🎧 From Functional to Unforgettable: The Business Case for Product Delight with Nesrine Changuel

Product Delight is no longer optional.

It's a key competitive advantage that has led to massive growth in revenue, retention, and referrals for so many of the products we know and love.

If you assume delight is nothing more than confetti and sleek animations, think again, this episode will inspire you to infuse delight and emotional connection into your product starting today. 

In this episode, I sit down with Nesrine Changuel, author of the new book Product Delight, to discuss:

• Her career journey from research to Product Management

• Loneliness and the importance of community for PM's

• How Product Delight was the key to product success during her time at Skype, Google Meet and Spotify

• The Product Delight Model and how to start using it today (without permission!)

• The business case for delight (aka it's not optional anymore)

• The 3 types of delight: surface, low, and deep

• The risks to avoid when building for delight

• The difference between Product Delight and good UX practices

• The limitations of the Kano Model, specifically with "delighters"

• How to infuse Delight into must-have, high priority features

• How leaders can create a Product Delight Culture

• Plus, tons of real-world examples of Product Delight

Grab your copy of Product Delight today at: www.productdelightbook.com

Ready to SHINE in your Product Management career? ✨

Learn more about my SHINE 1:1 coaching program for Product Managers seeking promotion and greater leadership impact. It's designed to help you grow your confidence, stand out as a strategic thinker, and take the next big step in your career.

• 📄 TRANSCRIPT

  Jess Sherlock (00:00)
  "The goal of delight is not just about sprinkling joy on top of utility. It's about weaving emotion into the core experience so that the product becomes memorable and meaningful."
  
  "It's not enough to build products that work well. They must also make users
  
  feel good about using them."
  
  Nesrine Changuel (00:16)
  People spend much more time trying to understand what are the functional needs of our users, which of course are very important to identify, but spend much less time into understanding and figuring out what are their emotional needs.
  
  And actually, you can create emotional connection between your product and user if you serve for those needs at the same time.
  
  connection can double revenue.
  
  Emotional connection can double and emotional connection can double referral, meaning that you would tell the world, you will tell your friend, you will stay longer and you will be much more likely to buy more products and services from them.
  
  Jess Sherlock (00:51)
  I did. And I did.
  
  Well, Nesrine thank you so much for joining us. I am so thrilled that our paths crossed through a shared connection. And I'm really excited that I got a chance to read your book. I feel lucky to have seen it before it's officially out. So I'm looking forward to having a conversation with you today. We can chat a bit about your career journey in product, talk a bit about the topic of the book, Product Delight.
  
  And then most importantly, talk a bit about how folks can actually put this concept into action. you know, theory's fun and all, but I love making sure things feel practical and actionable. So let's start with you as a human. Tell us about yourself.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (02:37)
  Sure. So hi Jess, excited to be here. I love the question that you're emphasizing on as a human. So I really have to not mention anything about my career. So I'm Nesrine based in Paris. I've been moving around actually because I was born in Tunisia and then I had most of my study in France between Grenoble and Paris. And then I moved to Sweden. I actually lived in Sweden for about eight years.
  
  particularly in Stockholm in hipster Söderland, that's the lovely city and then I'm back now here in Paris where I have two kids and I am enjoying the Parisian life again.
  
  Jess Sherlock (03:21)
  Wonderful,
  
  wonderful. Yeah, it's been such a pleasure to chat with you. And so now we can talk career now that I know you as a human. So let's talk a bit about your career journey. Because what I have learned in coaching PMs throughout the years and everyone who's joined on the podcast is that I have yet to come across someone who was a little kid and wanted to be a PM when they grew up. ⁓ yeah, so I love hearing about
  
  Nesrine Changuel (03:27)
  Okay.
  
  I haven't crossed neither.
  
  Jess Sherlock (03:48)
  the journey through various roles that people have taken because it seems to me like every PM has had such a unique background. And so I would love to hear yours. Tell us about your career journey and how you landed in product.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (03:48)
  Okay.
  
  Sure. So I actually started my career in tech. As you mentioned,
  
  actually started as an engineer, like I did engineering study that was back in Grenoble in France. And then I actually got myself even deeper in tech because I did a PhD. This is what we call industrial PhD where you can do like a PhD between a company and a university, which is lovely when you are not sure whether you want to do pure academia or you want to do like applied research. So in my case, I've been working for Bell Labs, part of Alcatel Lucent and at the same time.
  
  I was doing my PhD at Université Paris. So my PhD study has been on broadcasting, video compression, signal processing, telecommunication, like all those fun stuff. An interesting thing during my PhD is that I did an exchange program. know, the exchange program is a bit like an internship you do during your PhD. And I did it at UCLA. It was a six month internship or exchange program. It was a lovely experience.
  
  to work at that time on machine learning, what we call AI today. So that's back, I'm talking 20 years ago. And so my career, as you noticed, started in research first as a PhD, but then I actually worked and I was hired as a research engineer as part of Bell Labs. And I actually enjoyed very much being in research. You do a lot of prototyping, you get deep into the problem, you fall in love with the problem. But there was something that for me was missing.
  
  Jess Sherlock (05:08)
  Amazing.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (05:33)
  for me was how can we apply those findings because you spend most of your time trying to identify the problems, you prototype a potential solution and then you hand it over to a complete other department. So in the case of Bell Labs at that time we give it to the business department or development department and you have no idea what will happen to that idea or that prototype. So I really wanted to see what's the full spectrum, what happens to the baby that you try to come up with. That's how
  
  Jess Sherlock (06:02)
  Yeah.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (06:03)
  I started actually to see what are other potential career roles that I can maybe pursue or even How can I use my research skills and put that in practice for something where I can see the entire view 360? So that's how I actually came to a role at that time was called video PM for Skype So Microsoft was looking for a PM particularly for improving video at Skype and Just maybe it's an age revealer, but
  
  at that time we actually introduced the video call for let's say the group video call particularly so when I joined Skype it was mainly 101 and we introduced the capability to do group video call.
  
  Jess Sherlock (06:47)
  Wow, wow.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (06:47)
  Sounds
  
  weird to say that, but it was one of those fun projects. So the beauty is that I was able to put all my video compression and video signal processing skills that I gained from research into an applied, loved product. Like honestly, we can talk about Skype, even if it got shut down this year, so it's a bit ⁓ terrible news for me. honestly, mean, back then,
  
  Jess Sherlock (07:09)
  It is bittersweet.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (07:13)
  How can you have great like video calls or even audio calls internationally without Skype? So I've been at Skype in Sweden for about four years But then at some point I had that feeling that we reached maturity in video video calling in particular. So I wanted to do something else and being in Sweden I found myself in Spotify and when I joined Spotify, it was audio only by the way I don't know if you remember it was only
  
  Jess Sherlock (07:39)
  I do.
  
  Yeah.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (07:41)
  And so my team and I, what we did during my time at Spotify, we actually introduced anything that you see video now on Spotify. So like Spotify, podcasts, video podcasts, clips, or even these looping video, like maybe we call them canvas. It's like when you look at the app, instead of having an image of the album, you have a small mini clip, three seconds.
  
  Jess Sherlock (08:03)
  Same thing when
  
  Nesrine Changuel (08:05)
  these are some small and big projects that we introduced to Spotify because we used video as a way to enhance the audio, not the other way around. So that was the philosophy and the strategy. So I've been on Spotify for four years as well. And then guess what, Jess? ⁓ What I told you, that hypothesis that we reached maturity in video conferencing was completely dropped down when COVID hit. So when COVID hit, we all found ourselves
  
  Jess Sherlock (08:32)
  Yes.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (08:35)
  locked at home and we found ourselves all 100 % working remote, obliged to use video calling tools and actually video calling tools at that time were not adapted 100 % for remote. So that's how I got reached out by Google for a role for Google Meet and I joined Google Meet to actually make Google Meet more adapted for this new way of life and this new way of remote. so we introduced things like background
  
  replace, I mean anything that sounds obvious today. We introduced noise cancellation, mean these things that were not so needed because we worked from corporate environments and suddenly you have to protect your privacy, you have to make sure that your kids are not heard during the call. So I've been at Google Meet for a few years and then moved to Chrome, so I've been working on Chrome for iOS.
  
  and that was beginning of me thinking about helping others in addition to building my career. So I actually get myself too much into like community work, I love speaking on stage, I started building a product community as well here in Paris and then I decided to leave Google to get myself 100 % on this new project which is writing the book that we will be talking
  
  a lot about today I guess and also spreading the knowledge that I had I learned during so many years and help people build successful and hopefully delightful products.
  
