The Product Delight Framework for AI PMs (How AI Products Like ChatGPT Win)

1. 0:00 – 2:02

   Intro

   1. AGAakash Gupta0:00

      The AI products that win, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code, they delight. They're not just better at their functional job. They're doing something most AI product builders miss. They're engineering delight.

   2. NCNesrine Changuel0:12

      When we build products, we are supposed to meet both dimensions, the functional needs of our users, but also the emotional needs of our users. And if we only focus on the functional part, there is a risk, and I see it as a trap.

   3. AGAakash Gupta0:25

      Nesrine Changuel is the product leader behind Spotify Unwrapped and Google Meet AI transcription.

   4. NCNesrine Changuel0:30

      In today's episode, we're gonna dig deep into how to engineer delight into AI products and beyond.

   5. AGAakash Gupta0:36

      Today, she's gonna break down her exact toolkit to engineer delight into your AI products.

   6. NCNesrine Changuel0:41

      The only thing is that they don't necessarily know how to.

   7. AGAakash Gupta0:45

      What makes ChatGPT so successful?

   8. NCNesrine Changuel0:47

      Successful product used to create loyalty. It's about creating that emotional connection. It's not a feature. It's a relationship that you need to build. Delight model is a four-step process. First step is about identifying user's motivators. The second step is about turning those motivators into real product opportunities. Once you identify those opportunities, you create solutions. And then the last step, which for me is fundamental and very necessary, is about validating delight.

   9. AGAakash Gupta1:16

      Why do some products feel like they're delivering on both of these areas of delight and others fail?

   10. NCNesrine Changuel1:21

       Because some of them are authentic, and other might feel like, um...

   11. AGAakash Gupta1:31

       Really quickly, I think a crazy stat is that more than 50% of you listening are not subscribed. If you can subscribe on YouTube, follow on Apple or Spotify podcasts, my commitment to you is that we'll continue to make this content better and better. And now on to today's episode. Nesrine, it's so nice to be filming with you. How are you?

   12. NCNesrine Changuel1:51

       Hi, Kash. I'm excited to be with you as well.

   13. AGAakash Gupta1:54

       So we met up for breakfast. We planned out an amazing session for people today. I think they're gonna get a ton of value here. Let's start

2. 2:02 – 4:58

   Surface Delight vs Deep Delight

   1. AGAakash Gupta2:02

      here. What's the one thing that separates billion-dollar AI products from the graveyard of forgotten tools?

   2. NCNesrine Changuel2:07

      Let me be clear. When I talk about product, I talk about successful products, and I talk a lot about how can we create standout products. And those standout product has something in common. They blend while building the product two dimensions. They blend the functional dimension and the emotional dimension into the same core experience. So I do believe that for product to stand out and to differentiate themself and to create what I call excellence, it's really important to create them in a way that we address both functional needs and also emotional needs. So that's the, that's the essence. When I talk about delight, it's about creating those two dimension while crafting the solution, not like separately.

   3. AGAakash Gupta2:51

      So why do some products feel like they're delivering on both of these areas of delight and others fail?

   4. NCNesrine Changuel2:57

      Because some of them are authentic, and other might feel like, um, something on top. A bit like fake. Let's be transparent. So I usually distinguish between different type of delight. There is what I call the surface delight, and there is the other type, which is the deep delight. And here's the thing, like, when we talk about surface delight, these are just those shiny moment, those confetti effect, those animation that makes the product a little bit brighter. And of course, we know that they are nice to have, but it's not necessarily what is making this strong emotional connection that I'm talking about. However, on the other side, the deep delight is when we create functional solutions while addressing emotional needs while building them. So you see the difference. It's not about that sprinkling confetti on top of utility. It's about creating the product while addressing the emotional need at the same time. So that's the big difference between the two type of delight.

   5. AGAakash Gupta3:49

      I think that's a really important distinction. Why do some AI products just shoot themselves in the foot?

   6. NCNesrine Changuel3:54

      So when we talk about delight, let's be very clear. It's about emotion. And by the way, one element that we can address and clarify here is that delight by itself is an emotion, and there've been some studies like conceptualizing delight as a, a combination of two primary emotion. These emotions are joy and surprise. So just think about yourself. If you are in the moment where you are experiencing joy and surprise at the same time, then you are delighted. The problem is when we talk about emotion, what makes you happy is not necessarily what makes other happy, and even yourself, you might be happy with a situation that might not make the same effect on you on other situations. So inclusiveness is really, really important in that aspect, and making sure that you create that joy instead of disappointment. You see? Like, that's the problem. And I've seen this in action, unfortunately, in many product. We can talk about few product that try to be delightful, but in some situation turns out to be, unfortunately, more disappointing than [laughs] delightful. And I brought two example to share with you today.

3. 4:58 – 11:04

   When Delight Goes Wrong: Apple Summary Disaster

   1. AGAakash Gupta4:58

      Let's take a look.

