France by the way. The feature was on Mother's Day. And on Mother's Day, you get a popup by Deliveroo and the popup looks exactly and it's designed as a missed call from your mom. So when you see, you open the phone, you see missed call from your mom. And then when you click on it, you get like "It's mother's day. Think about your mom, send her flower." And they offer their service of sending flower. Why not? But it had the worst press ever here in France because have they thought about everyone, really? Do you think everyone could perceive this notification exactly the same way and create the same positive feeling? What if those who don't have that luxury of experiencing a missed call from their mom, how would they feel? So inclusion in that sense is really, really key especially when we talk about emotions. We don't want bad emotion, we don't want disappointment, and that's the biggest risk of delight.

  - Yeah, in fact, when I get a missed call from my mom, I stress, it's like, why is she calling? What's gone wrong?

  - Yeah, I mean, you see we have different relations with that sense.

  - It's like, 'cause it's usually me who calls and if she's calling, it's usually because she feels she needs to tell me something.

  - They had to apologise. I mean the bad press went so far, people like some felt super heart broken. So, of course, I don't think they will do it again.

  - If you had to distil your philosophy on Product Delight into one or two sentences, what would it be?

  - So Delight is about creating emotional connection first. So we want people to feel good while using the product. Of course, we want people to use the product for function and for productive reason and we want them to get that function well and right. But at the same time, we want them to feel good while getting that function and that productivity. So for me, Delight is all about making sure that your product function in a nice feeling. So if you can identify those emotional motivators and functional motivators, and then map your features toward those well-defined motivators, I'm pretty sure you can create standout products.

  - Probably a few more than two sentences, but I'll let you get away with it. I always like to end with one last question. What have I not asked you about Delight that I should have?

  - I mean, when I talk about Delight on most stages, there's one question that always come, two questions. The first is how to prioritise, and we spoke about that. The second is, hmm, Nesrine, you have been working on most of these B2C companies and what if I work on these super boring B2B product? Would your Delight topic apply? And I usually use this following answer, which I truly believe, by the way: If your product is used by a human being, there is no such a thing as B2B or B2C. I call it B2H which is business to human. If your product is used by human being, they deserve their emotion to be addressed and they deserve to feel good while using the product because they will stay longer, they will buy your product, et cetera. And that's why, by the way, while writing the product, I got to interview people like GitHub or Atlassian or Intuit and industries that I don't necessarily have experience working with. The reason is because I wanted to understand their relation with delight. And I was not surprised, by the way. Companies like GitHub even created a full metric for delight they call it DUUF. It's like D for delight. Companies like Dropbox have a product value called cupcake. Cupcake for delight, by the way. I mean, just didn't want to call it delight. Intuit do have a product principle called Delight. So whether it's a B2B or B2C or B2H in this case, emotions matter. And that's what allows us to use product and take actions.

  - I love it, I mean, I've long kind of said I'm Gen X. I'm old enough that we let people get away with terrible user interfaces. Millennials taught us that we should have a more pleasurable experience in B2B products. I still don't understand how companies like SAP survive with their terrible user experience and the lack of delight. And that's a particularly acute experience I'm having right now. But they're sticky and they do the jobs very functionally well for the people who buy them. Just wish there was more delight for me as another user in there, but I love that, I do agree. I think there's a lot that's talked about out there of how all the talk is for B2C products and there's not enough advice for B2B. And I personally think you can take a lot of inspiration from what's written normally from a B2C space in the B2B world because actually a delight, I think in B2C, is table stakes and expected. Delight in B2B can be still a differentiator.

  - Absolutely, completely agree. And by the way, I loved the model by Dan also and I got chance to also interview him in the book where he talk about, he's one of those rare people, by the way, who talk about delight. He was one of those who evangelised around canon model as well. And he used Delighters as a way to upscale your product market fit or like to go beyond and improve and enhance your product market fit. So absolutely agree with Delighters could be the differentiator and the way to make your products stand out compared to others, and more particularly these days in such a crowded digital market where competition is very severe. So of course, I agree with you, like most people don't necessarily expect delight in B2B, but when it's there...

  - Nesrine, it's been awesome chatting today. I'm looking forward to adding your book to my collection. I know I've got the PDF already and I've already looked through it, but I'm looking forward to getting a dead tree copy on my shelf as well. I always like to give people towards the end of the show a chance just to give their pitch how they can get in touch with you, where they can find you.

  - Okay, first, thanks for having me today. I am really pleased to talk about delight. It's my favourite topic. I left Google with the mission of making delight less as a buzz word and demystify the concept. So I'm very happy to have this conversation. So, about me, they can reach out anytime. I'm available on LinkedIn. They can also contact me on my website: nesrine-changuel.com. The book is actually available for signup. They just go to productdelightbook.com and they can sign up for the book. It's coming very soon. So they just have to stay tuned and get the best out of it. I'm super excited how we ended up having the beautiful result and the delightful design of the book as well, which was the minimum expectation for me. Also, if people wanna hear delightful stories on a regular basis, I have a Substack newsletter called The Delight Tips, where I actually share stories and delightful features so people can get more and more understanding of what it is. So they can subscribe and they can find the link as well.

  - That just leaves me to say, again, thanks Nesrine. It's been great chatting and we'll talk again soon.

  - Thank you.