  Jess Sherlock (10:08)
  Yeah, I'm so excited to talk more about the book. And one of the things that folks always ask me, and so I'd love to zoom in on one specific moment in your product career before we talk about the book, that moment when you very first got the PM title, how did that actually look? Was this a job you pursued? Was this an internal transfer? Can you talk a little bit about
  
  that moment of going from researcher to PM officially.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (10:39)
  Okay, let me be 100 % transparent. When I was, yes, when I was, like I spent five years in research and I had no idea what product management was for two reasons. The first reason is because in Europe, and I'm talking about 15 years ago, PM was not necessarily that much known. I mean, it's not a huge role. And the second thing is that even if you do like engineering school, we don't tell you about such a career. If you do engineering school, we tell you like, you can go to academia.
  
  Jess Sherlock (10:42)
  Sure. She's like, I'm breaking script.
  
  I see, yeah.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (11:09)
  or you can become a developer or you can probably want to do a bit of design or finance and these are the most common path you can pursue as an engineer. But as a product manager, that's something I personally had never ever heard about before that application.
  
  And to be honest, when I applied, I looked at the description, haven't even seen PM. I've seen video experts, I mean, things like we want someone who know how to compress video. And I was like, yeah, why not? And then suddenly the recruiter called me, he said, you applied for a TPM role. was like, are you sure it's about me? I'm not even sure if I applied for a TPM. I applied for like a video expert. He said, yes, but the role is called TPM. Okay. So what is TPM? Explain to me, what did I apply for?
  
  So he was very honest. He said, yeah, we're looking for someone who actually know how to deal with video, but also we want someone who has technical skills because you're going to be working with very technical persons and having the language and knowing these concepts is going to be very helpful for particularly for this role. And he said that, do know anything about product management? And I said, maybe it depends. I don't even know what it is. And he said, okay, as long as you have the
  
  ability to, I mean, we want to invest in ability to learn as well, not only in the skills. I mean, we know that you have the skills, so you will be mentored, you will be coached. And I loved my first years at Microsoft because I really was surrounded by great PMs who just took me in. I've been shadowing many of them. I had a buddy for about six months. My manager was always checking how things are going. It was okay to make failures. I mean, these have been extremely helpful for my first years.
  
  However, there was one thing that really surprised me a lot. I don't think this topic is very much spoken about. Me particularly, since I was coming from research, there was something special in research.
  
  There's something special where people work in community. So in research, work, of course, most of the time you're working alone and you have this stereotype that people are lonely somehow in research, but the reality is completely the opposite. As a researcher, you work with the community, there are names for their community. You're even ⁓ evaluated as a researcher by how much impact you make on the community. There is even a metric how many times your paper has been cited by others, et cetera, and how many times you
  
  review other people's papers. It's a really close community. You almost know everyone in the field that you're doing research in. I was traveling the world during my five years as a researcher. I traveled literally the world presenting my work, my prototypes, my ideas. You get to know people during these events and these conferences. I was used to it. I was like, yeah, sure, that's normal life. That's how it should work. And when I get to PM
  
  role I suddenly found myself extremely lonely. So actually here is a surprising thing, Jess. You can spend your day in more than 10 meetings. You can talk with more than 100 people and you still feel lonely because you are the only one accountable for your work. You cannot have someone critiquing your work or helping you with tasks. It's not like engineers who actually pair program and work
  
  Jess Sherlock (14:27)
  Hmm.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (14:37)
  together or designer critiquing each other's work. As a PM, I suddenly have been handed the team and said, hey, come up with a strategy, come up with a roadmap, come up with a plan. I was like, who's going to review my plan? Who's going to judge whether it's a good plan or not? I don't know. We trust you. Really?
  
  Jess Sherlock (14:57)
  This is not talked about enough. are, golly, keep going. Because I think this is going to resonate with so many folks and I know it does for me.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (15:07)
  Yeah, for me it was like a clear...
  
  feeling that, my God, ⁓ I really need to do something. If I continue like that, I will just become crazy. So for me, it was extremely important for my first years as a PM to get myself into people who are in this together. Like maybe people will not critique my strategy or something, but I had to be a group where they are in this together.
  
  Jess Sherlock (15:33)
  So let's talk about the book.
  
  I know the story, but tell us how did the book come to be? Did you always want to write a book? Give us a little bit of the background before we dive into what it's about.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (15:44)
  So as I told you, Jess, something that I love doing a lot is being on stage and talking about topic that matters. And I actually used to talk about different topics. I spoke about community of practice, by the way, that was one of the talks I enjoyed doing. I spoke about product discovery, some case studies. I mean, these are great talks, but one
  
  day I actually was asked by the conference organizer to... it was a quite specific question. It was like, hey Nesrine you've been in these very successful...
  
  companies and working on globally loved products for years, is there any pattern or something in common between these products like Skype, Spotify, Google Meet or even Chrome that you can share with us? And honestly, I was very lucky that he did not ask that in public because I couldn't find an easy answer. I was like, OK, give me a minute. At least I need to think. And I thought about it and I found that it was obvious
  
  There is a common trend or pattern or something in common. what's in common is that companies like Microsoft or Google or Spotify, they heavily invest in creating emotional connection between their products and their users, which means it's not only about functional needs, but also about identifying emotional needs and serving products that
  
  solve for those both needs, And when I get to that conclusion, what I did is that I actually crafted a topic and a presentation. And I presented this at PMF, Product Management Festival, that was a couple of years ago. And the topic resonated so much that people say, yeah, I mean, that's exactly what we need to do, but you should tell
  
  more. It's too short. So yes, what I did by that time I had no idea that I need to write a book by the way. just giving you how things went. So I said okay what if I start with writing stories? It's not even a book. The way how I started is like I'm writing delightful stories or the stories how we build Google Meet or how we build Spotify or what did work well and resonated with users at Skype. What didn't really work well. So I started
  
  Jess Sherlock (17:32)
  How do we do it?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (18:01)
  writing stories and it was nothing about business or it was not supposed to be a methodology product or a book or whatever and then I realized I have so many really like so many stories so yes
  
  Jess Sherlock (18:15)
  The book is full. We're going to talk about this because the examples I think
  
  are really what made it click for me. And I have some that were especially profound.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (18:24)
  Yes. So it started as a story, let's say, diary or like a small document. And then I said, OK, now how am I going to let people benefit from that? I mean, these are great resources. Why leaving them on my folder? It's like I need to share, but I can't just share it without the context. So that was the very, very beginning, let's say, V0 of Product Delight. It started as a story and then I said, hey, how can I structure it to make it a book? So
  
  Jess Sherlock (18:41)
  Okay.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (18:53)
  it had two goals. One is to inspire. So the stories play a big big role into inspiring people. Like the fact that you give concrete example, what example of product they are using every day resonates so much and I give them this first step of okay maybe I should do it as well. And the second which for me was an obsession, now we're gonna talk about that as well, how can we make it actionable? How can I, it's not only about inspiring because that's just half of the work, it's halfway. So how
  
  Jess Sherlock (19:16)
  Yes.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (19:22)
  can I allow you, any founder or CPO or VP of product or even PM IC, how can I help you start building such successful and such delightful products? So that was the obsession for me, is like how can I collect those stories? How can I collect my experience and my skills into something that people can benefit in order to apply into their job from next day?
  
  Jess Sherlock (19:48)
  Yeah, at the very end, I'm going to put you on the spot and ask for specific actionable advice for very specific types of PMs. I'm excited about that. But we'll start a bit higher level and it's probably worth noting. I started my product career from the user experience researcher side of things.
  