   2. NCNesrine Changuel4:58

      Yes. So the first one is actually that went viral, I think, on social media. People spoke about it's this, uh, Apple Message AI summary. So of course, the idea was, like when you receive a long message on your phone, then you get like a short two-sentences summary, and that's supposed to reduce friction for you and make it easier for you. However, there are situation where summary doesn't make sense at all, and I'm taking this screenshot because, like, this post went viral on LinkedIn and X and a lot of social media, and it's a real situation that someone get a long message from his girlfriend saying that she's leaving and she's quitting and she wanna take her belonging, and it's actually a very long m- message with a lot of explanation. But if you see the message, how it went and came as a summary, like, "No longer in relationship. Wants belonging from the apartment." Like, was so cold. And, and funny enough, it was his birthday. I mean, that- that's, that's, that's why, like... That's exactly the opposite of delight. That's when you try to bring j- joy, but turns out to be disappointment. So there are moments where delight doesn't work if the emotions are not addressed exactly as, as they should be.That's the first example

   3. AGAakash Gupta6:09

      That's crazy. Like, this is like [laughs] AI gone rogue, right? So-

   4. NCNesrine Changuel6:13

      Yeah

   5. AGAakash Gupta6:13

      ... and it's very hard to predict as a product manager that, you know, you might have created your eval test suite of 200, but you didn't create the one about breakup messages and just being super sensitive there, and all of a sudden this is out there in the wild. And so this is the type of problem people trying to engineer delight have to really work around.

   6. NCNesrine Changuel6:31

      Yes. So that's actually something I did a lot as a PM, is to look at corner cases, because we don't wanna have bad press. We don't wanna hurt users. I mean, it's better not to bring delight than to bring delight the wrong way. Uh, so for example, when I worked on Google Meet and we introduced filters, we made sure that it worked on all skin tones. And there have been one skin tone that it didn't work well, we did not ship the feature because we don't wanna hurt even like 0.01% of the population. That won't be aligned with the value of the product, and that will not be delightful because it's not aligned with our values. So that's, that's an interesting, uh, case. The other case I wanted to bring is actually a real story from one of my best friend who actually shared this story with me, and we are all user of WhatsApp in a way or another. And she actually... It happens that she lost her brother quite recently, and she was scrolling some messages on WhatsApp and found out there is a, a picture of her brother holding her baby, like, like her six-month baby at the time. So she clicked on the picture, and she couldn't get the picture, and instead she got this, like a very similar message to this saying like, "This picture is no longer available. Ask John to resend it." You know this kind of... The fact that "Ask John to resend it" in that grief moment was the, the worst message she said, like, "I could even receive." She said like, "I was willing to not use WhatsApp anymore." Like, I'm taking this screenshot. It's a real one, like for also the same for if you get an audio message and you wanna re-listen to it. So sometime it's about choosing the wording so you make sure that it's appropriate for all cases and all situations. [laughs]

   7. AGAakash Gupta8:13

      That's absolutely wild. Yeah. I think that, um, this is only getting tougher with AI features.

   8. NCNesrine Changuel8:18

      Yes. So here's the thing. AI is making a lot of progress when it comes to functionality. And remember, I said something in the beginning that when we build products, we are supposed to meet both dimension, the functional needs of our users, but also the emotional needs of our users. And if we only focus on the functional part because AI is allowing to progress so fast in developing functional features, then we... there is a risk, and I see it as a trap, that we ignore a little bit the emotional need and we become like just functional product, and that's the worst case that we don't wanna fall into. So it's doesn't mean that we, we... I mean, we should not work with AI the way it is today. But in the opposite, we need to train AI to be better at addressing emotional needs, and we see quite nice products like succeeding in doing it. The, the imp- the most important thing, and that's what why I wanna talk about this inclusiveness, is to ask your- yourself the following question: Is it inclusive enough? Is there any corner cases that has not been addressed? And if not, how can I train my agent, how can I train my machines to make sure that I am experiencing most of the cases to avoid whatever bad harm might happen out of that?

   9. AGAakash Gupta9:41

      I think you had shared with me an interesting example from Deliveroo around this.

   10. NCNesrine Changuel9:45

       Yes. Yes. Because that's an interesting case as well, since we're talking about the bad corner cases, and that's, uh, something that just happened last year. So I'm based in Paris, and on Mother's Day, uh, Deliveroo tried to do a delightful campaign. So what they did, and these are real screenshot by the way, they sent a notification on all like a user's mobile, and the notification, as you can see, look exactly like a missed call. So this is written in French. It says like, "Appel Manqué," which means it literally missed call from your mom. And so again, when you click on this, you're supposed to get like, "Hey, it's Mother's Day. Think about your mother. Send her flower," blah, blah. I mean, we can help you doing that. That's what, what the campaign is all about. But again, this is something that had the worst press ever because a lot of people felt hurt. And not everyone can feel the joy out of this supposed to be delightful moment. Some of them felt weird, some other felt grief, some other felt sorrow. And so again, this is a, a pure example when delight ca- can go wrong if it's not addressing all cases and all corner examples.