  And so I will admit to you, was thrilled to meet you, thrilled to read the book, but part of me was going, how is this not just usability? How is this not just UX heuristics, right? So I'm coming into this a little bit skeptical, admittedly, but you got me, okay? You got me. I'm a believer. ⁓
  
  Nesrine Changuel (20:22)
  Yes.
  
  Jess Sherlock (20:25)
  when it really started to click for me was a couple of these quotes and then a few of the examples. the first quote was that "The goal of delight is not just about sprinkling joy on top of utility. It's about weaving emotion into the core experience so that the product becomes memorable and meaningful."
  
  And when delight is treated as a strategic lens, rather than a finishing touch,
  
  Entire organizations can rally around creating products that are not just functional, but unforgettable." And what stood out to me with that is, this is in the DNA. I think someone even said that in one of the stories. It's about delight being a part of the DNA for how you build your products. And the head of engineering and product at Dyson, Andy Nesling said, "It's not enough to build products that work well. They must also make users
  
  feel good about using them."
  
  And it was those moments where it was so profound and it was starting to click that helped me see the point you were trying to get across. So.
  
  Tell us a bit about how would you define product to light in your own words? give folks a taste because it's probably the first time anyone listening has even heard of the concept.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (21:33)
  Yeah, so here's the story. When we build products, we build them for users, of course, and we need to know and understand very well what are the needs of our users.
  
  What I see around me, especially now is People spend much more time trying to understand what are the functional needs of our users, which of course are very important to identify, but spend much less time into understanding and figuring out what are their emotional needs.
  
  And actually, you can create emotional connection between your product and user if you serve for those needs at the same time.
  
  Let me explain with a very basic and known example. If you are a Spotify user, you might go to Spotify for different reasons.
  
  You can go there because you're looking for a specific track or song or podcast, or you might go there as well because you want to be inspired. I have no idea what I want to listen to today, but please give me something that fits my taste or something that I'll be happy listening to today. These are probably functional needs, but sometimes, and that happens to me a lot, I go to Spotify because I feel lonely. I just want some...
  
  like sound around me to change the vibe or I can listen to Spotify because I want to change my mood. These are on the other side emotional needs and you can notice that there are so many platform you can use today to stream video, but they are not as successful as Spotify because features like wrapped or discover weekly or
  
  Jess Sherlock (22:56)
  That's it. I was going to say that for me.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (23:13)
  Mood Recommendation. These are things that connect with users at the human level and so they create what we call the emotional connection concept. And by the way Jess, you said something quite interesting. You mentioned like
  
  delight in design and utility. the beauty is actually emotional connection is not a new concept. Actually, emotional connection is very well covered in design and in marketing. So designers do have resources like the book Emotional Design or Designing for Emotion by Aaron Walter. These are great resources. Same for marketing. Like the best marketing campaigns are these like emotional ads, like when you connect and it's like, my God.
  
  For example, Coca Cola are doing a great job with that. But what I noticed, and I don't know if you agree with me, is that for products and business, we are not educated toward this at all. We talk about discovery and problem space, but when it comes to emotional connection, there is an empty space. And that, for me, was a big problem because you create a gap in communication. You have designers saying, we need to build emotional products. Marketers are saying, we need to market the product in emotional
  
  way and like business are what's the metric what's the what's the OKR yeah
  
  Jess Sherlock (24:27)
  That is it. Yes. Yes. And you know,
  
  as you're saying that, I think I'm biased and you're helping me see this blind spot that I have because that was always second nature for me, but I think it's because my experience is so rooted in UX. So I was the type of PM who had, like I had that in my blood in a way that, you know, MBAs would not. So tell us what are the metrics because
  
  That was what I was waiting for in the book, to be honest, was, all right, I get the premise, but how do I answer my stakeholders who say, why does it matter?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (25:04)
  Actually it matters a lot in so many areas. The only thing is that...
  
  the impact on metrics may take time because what we are doing when we are building for delight is we're planting seeds to create what we call a brand, to create a personality, to go into connection. cannot connect with even a person like immediately. You have to interact. You need to surprise me. And these are things that take time. And we spoke about emotional connection, but just want to get back before we talk about
  
  metrics to why I chose delight and not calling it just emotional connection because in the world of products we talk a lot about we need to delight our users. I think you're like me you heard that so many times but believe me me who's driving this every time I ask people like how do you delight your users we don't know how I mean we just agree that we should delight our users we just don't know how.
  
  Jess Sherlock (25:41)
  Yes.
  
  Mm-hmm.
  
  And we try to sneak in that
  
  one feature, that one time a year that might be delightful.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (26:08)
  Absolutely. Or we confuse it with, let's say, the delightful design and we add interactions. I mean, we're going to talk about this type of delight, but this is not the delight that I am advocating for. So when we talk about delight, there is, of course, this theoretical definition. Nobody likes theoretical definition, but I'm going to be very short. You probably read that from the book.
  
  Jess Sherlock (26:28)
  I found this fascinating as someone who really
  
  enjoys psychology concepts and other social and emotional topics. So anyways, please share because I found this fascinating.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (26:37)
  Okay.
  
  So I also found it very interesting for the flow and also to even come up with this concept to understand what's the theory behind delight. So delight is an emotion. That's the first thing that people need to understand. And I love this study by Plutchik, Professor Plutchik is a psychologist who actually conceptualized emotions into what we call the wheel of emotions. And he actually said there are primary emotions and there are secondary emotions. And actually delight is a secondary emotion that is a combination
  
  two primarily emotions and these are I'm not gonna ask you what are these because you read the book but these are go ahead what are these two emotions that combine together give the light bingo
  
  Jess Sherlock (27:15)
  I remember.
  
  I believe it is joy and surprise? I pass the
  
  test.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (27:24)
  Bingo! Actually, just want you to think for a moment. If you're a moment where you are experiencing joy and surprise at the same time, you are delighted. That's the pure definition. These are great moments, right? So...
  
  Jess Sherlock (27:34)
  Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, these are like kids when
  
  they see their first fireworks.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (27:41)
  Yeah, amazing. Exactly. So that's the theory. Now let's go to the practical side. How can we bring these sparkles into users' eyes or users' experience? And I call out in the book that there are three pillars necessary for building delight And in order to achieve that goal that we all want to get into, we have to follow these three pillars or at least try to honor these three pillars. And believe me,
  
  you're going to make amazing product that will be very different from others. And that's what we want at the end of the day. I we live in a very crowded market. And if you make like a product that just works, it's not enough anymore in these days. So what are these three pillars? The three pillars are the first one you need to remove friction. Your product or your features has to come in a way that remove pain or remove friction. Like it has to be very easy for the user
  
  to live their life as a product without friction. That's number one, obvious enough. The second and the third are those that are less known and those are what will make bigger impact. The second is to exceed expectation.
  
  And the third is to anticipate users' needs. So it's not only about honoring users' needs, because then you will just get satisfied users, but you need to exceed their expectation and anticipate their needs. We can talk about examples, of course, but these are the three pillars that can guarantee that your product won't be like the rest.
  
  Jess Sherlock (29:17)
  Yeah, I'd like to share a story with you, if I may. So about a year ago, almost to the day, I had to put one of my first pets down. Very sad time. It something I had never had to do before. It's a little kitty cat. Her name was Wrigley. And around that time, after she passed, you end up with all the extra pet supplies, inevitably, right? You bought the bag of food that you no longer need. You bought the...
  
  Nesrine Changuel (29:21)
  Yeah, sure.
  
  Jess Sherlock (29:46)
  ⁓ Litter that you no longer need, Something struck me where I wanted to run a little bit of an experiment. So I had her food from Chewy, a big 30 pound bag that I didn't know what to do with. And I had two containers of litter from Petsmart. And somehow I knew that the experience of those two brands would be different. I don't know how I knew that, but I made a mental note that I wanted to run a bit of a side-by-side experiment to see how they would react.
  
  So I contacted both companies through their support line or whatever, because the return window had probably passed. And I said the same exact thing, except for what the product was that I needed to return. I said, hey, I lost my cat. ⁓ What should I do with these products? One was a prescription food, one was litter. So I thought for sure the prescription food would be a pain in the butt. To return, that was the one that was going to Chewy. Wouldn't you know? Chewy responded.
  
  With her name, I didn't even use the name in the email, but they had her name because I had ordered her prescription food. They said, we're so sorry to hear about Wrigley. And they immediately took the weight off of me. They said, it's a prescription food. So, you know, please just give it to your vet. Your vet can make sure it gets to someone who can use it. We've already refunded your order. What a bar to set. Okay. I reach out to PetSmart about the litter and their response was,
  
  Nesrine Changuel (31:04)
  Yes.
  
  Jess Sherlock (31:08)
  you can return it to the closest store. Didn't use her name didn't refund me, didn't even tell me where the nearest store was.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (31:17)
  yeah yeah which one do you want to continue working with?
  
  Jess Sherlock (31:18)
  But here's the icing on the cake, right? Exactly.
  
  And here's the kicker is two or three days later, I got flowers delivered from Chewy, handwritten, right? Frosting on the cake. So I guess, I mean, it sounds like that's product delight in action, would you say?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (31:28)
  Okay. Oh, okay.
  
  Yeah.
  
  And that's it.
  
  Absolutely. And that's how we're getting into, by the way, this concept of metrics, because usually we have ⁓ two levels of satisfaction. We have either satisfied users. These are just satisfied because they asked for something, they got it. And you have these emotionally connected users where you actually exceeded their expectation exactly as you are describing and you even anticipated their needs. mean, offering the flowers, whatever. This is something that they thought
  
  about and you might not even have thought about it. And actually there have been a lot of studies and I love these studies because I've been reading through all these reports and these reports come from Capgemini, Deloitte, Harvard Business Review, I mean so many, and McKinsey. Actually they all study the exact same thing. They study the comparison between emotionally connected users and satisfied or highly satisfied users even. And the results?
  
  Jess Sherlock (32:40)
  you
  
  Nesrine Changuel (32:41)
  of the reports has been really mind-blowing because I've seen a consensus across all reports. What these reports said is Emotional connection can double revenue.
  
  Emotional connection can double and emotional connection can double referral, meaning that you would tell the world, you will tell your friend, you will stay longer and you will be much more likely to buy more products and services from them.
  
  Jess Sherlock (33:02)
  I did. And I did.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (33:08)
  which mapped very well what you just said, is a recent experience I had with Uber. Actually, I was in a rush to catch my train from Paris to London and I so ordered an Uber driver. And what happened is that during the waiting time, the driver canceled. So I got the notification saying that, Hey, your Uber driver canceled the trip. So we're looking for a new driver or something like that.
  
  Honestly, I was in a rush. I really had to go to the train station. So I picked the first Taxi driver just passed in front of me and I forgot about the app. So on my journey to the train station I realized that actually Uber was searching for another driver for me and another driver came to my place and was waiting for me and couldn't find me So I was actually charged the waiting time the trip. I mean everything was charged and I was so
  
  Jess Sherlock (33:59)
  ⁓ no!
  
  Nesrine Changuel (34:02)
  anxious and angry. I did not take that Uber and I'm charged twice and what the hell? So I get through all these negative emotions and what happened is that I was already prepared mentally and psychologically to go and write a full email saying hey this is the story the first driver was cancelled blah blah blah. The big surprise was that I got to the app and said like I have a
  
  claim to do. I said which trip or which ride you want to claim and I said this and I clicked on this and I don't have to do anything or write anything and it said your money will be back. I like wow.
  
  You know, I've been from that, okay, I need to write and explain and I'm not even sure if I will get my money because I was a bit part of it guilty as well. I mean, I could have checked, et cetera. And suddenly like the entire money was back and they said, sorry for that experience and bingo. Wow. Honestly, this is like exceeding expectation, also removing friction in some way. So it's not necessarily about that delight that comes from the design and the utility and the sparkles and the Easter eggs and the
  
  Jess Sherlock (34:43)
  Wonderful.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (35:12)
  what I call usually the confetti effect. It's not about the confetti effect, it's about the core experience and we need to build for that delightful core experience.
  
  Jess Sherlock (35:21)
  You're exactly right. And with the confetti effect and all these things, think I was guilty of that too. That's what I was picturing was, okay, so more pizzazz, more things flashing, more animations, but that's not what you're talking about. And I loved you have this design excellence checklist in the book that really helped me start to imagine
  
  the different ways that you can add delight that are not necessarily the obvious things. I think the one that really stood out to me specifically was the one about humanization. like if a human were to do the thing that you're offering with your product or your service,
  
  How would a human do it? And then how might you incorporate that into your product? That was just this aha moment for me to go, it's not the pizzazz.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (36:08)
  Yes, actually when I wrote the book I had an entire chapter about what I call the nine delighters. And nine delighters are ways to or tools, let's say, to equip people who want to introduce delight into their products. It's not only about inspiring them, but let's give them tools. And one of those tools was humanization. And I even said in the book it's my favorite because I honestly believe it's the most impactful one. And it's exactly what you said. It's about asking yourself if my product were a human
  
  human,
  
  how would that product or that human would do the job better? How could it be better if it was done by a human being? And honestly, we applied that concept very much at Google Meet. So for example, during COVID we rarely compared Google Meet to Zoom or to Teams or whatever other
  
  video conferencing tool. However, we constantly compare Google Meet to how would it be better if you were all in the same room. That's the main competitor. That's the higher bar. That's what you want to achieve because if you set that kind of bar and you start thinking that way, you raise the expectation. actually we develop it features like raise hand or reactions, emoji reactions. Exactly. Because if you were in a room, you don't want
  
  Jess Sherlock (37:25)
  or the reactions,
  
  Nesrine Changuel (37:29)
  to interrupt and always say I agree or whatever. I sometimes a thump up is enough. That's what you want to express.
  
  Jess Sherlock (37:34)
  Mm-hmm, or a head nod,
  
  or a head nod, yeah.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (37:37)
  Exactly and you mentioned that example from Dyson because when I chatted with Andy, I said like how come I have a Dyson vacuum cleaner that I feel so proud of like how come like it's a vacuum cleaner and I'm so happy hanging it on the wall I can show it every time I have visitors like it's a vacuum cleaner Nesrine come on what's going on and he said like how come and and he said like we actually
  
  Jess Sherlock (37:46)
  Me too! ⁓
  
  Nesrine Changuel (37:59)
  think a lot about making sure that people really love their products and and he mentioned this concept of humanization he said like when we were building our robots we thought about the following how the person like if I hire a real person to clean my house how would that person experience would be better and they said okay if I hire a person I might probably tell the person to clean in a certain way or to start with a certain room I mean that's what we love doing when we get someone to clean our place
  
  Jess Sherlock (38:28)
  Hmm?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (38:29)
  So they got inspired by this concept of recommendation and they implemented recommendation in their robots and they are thinking that way and that's why we relate and we love such products.
  
  Jess Sherlock (38:41)
  Yeah,
  
  I almost want to add that into when I'm helping folks understand how to approach a competitive assessment, I almost want to include this question that says, what would a human do? So in your competitive assessment, include all the alternatives. But one of the alternatives I've never thought about is human. So we've talked a lot about how product delight can go right. Product delight can help move these metrics. can contribute to
  
  Nesrine Changuel (38:55)
  Huh.
  
  Jess Sherlock (39:07)
  longer retention, higher lifetime value, higher revenue, stronger word of mouth. That's great. You also included some stories where delight went wrong. Well-intended delight did not land. And you have a principle in the book where you talk about it's not enough to just deliver delight, it's about when delight is actually felt. And so could you share the call mom promotion example?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (39:20)
  Yeah.
  