4. 11:04 – 15:55

   ChatGPT's Emotional Connection

   1. AGAakash Gupta11:04

      I think the delight challenge around corner cases is perhaps hardest for something like ChatGPT, right? It needs to succeed in every single corner case. What is ChatGPT's success really about? Is it about delight? What makes ChatGPT so successful?

   2. NCNesrine Changuel11:19

      So if we talk about ChatGPT, ChatGPT is definitely one of the product now that is used by most people around. Like, again, we, we might not maybe ig- all agree on how it's used. Some are using it more like a, a search engine, and other they are using it more as a, a company. And I like this concept of I'm using ChatGPT as a company or like a co-writer or a co-worker or... You see the point? So I've been talking a lot with, with many of my friends and, and ex-colleagues about how are they using ChatGPT, and I'm realizing that a lot of my friends are paying subscription to ChatGPT, not for the functional part, but for the fact that they are feeling less lonely with, with the products. Like, especially like I personally very recently moved from being a full-time employee in very well, uh, established organization to working by myself, and having ChatGPT on my side honor that need of creating, uh, that company feeling and feeling less lonely aspect. So that's one part.Because what, I mean, the, again, the set of emotion is not necessarily the same for all products. I mean, when we talk about Spotify, the set of emotion that I'm looking for while using Spotify is definitely not the same set of emotion that I might be looking for while using ChatGPT. So it's really important whatever product you are building to identify what set of emotions you want to feel and build toward achieving those, uh, those emotions.

   3. AGAakash Gupta12:58

      That was great. So in the case of ChatGPT, how do we make sure that we achieve that sense of belonging, that sense of company into the product?

   4. NCNesrine Changuel13:06

      So here's the thing. We as human being have some core value, and we have some core needs, and these needs, of course, we, we are doing our best to honor those needs. And one of the needs that is very evident, and it's got even more proven during COVID time, is the fact that we wanna be closer human to human. So we wanna be, um, of course, in company. We, we want to be closer to other, uh, peers. And this is a concept that, uh, also can be very much integrated into tech products. Here is the thing. I can talk about, uh, a technique that I'm calli- calling humanization. What it means is that how can we build products that feels like it's a human? It's not necessarily a machine. What I mean by that is that asking your question, if my product was a hu- human being, how would the reaction be? How would the service would be? And then compare your product to that, to that level of service or that level of product. And I'm bringing here an example, uh, because it's a real conversation I had with the head of product, uh, back then, uh, from Dyson. And I asked Andy, like Andy, the head of product from Dyson, like, "Hey, how come that I love my vacuum cleaner? Like, it's a vacuum cleaner, and, uh, I feel proud of having it. I show it to my guests and friends, and how come?" And he, he shared an interesting story with me. He actually said, "We do not compare our vacuum cleaner to competitors. We do compare our robot to how it would have been done better if it was done by a human being." You see the point? Actually, he told me that if you hire someone to clean your house, you probably ask that person to cl- to start with a certain room, or you probably, uh, clean in a certain way. And they got inspired by this kind of recommendation system to add it into their robot. And the reality, Aakash, is that that's exactly what we did at Google Meet as well because when we, when I worked for Google Meet, we almost never compared Google Meet to Zoom or to Teams or whatever. But we compared Google Meet to how it would be better if we were all in the same room having the same meeting but, like, uh, in, in a human style. And if you do so, you raise the bar because that's exactly what our brain is, is so, uh, willing to have, and that's exactly what we want to have as well. So for example, we developed features like, uh, hand raise, or we developed features like emoji reactions. Like, these feature were born out of conversation like, "If my product was a human, how the experience could be better?"

   5. AGAakash Gupta15:53

      That's fascinating. Today's

5. 15:55 – 17:42

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   1. AGAakash Gupta15:55

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6. 17:42 – 24:13

   Humanization: Compare to Human Service

   1. AGAakash Gupta17:42

      So they're really bringing that humanization into the feature development process so that you're focusing on the human element instead of the competati- competitive element. Are there specific variables or types of emotions or ways people should be thinking about bringing humanization into their product?

   2. NCNesrine Changuel17:59

      Yes. And again, it's not a bucket of emotions. I think it depend a lot on the product you are developing. Again, I mean, we spoke about the example of Spotify earlier. The set of emotion that you are looking for is definitely not the same set of emotions that you might expect out of a product like Teams or like Miro or Atlassian or whatever. So what I can highlight here is that, and that's something that I've seen from coaching a lot of organizations, like, people not necessarily, don't necessarily want to agree or to feel agreed with. However, they value very muchFeeling seen, heard, and valued, right? So if your product can allow them to have this kind of set of feeling, I wanna feel more heard, I wanna feel more seen, or I wanna feel valued through my work. Maybe I wanna feel like a better facilitator. I wanna feel like a better leader. I wanna feel like a better than the frauder, for example. If I have a product against that, then that's an interesting set of product that can bring that product to humanization style. And the best example I can bring here is, for example, the Spotify AI DJ. Like, um, this is a, a very interesting project by the way. It's been like now growing, uh, in many countries. Like it started from the UK and now it's available in so many, uh, company, and, uh, countries. Sorry. But the beauty of this, uh, specific product is that it adapts the way how it speaks to the user based on what type of playlist you wanna listen to, what ti- what time in the day you are, uh, trying to listen to that playlist. Also what kind of mood are you in? And this is again, very much aligned with the set of, uh, emotional feeling heard and feeling seen. So, and, and I see a lot of company trying to navigate through these two set of emotions nowadays.