  Jess Sherlock (39:31)
  I just thought that one was so, so clear to me why delight isn't always good. Or I guess has to be approached with caution is maybe the way to say it.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (39:42)
  So probably the best way to say it's always good if it's done right. However, if it's done the wrong way, are huge risks. And that's why for me, there was an entire chapter trying to raise awareness about these risks because we want a better world,
  
  Jess Sherlock (39:46)
  Mm-hmm.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (39:58)
  we want user to come by themselves because they feel good when they interact with our product and there's a huge difference. So some of those principles that we need to take into consideration when
  
  building for delight is inclusion. Inclusion is one of the biggest pillars that need to be part of our thinking. What do I mean? Actually remember, delight is an emotion. And what makes me happy is not necessarily what makes you happy or even myself. I might be happy by something today that might not have the same effect on me next week or the following month or whatever. So it's really important to, when you're building for delight, to ask the question, could it be harmful in any way? And this is a very powerful question to ask.
  
  and we need to generalize as much as we can. And the example you asked about is actually an example that is real, just happened last year. So on Mother's Day, Deliveroo, which is that delivery company, actually had a marketing campaign. And the marketing campaign is about sending people notification on their phone. However, the notification shows up on the mobile exactly as a missed call. Like the design is exactly the same color, the same size. And even if you see
  
  it seems like missed call from your mom and the idea was that you click on that notification and you get a message saying it's mother's day think about your mom send her flower here's our service you can use deliverer for that bingo I mean the intention was supposed to be delightful it's a great occasion but have they thought about those who might
  
  go through some weird emotion while seeing that message. for some people it may make them feel a bit of grief or some would be happiness, some others might be some awkward emotions as well. that campaign particularly had a very bad press. People started sharing screenshots like, thank you Deliveroo, but I don't think that was a great idea
  
  and they had to apologize. Well anyway, so this is exactly the example that I love sharing to say delight is great and we just need to apply it at the right time and right space but also with
  
  Jess Sherlock (42:07)
  Mm-hmm, yeah. And again, not a new thing. You make this point throughout the book that nothing that you're talking about is new. These are all concepts that we can use in existing frameworks that we use as PMs. So this falls under the category, like when you're talking about inclusion, we should know our users well enough to feel confident that the way in which we're trying to present delight is going to be appreciated, right? And if we're not sure, we may need to approach with caution.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (42:24)
  Hmm.
  
  Yeah, I like.
  
  Absolutely and I love what you said about you need to know your users well enough because that's exactly what makes the effect higher.
  
  Jess Sherlock (42:43)
  Exactly. Being seen, it's a core human need, as you talked about in the book. And we all know that, but for some reason, when we're thinking about our products, I think your point was that PMs were so trained on the logic and the left brain and the thinking about the functionality that it is an awakening that I know I needed and I suspect a lot of other folks will appreciate as well. So we've talked about a lot of examples.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (42:46)
  Yeah.
  
  Jess Sherlock (43:07)
  I want to maybe share a bit about the different types of delight so that folks can understand that not all delight is created equal. And so could you just share briefly about the three types because this felt really helpful for me as I think about what types of delight to incorporate and which ones are going to have which impact.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (43:28)
  Yeah, so.
  
  Before we talk about the three types of delight, I wanted to highlight the fact that when we want to build a product, it's really, really important that that's actually the most important step to start with is to identify users, what I call motivators. Actually, what motivate users to use your product? And it's surprising how people might be using your product for so many different reasons. And these motivators could be, of course, functional as we spoke about
  
  for the Spotify example, like listening to music, searching for a song, whatever. It could be emotional, like I want to feel less lonely, I want to be more productive, blah blah blah. And these are the first two steps that are extremely important, like identifying the emotional motivators and the functional motivators. Why am I talking about that? Because when you get to the phase where you are brainstorming ideas and solutions,
  
  you look at these solutions and you say if my solution is only serving for an emotional need to be seen, to feel fun, whatever, it's that first type of delight that is surface delight. And that's what most people are familiar with by the way. time I talk about delight the first idea that comes is like the surface delight. And the very basic example I could share is like I have an Apple Watch and a couple of months ago was my birthday and on my birthday
  
  I got this notification with balloons saying happy birthday Nesrine. I mean there is nothing functional about it, but why not? I mean it gives a smile, it's a personal touch that's surface delight
  
  If you have a feature that is only solving for functional needs, a functional motivator, there's nothing emotional into it, then this is what I call the low delight. It's important because at some point, for example, when we were working on improving search in Spotify or working on skip, that's not emotional. It has to work, of course, but if it doesn't work, it's empty delight. It's like the worst experience you could have. And the third type, which I'm much more vocal about and I love if people can start thinking about it,
  
  is the deep delight. And the deep delight happens if you have a feature that is at the same time of course solving for a functional need and an emotional need. Like think about Discover Weekly for example. Discover Weekly is allowing people to be inspired and like get new songs but also feel heard, feel understood through that personalization and...
  
  fact that it's made for them. So these are the three types. Surface Delight if it's only emotional, Low Delight if it's only functional and Deep Delight if it's the combination of the two.
  
  Jess Sherlock (46:05)
  And folks might be wondering, how is this different from the Kano model? Can you share a bit about how you think about how this is different or related?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (46:13)
  I think a great framework, because it was something that initiated this concept of delight. But there was no distinction between what is surprising from a design perspective versus what is surprising from emotional needs perspective. honestly worked a lot with Kano it was one of my favorite framework, like the fact that you can distinguish between must-haves, performance and delighters. And the problem is that
  
  people are using Kano as a prioritization tool. So they start putting must have and then they put Performance and who knows maybe one day we get to the Delighters. And that's exactly what we should not do because absolutely not a prioritization tool. It is a categorization tool. But the reason why I always say it's missing something is because it doesn't distinguish between any type of Delight and biggest mistake I've seen people using Kano with
  
  Jess Sherlock (46:47)
  Yes, yes.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (47:05)
  end up doing only surface delight, only those sparkles, confetti and celebration effect. These are good but absolutely not enough. These are not what drive emotional connection. It's the deep delight that is not mentioned in the Kano.
  
  Jess Sherlock (47:19)
  also
  
  think it creates this either or and they're not mutually exclusive. These must have features can be delightful. This is the, this was right, this was my aha. You're like, my gosh, it worked. So some of the examples that you shared, helped me to see the example and realize that this feature had to be built somehow. And the choice to make it delightful was just that. It was, it was simply a lens. one of the examples that I thought we could talk about was
  
  Nesrine Changuel (47:22)
  Yeah.
  
  Absolutely.
  
  Yeah.
  
  Jess Sherlock (47:46)
  if TurboTax figures out, ⁓ you're doing a tax return for a loved one that you have lost, they don't have to do anything. They don't have to do anything. They could just let you finish your taxes and be done with it. But there was a choice to present a message that says something to the effect of, we're sorry for your loss. We're happy to help you get these taxes in order.
  
  or done the right way or whatever it was. that was the moment for me is that the Kano model isn't bad, but it leads you to believe that delight is a layer on top when really delight can be and should be infused even in those must have features. Would you agree? I getting that correct?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (48:07)
  No. No.
  
  100 % and let me be honest with you. I feel like my job is really hard these days because I am debating and I'm fighting for...
  
  the wrong ideas. I think Kano was a great, as I said, way of introducing delight. But what people got from Kano is exactly like, hey, OK, it's a nice to have. It's the cherry on the top. We get to it if we have space or resource. And people never have space or resource to get delight. So that's the idea that I am fighting against. I'm saying that it is absolutely not a nice to have. It is a must have. This is what is making Spotify or Google or
  
  TurboTax, whatever product is succeeding and differentiating from others is exactly through this way of introducing delight. It's the humanization. And by the way, this example of TurboTax is exact pure example of humanizing product. Because if you're in front of an agent, let's imagine you're not doing this in an app and you say that you lost a loved one. Do you think that agent, or maybe I'm not sure, but do you think that that person will just take, okay, next step. ⁓
  
  Jess Sherlock (49:35)
  I would hope not.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (49:35)
  You might be
  
  surprised and we should be also surprised if the app do that as well. So it's all about saying if the app was a person, is there any way we can do it better? So that's a pure example.
  
  Jess Sherlock (49:40)
  Yes, yes.
  
  Mm-hmm. Yes.
  