   3. AGAakash Gupta20:03

      And you can access this AI DJ through ChatGPT?

   4. NCNesrine Changuel20:06

      Oh, uh, actually, this is very new. Uh, what I've seen very recently, and that's, um, I think a, a week ago that I've seen Gustav, the new president of Spotify, talking about the integration of Spotify with ChatGPT. And the interesting part was not only the integration. Let me be honest with you. I was very interested by the text in the message, the, the post itself. So Gustav didn't sound like we integrated Spotify into ChatGPT. He said, "If you want to get a playlist from ChatGPT, or if you have a set of emotion you wanna honor, now you can get them." So now you see leaders of top companies talking about emotion in their way of communicating around their product and their features. It's very clear that, I mean, emotion was part of the text, was part of the marketing campaign because we value and we see clear connection between product success and honoring users' emotion in the product.

   5. AGAakash Gupta21:08

      So when ChatGPT is thinking about engineering delight, and it's thinking about it, you know, we've already said don't think about it too much from a competitive lens. Think about it more from a humanistic lens. But you're living in a competitive marketplace versus a Claude or something like that. Are these integrations, are these good factors that a PM should be considering good tactics to potentially build more delight into their product and differentiate from the competition like Claude?

   6. NCNesrine Changuel21:32

      From my perspective, and I've seen this working both for the product I've been building, but also in so many other products, competition is very easy if we compete on the functional side only. I mean, if you have a product that is brilliantly engineered and users are using it, tomorrow if they find another product that gives them the same set of functionality, users will feel very easily... I mean, they, they, there's no attachment. They can easily move to the new product, especially if you offer them like a lower price. However, here is the secret ingredient that product or successful product use to create loyalty. It's about creating that emotional connection. If you invest in creating that emotional connection, it w- it will take time, by the way. It's not a feature. It's not two features. It's a relationship that you need to build, and you need to build from the start, by the way, because you wanna gain the trust, you wanna gain the confidence, and you wanna gain the proudness as well because you wanna make sure that users are proud enough to tell the world. So if you invest in this emotional connection, then it's much, much harder for a user to move to competitor. And that's why like I really emphasize on the fact that delight is a lens of differentiation. It's a lens for growth. It is a driver for standing out and having a longer relationship with the users. And by the way, uh, I wanna highlight something, um, maybe interesting for our audience here that there've been recently quite interesting researches, and this research has been conducted by giant like Capgemini, Deloitte, Harvard Business Review, McKinsey. Actually, they all studied the same thing. They studied the impact of emotional connection on product adoption. And so out of this report, and I spent weeks trying to like, uh, compel and get the best out of this report, I realized that there is a consensus, and the consensus is saying that emotionally connected users are twice more likely to stay longer, twice more likely to recommend your product, and twice more likely to buy more product and services from you. So you are doubling revenue, retention, and referral just with the ingredient of emotional connection. And by the way, do you know what they are comparing these numbers to? They are comparing them to highly satisfied users. So the two buckets are highly satisfied users and emotionally connected users. So you see the potential by investing into this area.

   7. AGAakash Gupta24:05

      I think that, uh, delight has to be one of the most important factors for differentiation for any product builder out there, and it's about thinking about both

7. 24:13 – 27:32

   Google Meet's Delight Team & AI Translator

   1. AGAakash Gupta24:13

      the small and the big investments. Here we see, I would say what would be like maybe a little bit of a smaller investment where you just integrate with a delight feature that Spotify has had. But as you stack up these delightful experiences, that's how you create differentiation. And if we look at the monthly active users of a Claude versus a ChatGPT, ChatGPT now crossing eight hundred million. Claude still stuck well below a hundred million. Being first mover helps ChatGPT, but all these elements of delight, all the consistent shipping they're doing also I think are playing a really important role, and I love how you're highlighting that here. Do you have any other examples that would really help illustrate how to stack in these competitive vectors of different delight?

   2. NCNesrine Changuel24:50

      Yeah. I mean, the, the second example I have is, uh, an example of a product that is very close to my heart, which is Google Meet. Uh, I've been working in building product, uh, like Google Meet for, for years, and I see how much value is putting into like a product like Meet. And, and by the way, maybe what people don't necessarily know about Google Meet is that Google invests so heavily into delight that they create delight teams. Like I have been the PM for the delight team in Google Meet.

   3. AGAakash Gupta25:19

      Wow.