  Yes, yes. There was one other example before we talk about process, because I think folks might be curious, like, how do you actually put this into action? And you have a great product delight model. I want to talk about it. But we're all probably familiar with the anonymous animals in Google Docs. I just saw it this morning, in fact. I was sharing a document with a few folks in my coaching community. ⁓
  
  and I got a giggle because someone was the anonymous liger, which is a lion and a tiger. And so you talk about that example in the book, and I think the TurboTax example feels obvious in some way, right? Like, of course, if you lost a loved one, you would be caring and empathetic. But the anonymous animals in a Google Doc, this one started to feel more relatable, I guess, more...
  
  representative of how we have a choice to bring in delight and delight doesn't have to be loud, if that makes sense. So can you talk a little bit about the anonymous animals example, why you chose to include that one? Cause I, that one, just like the other examples you chose, this one felt representative, but in a like different way.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (50:44)
  Yeah.
  
  Yeah, I love this example and it doesn't come from me by the way, it came from Jonathan. Jonathan Rochelle, he's actually, used to be the director of product at that time at Google Doc and he's a great guy. He shared this story with me that I loved because this is a pure example of deep delight. By the way, the TurboTax sounds to be much more into the surface delight, like we are just connecting only on the emotional level. However, the way Jonathan described the story is interesting. They started from a functional
  
  Jess Sherlock (51:02)
  That's right, that's right.
  
  Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (51:27)
  need. Like they had for privacy protection to work on a solution that can anonymize or like protect people's privacy when they don't necessarily want to show their identity. And he actually said like, okay, I asked the PM, be creative, find out a way. I mean, he used to be a leader at that time. And he said, I just told them, go crazy and be innovative in that space. And they came with that solution. So the reason why I'm saying it's deep delight because it starts
  
  it
  
  from a functional need. There is a clear functional need which is about protecting privacy and anonymizing people and they solved it. Instead of finding just this functional solution into it, they solved it in a delightful way. And we actually did something quite similar as well at Google Chrome because when I worked for Google Chrome, I worked on one of the most, let's say, challenging problem which is how can I help people managing their open tabs? my god.
  
  Jess Sherlock (52:23)
  ⁓ yeah, ubiquitous.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (52:25)
  Hahaha!
  
  Jess Sherlock (52:25)
  If there's anyone out there listening who feels like an expert in tab management, let me know. Otherwise, we're all in the boat of three dozen tabs, I think.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (52:32)
  There's
  
  no expert and more particularly on mobile. I've been like the Chrome iOS PM and I've been working on how people are, what's the relationship? There's even a relationship between people and tabs. Some are for them, like tabs is so important and don't even touch my tab. If you dare.
  
  Jess Sherlock (52:54)
  You close my tabs, I'm going to be mad.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (52:56)
  Exactly. I will hate you. I will
  
  lecture and immediately I will go and check for another product. Anyway, and we've seen from data and numbers that...
  
  Many, many people are having like a lot of tabs open, like a lot. And that started as a technical issue. Like from a functional perspective, we don't necessarily want to have an app with 500 tabs open and that creates memory, space, performance, whatever. But at the same time, we know that we can't close tabs on people's behalf. They will just hate us. mean, trust is broken. So we had to interview people and we had to learn exactly that relationship. We had to understand how they navigate through their tabs.
  
  they
  
  leave tabs open. Some of them leave them as reminders, others because they don't just don't care. I mean, there are a lot of different reasons. And some interview ended up being super interesting by the way, because I remember I asked one of our users to walk through how they navigate through the tabs and sometimes they felt like there is a need to apologize.
  
  I like, sorry, I usually don't have so many tabs open. was like, I mean, it's not exactly, I don't care. I just want to understand the way how you navigate through your tabs. Anyway, so we ended up building a feature called inactive tabs, which is actually a group of tabs of all the tabs that have not been visited for over 21 days. So we're not closing the tabs on their behalf. We're just placing them in this big group.
  
  Jess Sherlock (54:00)
  Yes, you do. We all know you do.
  
  Yeah.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (54:24)
  There's a relief that their tabs are there forever, but at the same time it allowed us to fix some of the functional issues. You can can reduce thumbnail, I these are techniques that we can apply. So it's this deep delight of trying to solve a functional need, but while understanding the user so well that you won't end up hurting them in any way.
  
  Jess Sherlock (54:46)
  Yeah, and delight might feel like a strong word there, but I think that's the difference with deep delight is that it is not flashy. I think it's a bit counterintuitive when you start thinking how some of the examples you share in the book.
  
  don't necessarily seem like they would be delightful on the surface, but as you dig into the reason it makes sense for that user and how it actually is supporting them, that's when it starts to click.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (55:09)
  And something I a lot is that the beauty of your product will be achieved if you make a combination of the three types of delight.
  
  I'm not saying that you should only build for deep delight and forget about low delight or whatever. I mean, what I've seen working so far in my experience is that the best products are having a bouquet, let's say. You need to look at your roadmap and you need to see some of low delights, some of deep delights and some of surface delights. If you manage to do a roadmap where you alternate and try to dig and place these type of delights continuously, I'm sure things will be.
  
  Jess Sherlock (55:19)
  Yeah.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (55:49)
  amazing.
  
  Jess Sherlock (55:50)
  Yeah,
  
  it's no different than trying to always sprinkle in a little bit of technical debt work and a little bit of bug work and a little innovation. But I think it's about not necessarily separating innovation from delight, right? But rather saying there should be some sort of delight in everything we do. And I just, love this reframe so, much. So let's talk about how we put this into action.
  
  because that felt like something I could pick up and start using right away.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (56:19)
  Yes, so the delight model is more like a mental model, I would say. more like some first we need to be aware and we need to agree that that's something that we want to work on and that's most of my work is about evangelizing and talking about it. Then if you want to place that into your product, it is something that will not require any change in ways of working or change in your framework or whatever. It's just like an additional thinking that you need to place throughout
  
  the journey and it's actually a four steps model. It starts with exactly what we said earlier, identifying the motivators, meaning that you need to understand what motivate users at the emotional and the functional level. By the way, it starts with the segmentation of your users and I've seen, most of companies are
  
  basing their segmentation or personas on behavioral segmentation or
  
  Demographic segmentation. I mean, these are not enough. You need to work on the motivational segmentation, which is about the why users are using your product and try to solve for those whys. That's first step. The second step is to the motivators into product opportunities. And what I see these days, there's a shift from talking from product space into opportunity space because we're not
  
  solving problem. are also honoring needs and this is by itself is a mindset that we need to adopt. So it's about converting these identified motivators into concrete product opportunities. And there are plenty of framework that we can use. It could be we can use how might we, which is a nice way of framing, a need into an opportunity. But the idea is to list that into a concrete product opportunity. Once you get to that level, you
  
  are getting into the third step which is identifying solutions that could solve for that need and categorizing them based on the level of delight. And I'm not gonna say so much about how to identify solutions because in most companies it's not the hardest problem.
  
  Jess Sherlock (58:30)
  That's not the problem.
  
  We're drowning in solution ideas.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (58:31)
  Absolutely, absolutely. However,
  
  knowing which one is delightful or not is still not very well mastered. So that's why I say like if you use the delight grid, so the delight grid is a simple tool where you actually place all the motivators, the emotional motivators on the X axis and the functional motivators on the Y axis. So you get a matrix or a grid. Now you get all your solutions that you brainstormed on and you place them in this grid
  
  based on what does this solution solve for? Does it solve for this emotional need or this functional need or both? And if you place them in the grid, you end up having a map telling you these features are low delight, these features are surface delight, these features are deep delight. And that's actually the start of winning because knowing exactly which one will delight your users versus not is a great start. And I usually advocate for a model called 50-40-10, meaning
  
  that if you manage to create a roadmap with 50 % of low delight, 40 % of deep delight, and just 10 % of surface delight, that's great. So that's the categorization of the solution. The last step, which is number four, is called validating delight. And we touched a bit on this delight excellence checklist. So the delight excellence checklist is just a checklist where you go through it one by one based on the solution you want to introduce to the product to check,
  
  familiarity, like is there inclusion, does it solve for business need? We just want to make sure that this entire work is worth it and we're not doing a mistake toward the end so it's a reminder that the delight will be met. So this is all about this delight model for step summary.
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:00:19)
  Yeah, and the excellence checklist as I was reading it, it certainly and obviously felt helpful for an IC PM, but it also felt like a tool that they could use with their stakeholders or peers who might be skeptical. As you're thinking, you know, well, why should we do this thing or does it really matter, right? The checklist can be a sort of buy-in gathering tool as well.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:00:34)
  Yeah.
  