   4. NCNesrine Changuel25:19

      And it's not unique for Google Meet. Like, uh, it's also the case for Google Search, for Chrome, and for most of the Google products. So at Google Meet, our-... mission was to make sure that we create the most delightful experience. And so when I left Google Meet, this feature got shipped, uh, by my ex-team, I would say. And they shipped the Google Meet translator, which is powered by AI, of course. So what is beautiful about this feature is not only about translation. I mean, translation is definitely not a new technology. It's about featuring your own voice, and even integrating your own emotion in the way how your speech is translated. And that, for me, is the power of this tool. Because, like, translation, as I said, uh, itself is not a new technology. But integrating your own emotion and your tone and your voice into the translation make you feel present, make you feel connected, and suddenly even make you feel surprised about yourself speaking another language.

   5. AGAakash Gupta26:21

      I love that example. So as I was reading your book, thank you so much for writing this, I think one of the coolest resources you put in here was that there were three types of delight. Can you walk us through those and how those might relate to AI products?

   6. NCNesrine Changuel26:36

      Yes. So here's the thing. Again, we always get back to this concept of every product is created for two reasons: for functional reasons and for emotional reasons. If the feature you are building is only solving for a functional reason, there is no emotion into it, then it belongs to this category that I call the low delight. If your feature is only solving for an emotional need, and there is definitely no functional need into it, then it is a surface delight. Think about this confetti thing or this like, uh, Easter eggs that we see nowadays in some products, or even the emojis in Slack or the emojis in ChatGPT as well in order to add this tone and the fun effect in the, in the output. And then the third category is what I call the deep delight, and that's when functionality meets emotion. And that's when we create products that, uh, are,

8. 27:32 – 36:19

   3 Types of Delight: Low, Surface, Deep

   1. NCNesrine Changuel27:32

      like, blending the two dimension together. So let's maybe go through some examples so we understand a little bit more these categories. I think the low delight category is very easy to understand. That's what most people are doing nowadays.

   2. AGAakash Gupta27:44

      [laughs]

   3. NCNesrine Changuel27:44

      Like, we are building features that work, and that's what we want. Now, the surface delight is actually something, for example, just happened to me a few weeks ago. It was my birthday, and on my birthday, my Apple Watch just popped up some balloons and some, uh, interesting confetti saying happy birthday in the screen. Is there any functional need for that? Maybe not. Same for Wrapped, by the way, and I'm gonna surprise you now because a feature like Spotify Wrapped, which you get, like, this retrospective toward the end of the year-

   4. AGAakash Gupta28:13

      Yeah

   5. NCNesrine Changuel28:13

      ... there is no functional reason for having Wrapped. It's all about making you feel cool so that you can share it with your friends. And, uh, these kind of feature might sometime have a lot of positive impact on the business and the product because, like, feature like Wrapped had a huge impact on the app downloads. Just Wrapped by itself had a huge impact on the app download. Uh, I wanna also, since we're talking about Spotify, I wanna highlight an interesting feature, and I was talking to, uh, the head of product who actually came up with this feature on Spotify, which is when it's, uh, season... Like, these are seasonal features on Spotify. It turns the progress bar into lighting when it was Diwali time. So when Spotify was trying to grow, uh, in, in India, uh, we tried, like, to, to make the product feel a little bit more local and so, um, like, Indian users might feel, like, more connected to the product. So when it was Diwali, we just slightly just turned the progress bar from a regular dot, like the green dot, into the twinkling light. And this feature by itself, like, I remember I had this very interesting conversation with the h- head of product who came with this idea, told me, like, it went viral in India. Everyone was talking like, "Hey, we need to download Spotify to see this." It's not about listening to the music. It's about I wanna see the progress bar turning into this twinkling light. So that's why I'm not... Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that surface delight is not interesting. It is important for the brand and the personality of the product. It's just not the unique and the only delight that will bring growth. It has to be, like, addressed with some, uh, some control, I would say.

   6. AGAakash Gupta29:58

      Hmm. And then Diwali, it seems like really is hitting at what Indians, like, feel their pride. And so it's something about really understanding your users and not just, you know, sprinkling some random delight on there, but getting to something they're really gonna associate with.

   7. NCNesrine Changuel30:15

      Yeah. I mean, uh, let me... I mean, I usually use seasonality as a great driver for delight. Let me explain. Again, when I worked for Google Meet, we ha- we introduced background replace. Uh, that was COVID time when we quickly realized that, hey, most of people are moving from having, like, meetings in offices and classrooms and to 100% remote. And those same people started to realize that they wanna protect their privacy. They wanna protect their, um, of course, their, their private life. And so we quickly introduced background replace. And again, it might sound, like, obvious nowadays, but at that time, the need was not that much clarified. It got clarified through COVID. And so we introduced background replace with a static image. And then we started introducing, like, a seasonal, uh, background. So when it was Christmas, we, uh, introduced Christmas background for a certain period of time, like few weeks. When it was Diwali, we introduced Diwali background. When it was Ramadan, we introduced Ramadan background. The idea is that we wanna surprise our users in a seasonal but also in a personal way. Uh, and again, the risk is that you are not inclusive enough, so you now wanna make sure that you're not excluding some people and only, like, addressing some people's value. So we try to be as much diverse as we can. So we even did some Olympic-themed background when it was, like, Olympic game. The idea, again, is, like, to surprise our users positively but also in a continuous way to avoid this habituation effect. The habituation effect is when you see something, you get surprised the first time, but then you're not surprised anymore. And in order to maintain delight, we wanted to do this in a continuous and repetitive way. And, and that's also another example that we see from the progress bar in Spotify.

   8. AGAakash Gupta32:05

      Very, very interesting. So what does it look like if you're trying to engineer deep delight?

   9. NCNesrine Changuel32:10

      So deep delight now is a different aspect. Is- it's not even comparable to the surface delight. The surface delight, I think it's even well understood from designers. Designers are really good at understanding surface delight. They will help you into getting these shiny moments. Uh, however, before we move to deep delight, I wanna make sure thatEven surface delight has to be there for a reason. I mean, it's not about, "Hey, I can shake my phone and you can get confetti or a snowflake or whatever." You need to ask yourself, "What value am I honoring? What emotional need am I honoring?" Like think about Diwali as we spoke, et cetera. So if there is a value for the user or the business, do it. If there's no value, just for the fun, skip. Now, let's move to the deep delight. Deep delight now is when you're building a functional feature, like you are already like thinking about improving your functionality. Think about how can I do this in a way that I integrate my user's emotion? And let me be, let me give you an example. Uh, I will give two example. The first one is from my time working for Google Chrome. When I joined Google Chrome, actually I worked on one of the toughest, I would say, problem on Chrome, which is managing tabs.

   10. AGAakash Gupta33:26

       Yeah.

   11. NCNesrine Changuel33:26

       So, uh, I know, we know that a lot of our users do have many tabs open. And so of course from a functional perspective, that's not ideal. You end up having a product that is heavier, like, uh, from a performance per- perspective it's not that great. From a memory perspective it's not what you want, et cetera. So we wanted to encourage our users to close their tab. But at the same time, we wanted also our user to enjoy their experiencing navigating through their tabs. So h- what's, w- what's the solutions? Some of the solution we explored is like what if we close tabs on their behalf? And we quickly realized that that's the worst, that's the worst, worst solution you can bring. Why? Because when we interviewed our users, we do, we did it, by the way, on a very repetitive way. We realized that there is a relationship between users and tab. It's not like just a connection, it's a relationship. Some people would tell you, "Don't touch my tab." It's like in a very aggressive way. [laughs] So we quickly realized that, okay, that's not an area we're gonna get closer to. So how can we still help them without, uh, frustrating them or creating friction? While doing this investigation and user interview, we realized that also the number of open tabs create some confusion because some people will feel like ashamed when they show us their, uh, like, uh, their tab grid, and they will probably, like some of them apologize saying, "Hey, sorry, I usually don't have so many tabs opens." So all these insights turns out to be very useful. Like we wrote down what's, what's possible, what's not possible at all, what is a red line, and what's like the emotion, uh, uh, what's the provocation that we made out of this conversation. And we created a feature, by the way, that we called Inactive Tabs, it's available on, uh, on, uh, on iOS, Chrome iOS.

   12. AGAakash Gupta35:19

       Mm.

   13. NCNesrine Changuel35:20

       Uh, that meets this functional need, which is about like improving the performance, but at the same time honoring the user's emotion or the user's value. So Inactive Tabs is this possibility of grouping all tabs that have not been visited or opened for more than 21 day. And so they are grouped in this, uh, this group. And of course, users will see all tabs that have been opened over the last 21 day. And if they want to see their old tabs, and they rarely do, by the way, they just like care about them, but they will never go to, they know that they are there. So there is a connection of trust. There is a relation of trust and confidence that we didn't want to touch at all. So that's the example I personally worked on, and I see it as a pure example of deep delight because we try to like, uh, compress thumbnails and make the, the end inactive tabs like taking less memory and space, but at the same time improve the experience and honor the user's

9. 36:19 – 38:18

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   1. NCNesrine Changuel36:19

      needs.

   2. AGAakash Gupta36:19

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   3. NCNesrine Changuel37:54

      Yeah. S- same. Uh, for me, this is another great example of deep delight because it's about, again, there is a functional part. Your functional part is y- I wanna help you write, uh, your message. I want... I mean, the functional side isMaking you answer your email or sending, uh, emails. But at the same time, I'm making you feel less stressed. I'm making you feel less, uh,

10. 38:18 – 42:03

    Gmail Smart Compose: Deep Delight Example

    1. NCNesrine Changuel38:18

       uh, frustrated as well, or even, like, making it feel easier for you. So you see, I already used at least three time the term making you feel. Uh, why? Because it's not only about making you write an email, it's making you write an email in the easiest but also in the relaxed way. So for me, it's another example of deep delight that, uh, could meet this category.

    2. AGAakash Gupta38:42

       I think, uh, two other examples that people should really pay attention to. So one is, uh, Claude Code. So I think that they're getting their deep delight and they're winning, right, in this developer market against a GitHub Copilot or a ChatGPT Codex, where they infusing similar things like auto-complete, like a Gmail Smart Compose, but they're adding on delight. Like, they have these crazy verbs every time it working.

    3. NCNesrine Changuel39:04

       Mm.