  Yeah.
  
  For me it was really important to start with the two first which are is it solving for a business need? Is it solving for a user needs? Why? Because delight is not an excuse to add sparkles and confetti. I mean, I have been giving some workshop recently about delight and I've got some people saying, hey, look, we have this nice feature when you shake your phone, you get snowflake falling. It's like, why?
  
  I yes you've been like engineering on it I mean probably took you two days I don't know how much time but why what's what what's
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:01:16)
  Yeah, but surface to light.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:01:20)
  I mean even surface delights has to serve for a reason. I it's not because it's confetti. Exactly. Let me give you an example. I I mentioned this confetti effect but it doesn't mean that we should completely banish confetti and not do confetti at all in the product because I'm an Airbnb user both as a guest but also as a host. I have a place I love putting for rent on Airbnb. There's something that I'm extremely serious about is being a
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:01:24)
  Yes, thank you for calling me out. Yes, yes.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:01:49)
  superhost and I have the superhost tag and I'm very serious about keeping it and actually Airbnb reassess your ability to remain a superhost based on the reviews and the quality of your hosting and you know what they actually reassess whether you want to remain superhost or not every three months so every three months if I'm reassessed as a superhost again every time I open the app it turns into a confetti
  
  The reason why I'm sharing this example is because honestly, I love this moment because I feel like the app is celebrating this effort with me. It's recognizing my effort. Like I really put a lot of effort into remaining super host. So this moment, particularly the confetti is like, why not?
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:02:34)
  Yes,
  
  yes, yes, yes. And actually with the shaking of the phone, the feature that I thought of immediately, I think it's Instagram. When you shake your phone, it asks you if you're having a technical problem because I think it's thinking that you're so frustrated that you're like, frick this phone, right? So that one functional and emotional. ⁓ I just, feel like we could sit and talk about examples all day long. ⁓
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:02:53)
  Yeah. Yes. Yes.
  
  Yes.
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:03:03)
  And it's fun. You can think of the examples when you're looking for them. They are so easy to spot. actually, you and I were going back and forth on LinkedIn. I think it was yesterday where someone had posted about Buffer sending out an email. And this is amazing. So if you haven't seen it folks, Buffer, apparently if you're coming up on your annual subscription and you haven't been active in the product, they send you an email that says, hey, looks like you're not active. We're just going to not renew you. Can you imagine?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:03:15)
  Yes.
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:03:33)
  But has your gym ever done that? Netflix ever? No one that I can think of has ever done that. anyways, you can sit and think about these examples all day long.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:03:35)
  Yeah.
  
  Yeah. Yeah.
  
  There are plenty of them. I love this example in particular because it's a pure B2B. mean, sometimes people are asking me in the screen, is delight a B2C thing? It's like, no, it's delight is for B2H, it's like business to human. If at the end there are human being using the product, then we need to honor their emotions. And this, Buffer, for example, is a pure one. The other day I experienced something similar, but not that intense with Speechify. Like Speechify is an app that turns
  
  like a text into an audio and I subscribe it for a trial, just the trial first, seven days. And one day before the end of the trial, I've got like actually two email, one before, one in a couple of hours saying you're reaching the end of the trial. Do you want to cancel or do you want to keep going? In that case, we wouldn't get money. And I honestly love the fact that they are asking me, they are reminding me because they could not remind. And in that case, they will get the money. And honestly, when I get that email, like,
  
  wanna
  
  go with you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I will go with you. I I will not cancel my trial. You're nice with me. I will be nice with you too.
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:04:45)
  Yeah, yeah, you thought to ask me. How nice, how nice of you.
  
  Yes. So
  
  I wouldn't be doing my listeners justice if I didn't put you in the hot seat and ask some of the questions that I think they would ask if they were here. how we can put this into action. there's three challenges that I could imagine folks bringing up immediately. And one is kind of related to what you said about working on a B2B product, but it's a specific challenge that I see in enterprise products specifically, which is
  
  What advice do you have for PMs who find it hard to get direct access to customers, to conduct the interviews and other discovery activities that are going to help them surface those emotional needs? Because sometimes you'll get leaders or customer success managers who get nervous about allowing their product managers into those relationships.
  
  I fully believe PM should be able to talk to customers, but there's plenty of situations where that is a challenge. What advice would you have for those folks?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:05:50)
  I know it's sometimes unfortunate that some PM find themselves into this situation where they have absolutely no access to customers. So it's really hard to identify what are their needs and their motivators. However, if you can't have access to the customer, my advice is to be the customer. Of course, it's not always easy to be the customer, but try for, I mean, I've seen a lot of companies, especially in the B2B space, having the be the customer's day.
  
  customer
  
  day is like a dedicated time. It could be a day or it could be like a couple of hours where you are just trying to do what a customer would be doing with your product and take notes of the things that frustrate you, the things that are obvious, the things that are easy, the things that are really hard. And these are initial initiatives for identifying motivators. And by the way, B2B or B2C, it's always hard to identify, especially emotional motivators. You know why?
  
  Because even users themselves might not be aware about those. It's something that you unveil over time by conversations, et cetera. So my advice is maybe if you can't find the motivators, try with the demotivators. It's really much easier to identify what makes them anxious and what makes them stressed than what makes them happy. Even ourselves, if you ask me what stress you or make you angry, it's easier for me to come up with answers than if you ask me what makes you super happy.
  
  today. So try with demotivator. That's something I applied for Google Meet when we were in this COVID time. We interviewed people and we identified some of the demotivators who had low interaction or boredom from back-to-back meetings. So we worked on these demotivators. So these are the two advice I have. First is to try to be the customer and notice what's motivating you, what is not.
  
  motivating you both from a functional but also pay attention to the emotion you're going through during these experiences.
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:07:53)
  Yeah, and like you said, start with the friction rather than looking for the improvements. What about situations where there's some unclear boundaries or some egos when you start talking about the line between product management and product design. any advice for folks who find that their designers are
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:07:55)
  Yeah. Yeah.
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:08:10)
  feeling like their territory is being invaded or kind of how do you share and entice designers to come on this journey with you as opposed to feeling like we're somehow stepping on their toes?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:08:20)
  I hope I could be as much clear as I can about that the delight I'm talking about is not the design, delight. It is really about, by the way, I don't even talk about designing for delight. I talk about building for delight because most of the examples we've been talking about are not necessarily tied to design at all. if we, I mean, when we talk about Uber example or whatever.
  
  I mean, these are core, these are in the product itself, like that. Of course you need to embark the designers with you, they need to be on board, they need to be aligned, and it's actually a tool to align, not to step on each other's toes. I mean, it's really sad if we end up getting this understanding because it's completely the opposite. Designers are aware about emotional connection. They know how to delight users. The problem is the product managers and the business who actually don't necessarily care, so they end up giving up.
  
  So this tool is for product managers to get the thinking, to get the mindset and get the vocabulary as well to align with what designers are also wishing to do. I I met a lot of designers who are feeling frustrated that I wish I could get my product manager into this with me and I can't. So I really emphasize on this point. mean, product delight, the theory, the book, the concept that I'm introducing is about
  
  empowering product manager to get the same language and the same level that designers are hoping the product to, but also to add the thinking into how to even come up with ideas for products.
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:09:57)
  Yeah,
  
  yeah, and so maybe another way to say it is if you're bringing this up with your designers and they're not thrilled, that would be unexpected. I would expect the designers to go, thank goodness, I've been saying this for ages.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:10:06)
  Yes, yes absolutely
  
  you said it so well.
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:10:13)
  Yes, yes. So my take on all of this, and I'm curious if you agree, is that this whole concept falls under for forgiveness, not permission umbrella. a lot of what I took away is that you do not need to ask for permission to do this. This could be something that you do fairly invisibly on your own at first, right? It could simply be a lens that you use
  
  to look at the insights from a customer interview differently, to change the types of questions that you ask, to challenge yourself to think outside the box on solutions and factor in the emotional needs. for many of the folks that I work with who are not lucky enough to be in an organization that is product-led and has product in its bones, folks who are still educating on the value of product, to you folks who are listening, I would tell you.
  