    4. AGAakash Gupta39:04

       It's like meandering or bamboozling or pontificating or whatever different interesting verbs that they're putting in there. And similarly, Cursor. So we're seeing through these spaces in AI products like Cursor where you just hit Tab and it feels like magic as a coder, that delight and specifically deep delight is the way to win for AI products. I think it's probably one of the most important lessons out there. But a lot of our examples so far have really been in the B2C realm, people could say. Could you give us some examples in B2B?

    5. NCNesrine Changuel39:37

       Yes. So I, I love, by the way, the example you brought from the AI world, and I just wanna complement one more thing 'cause, uh, over the weekend I've been trying to prototype with Lovable. And again, this is one of those product that everyone start to know [laughs] nowadays. I mean, if you don't know Lovable, it's like you feel like so much behind. And I loved the time I spent on Lovable. The reason is not only the output I get or the, the product I managed to prototype, it's the sense of achievement out of four hours of work. This is a very rare, like, um, sentiment or feeling I usually, like, get. Like, I was so much impressed not only by the outcome but also of, of the, that sense of achievement, which is again, one of our emotional needs is to wanna, wanna feel like, uh, uh, accomplishing and valued, and that's, that's an interesting part. I just wanna complement what you said about. Now, when it comes to B2B or B2C, I just wanna highlight one thing here, is like when, when we talk about honoring emotional needs, I rarely distinguish between B2C and B2B. Uh, I mostly talk about B2H, which is the business to human. Because if the user is used by a human being toward the end, uh, then they need their emotion or they deserve their emotion to be honored. So that's the concept. That's the mindset I usually do. Now, I also agree with you. Most of the product I worked on are more toward B2C like Spotify, Skype, Google Meet. Even if like for Google Meet we also address the enterprise side, and we brought a lot of delight by the way in the enterprise side. But the reality is that when I started writing my book, Product Delight book, I interviewed a lot of people from the B2B space in order to get their opinion toward what it makes to build delightful products. So I interviewed people like from Intuit, Atlassian, Miro, Slack. The point was like, "Hey, you are... I'm considering you as delightful product. How did you do?" And what I realized that all those product do intergate- integrate the principle of delight, they just integrate them in different ways. So for example, let me give you an example. When I spoke with, uh, some product leaders from Dropbox, I realized that they had a product value called Cupcake. When I spoke to people from Snowflake, which is a pure tech company,

11. 42:03 – 45:50

    B2B Delight: Jira & the "Superhero" Value

    1. NCNesrine Changuel42:03

       I realized that they had a value called Superhero. They wanna make their user feel like superhero, so that's the, that's the point. And I quickly realized that they have more or less the same goal in order to achieve this excellence and this human connection. They just call it differently, a- and that's the beauty part. So whether B2B or B2C, we need to take or at least think about it the same way. The big difference though, and that's what I wanna highlight, is again, it's not the s- same set of emotions. So if you're working toward building a B2B product, the set of emotion that you want your user to feel is definitely something worth investigating and trying to understand. I was talking the other day with a heavy user of Miro, and she told me something quite interesting. She said, "Actually, what I love about using Miro is that I feel like I'm a better facilitator. I feel like I'm a better leader." And she didn't said like, "I can use board," or, "I can move cards," or whatever. She said like, "I feel like I can do my job better. I can feel, uh, as a better leader." And, and that's an interesting set of emotion in the B2B space to investigate. I'm not saying it is the set of emotion. It's one of them that you might consider others as well.

    2. AGAakash Gupta43:22

       Mm. So I think that there's also this element where if you're gonna delight the end user, you're gonna delight the person who wants it, you're gonna create a lot more lock-in for those enterprise contracts. Eventually, those enterprise contracts might... You might get more of them because the user talks to the buyer or the user is the same as the buyer-

    3. NCNesrine Changuel43:39

       Yeah

    4. AGAakash Gupta43:39

       ... or the buyer tries out the product as a user. So there's so many different ways where delight I feel like in a B2B context we shouldn't ignore it. I think that I've generally seen more PMs of delight like you were on gigantic consumer products, but there are probably some B2B products out there that could really use a delight PM and create it as their differentiation factor.

    5. NCNesrine Changuel43:59

       Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we see that as well. Like Atlassian recently released, uh, a blog post called The New Jira. I don't know if you've seen it. It's a long blog post-I mean, it's not that recent. It's like from a couple of months ago. And new Jira is actually the list of new features that was released out of the, like, the recent release of their Jira. And I went through all the lists, uh, and I tried to apply the delight model on all the features that they, uh, released. And I realized that almost 70%, really, like almost 70% of the new features that got listed in that new Jira blog post applies to the delight concept. And, and that's an ex- a g- great example to see, like, pure B2B company investing into delight. And the reason is because we, as users, are so much, um... We are interfering with so many B2B or B2C products that our expectation now is raising. Like, since we see delight in B2C, we also expect to see it in B2B. If I don't see it, then I will check if there's any other product where I can find more delight into it. So I agree that it's definitely a tool for differentiation, and it's definitely a tool for success as well.