  Take this and start to leverage it and measure the success of it and when it is successful, which it will be based on all the data we've seen. When it is successful, celebrate it and then talk about how you did it. Don't advertise this new scary thing because we know the reaction will be skeptical. so find ways to try it and when it's successful, advocate for the success, celebrate the success.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:11:19)
  Yes.
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:11:35)
  So
  
  Let's say there's someone listening who has been at their job for a while and they're feeling really inspired to try this out. What would you tell that person? you tell them to start or any advice you'd have if that person wants to try to work in a different way?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:11:52)
  So.
  
  I've been trying to coach a couple of people around this concept and I very much liked what you said like it's not about convincing them. By the way if you try to convince it's lost before you even start especially for leaders if you want to come and say hey this is a new concept I heard Nesrine talking about delight we should absolutely try it it's not how it works because any innovative idea sounds like a threat
  
  nobody will accept it. However, I like your thinking about, hey, we need to start small and then show results. And that's exactly what I can recommend. I'm not here to say change your ways of working. I'm just saying adapt your ways of working. We're gonna keep doing discovery, but just pay attention to users' emotions. So I'm pretty sure any IC product manager listening today, they have an idea what motivates their users.
  
  on the functional level. But what if starting tomorrow start at least thinking what could be the emotional motivators? And also when we talk about emotional motivators, there are two different types. is the personal emotional motivators and the social emotional motivators, which mean personal ones are what user want to feel while using the product. Social ones are what user want others to feel about them while using the product.
  
  And these are both put in practice today in most of the successful products. So try to identify those two. What user want to feel while using the product? What user want the other to feel about them while using the product? And try to answer these questions. I think this is the very most important starting point because if you start gathering them, you already have that awareness in mind so that when you start thinking about solutions, you will map to those motivators even in your head.
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:13:44)
  Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's amazing what can happen when you just start to create awareness around something new. You'll start to see it everywhere. So what about folks who are actively job searching? As you know, it's been, so many layoffs lately. So many folks are looking. do you have any advice for how you might...
  
  look for an organization where this already exists or it might be more or less conducive to this sort of work. So just what should folks keep an eye out for during their job search and interviews?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:14:15)
  can talk from my own experience like it's unfortunate to say but the best opportunity comes when you're in a comfortable situation. It means that if you're in a rush or if you're actively looking for a job usually like we have that stress that we need to sort it out immediately and it's not necessarily the best situation. The best...
  
  opportunity comes when you are not searching for it. I this is something that I experienced with myself, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you should not look. I mean, you need to keep yourself informed. The thing that did work very well for me is, as I mentioned earlier, is being very active in community, like product community. It could be by participating, just attending, but also you could be trying to be active, like crafting talks about things.
  
  that you are.
  
  passionate about to get more and more known into the community and people will think about you because we live in a world where network has a bigger impact on getting a job than skills. Of course, skills has to be maintained When you're using an app or product, think about how can you improve that app? I I became obsessed about that. Like my husband hates
  
  These reflections like every time I'm using a product, like, can you please try not to be a PM for a moment? So these are skills that you get to practice. And honestly, these are very important ones because you get those kinds of questions. Most of companies like I've been interviewed for like Spotify, Google, Microsoft, they ask you these kinds of questions like how, what product do you love and how can we improve it, et cetera. So get that practice continuously and reading about what people are sharing in
  
  product space.
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:16:00)
  Yeah, and as you're being interviewed, that would be a huge red flag in my mind if you're not getting some of those product sense questions about what products do you love or how would you improve this product or that product. So some of that you can tell pretty quickly. And then if someone has just landed in a new role, they're working on an existing product, is there a way to like...
  
  baseline delight, right? Like how could you sort of get a sense for where things are at? Is there anything that would be out of the standard operating procedures for a PM to kind of quickly figure out how well their product's performing in terms of delight? What advice would you have for someone in a new role?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:16:28)
  Hmm.
  
  Yeah.
  
  I think if you're new to a company, very first, very, very first thing that I highly recommend people doing is to try to understand where the business want to go before even thinking about delight Why? Because you can use delight as long as it's aligned with where the company want to go. If you know what the leaders care about, what the company want to value most, then you can apply.
  
  delight as a tool to achieve that goal. And we spoke about how delight can contribute to retention, to revenue, loyalty, whatever. So first, make sure that you understand the business goal, what's their objective? And then get to the customer, understand the customers, both from emotional and functional, as we said, in order to see ways to align to
  
  where the company wants to go. But I mean, I've seen a lot of mistakes where people immediately jump into the customers. I mean, why not? Of course we have to jump into customers, but first try to make sure you understand what your leaders value most. Because if you go ahead and come up with new ideas that absolutely do not align with where the company want to go, I'm not sure that's going to be a success.
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:17:52)
  Mm-hmm. And the final question would be for someone who is a leader of a team. And they're thinking, gosh, my team could do this. I feel like I want to give them permission or encouragement to go think of things differently. What have you seen work best when leaders want to start implementing this in their teams?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:18:13)
  ⁓ I call this the delight culture.
  
  because we spoke a lot about delight today. And if you want to get this mindset, into your organization, it has to be a continuous work. And leaders has a huge role to play here in evangelizing, of course, but also in making it part of the product culture. I called the product delight culture. And what I mean by that is like, for example, when I worked at Google, we used to have product principles and product pillars. Some of those pillars
  
  were delight which means that every time we have to think about new feature, we are mapping to these principles and pillars to make sure that are we delighting our customers or not. And the beauty is that when I interviewed other companies, other companies calls it with different names like Dropbox called Cupcake and Snowflake called Superheroes. mean, the names are different, but the meanings is the same. It's all about bringing joy and delight to the users. So as a leader, you have
  
  a significant role into putting this in place by adding those concepts into the strategy, into the pillars, into the culture of the product. And by the way, when I worked at Spotify, we had something that I loved, like I kept with me, I love these days, it's called hack days. Hack days are monthly days, where we can hack on whatever new idea that could develop ourselves or the product. It's not necessarily by
  
  way for the products. And I got inspired by this idea how we foster a culture of innovation. I said why not company could have a delight day? Delight days could be opportunities to evangelize and keep the thinking and keep this as a continuous habit and foster it as a habit rather than once a day I would talk about delight as a buzzword. There's a huge difference. So delight days and I've did that by the way with this
  
  Swiss company, it's the biggest ⁓ online grocery in Switzerland. And we had the Delight Day where we all together worked on a complete think out of the box day and think about how can you delight your customers. And you know what? It was amazing. People loved how we are completely unstructured. can just go crazy with delightful ideas. And at the end of the day, we had a jury and people are demoing their delightful features.
  
  It was so playful and I keep checking with them like, hey, still talking about delight? And they love that day so much that they want to put it as a habit because you need to foster it as a mindset, but also culture.
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:20:54)
  Yeah, that's a delight day. love that. So the book launch, how can folks get the book? How can folks connect with you?
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:20:59)
  Yes! ⁓
  
  can reach out nesrine-changuel.com I have a website they can fill in the form and of course happy to get whatever request or question they have. They can find me on LinkedIn as well. I love being connected as well. They can find information about the book on productdelightbook.com The book available on Amazon so it will be available worldwide.
  
  And also something I loved recently since I started talking about delight I'm actually receiving a lot of stories from people like people I know and people that I don't necessarily know and these are stories that could be personal or professional like you just pinged me yesterday and I love that story but sometimes just text me an entire story and they say hey Nesrine this is my delightful experience today and I wanted to share it with you and I love reading these stories like
  
  So if you have a delightful story, please share it with me. I love these moments.
  
  Jess Sherlock (1:22:00)
  Well, thank you so much for joining us. It was truly a pleasure and I can't wait to get my hands on a real copy of the book.
  
  Nesrine Changuel (1:22:07)
  Thank you. Thanks so much.
  

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