    6. AGAakash Gupta45:17

       So if you're trying to decompose it into a model, which you have done in your book, what would that model be? What is the delight model, and how can you engineer delight?

    7. NCNesrine Changuel45:25

       So after ha- like, with my own m- experience, and also by interviewing a lot of leaders from different industry. By the way, like, I checked hardware industry, B2B industries, like tech industry, like, uh, GitHub or Snowflake. I mean, these are a company that I don't necessarily have big knowledge about how they develop their product, but I spent a lot of months, uh, interviewing them. Actually, I have a research background.

12. 45:50 – 48:23

    The Delight Model: 4-Step Process

    1. NCNesrine Changuel45:50

       Like, I did a PhD in my early days, so I put my researcher hat again, and I did my research to try to consolidate both my knowledge together with what I consider successful f- outside of my, my knowledge. And I ended up creating what I call the delight model. So delight model, I mean, I'm, I'm more calling it as a model because I see it more like a mental model. First of all, delight is a mental model. You need to be convinced-

    2. AGAakash Gupta46:15

       Mm

    3. NCNesrine Changuel46:15

       ... that you need to delight your customers. And here's the truth, Aakash. The reality is, like, now that I'm coaching companies and founders, I think and I see that most company and most founders agree that we need to delight our customers. They will tell you we should delight our customers. All of them. All industries confused. The only thing is that they don't necessarily know how to.

    4. AGAakash Gupta46:38

       Yeah.

    5. NCNesrine Changuel46:38

       So we agree on the goal. We just don't know necessarily how to. So that for me was an eye-opener and a revealer that we... I, I needed to put this into something actionable. I needed to put it into, like, something step by step that people can benefit from. So the delight model is a four-step, think about it as a model or a process, that works the following. The first step is about identifying users' motivators. The second step is about turning those motivators into real product opportunities. Once you identify those opportunities, you create solutions, and you categorize solutions into these different type of delights. And then the last step, which for me is fundamental and very necessary, is about validating delight. Why? Because we don't wanna get into that bad press and all the risks that we started the session with today. So these are three steps, or four steps, sorry, that operate into the opportunity space and the solution space. And if we follow them step by step, then we can guarantee at least that we can achieve this, uh, goal of delight.

    6. AGAakash Gupta47:43

       So I assume there's a lot of depth here that we could go into. Let's start with into identifying the users' motivators. What are the next level layers and techniques to do this well?

    7. NCNesrine Changuel47:55

       Yes. So it might be surprising, and a lot of time when I talk about this to leaders and founders, I surprise them the first time, but then they agree. The reality is that users use your product, but they not using it... They are not all using it for the same reason. So you think that you're serving them the product for a reason, but they are using it for different reasons.

    8. AGAakash Gupta48:19

       Mm.

    9. NCNesrine Changuel48:19

       And here's the thing. When you're building a new feature or a new product,

13. 48:23 – 55:05

    Motivational Segmentation

    1. NCNesrine Changuel48:23

       of course you have to start with segmenting your users. You need to start by, like, doing your personas and creating your personas to understand who they are. But what I see nowadays is that there's the different type of segmentation. There is the demographic segmentation. It's about the who they are. And there's a second type of segmentation, which is more about the behavioral segmentation, and that's a little bit better than the demographic segmentation. But the very best one is the motivational segmentation. It's the why. It's why your users are using your product. And you need to invest, and that's the very first step. If we skip that step, the rest will not match. We need to start by listing what motivate my users on the functional side and what motivate my users on the emotional side. Here an example. Like, when I build Spotify together with my team, we know that from a functional side, some people go to Spotify knowing exactly what album they wanna listen to. So they wanna search for a specific album. But there are also other users who have no idea what they wanna listen to. They go to Spotify to get inspired. So another need could be inspire me, or I wanna get inspired, whatever thing that you know about me, maybe my taste, my preferences. So these belong to the functional motivators. On the other side, a lot of people go to Spotify just because they wanna change their mood or because they wanna feel less lonely or they wanna feel more productive. So these are alsoArea, like let's call them emotional motivators that need to be identified. Why? Because when you build the feature later on in the process, you wanna blend them together to create that emotional connections. So for me, that's the most important part. It's about identifying the motivators, but also from the functional sides, but not only. Please not only, because most of people I spoke with are really good at identifying functional motivators. Think about the emotional motivators of your users, and if you manage to get them right. It's a continuous process, by the way. It's not like a one time and then I'm done with my motivators. Every time you have an opportunity to speak with your users, try to ask this question like, "Walk me through, uh, the journey of using the product and describe how you feel." Even if you don't ask that question, like, take notes as the example of Google Chrome. This frustration feeling, this shame feeling, this relationship feeling. Address that and write them down.

    2. AGAakash Gupta51:01

       What are some of the motivational segmentations we could think of for a product like Spotify?

    3. NCNesrine Changuel51:07

       So usually when we talk about functional motivators, they can belong into these three type of category. It's either solving a problem, or it's about creating efficiency, or it could be related to ease of use. So if the feature is related to ease of use, efficiency or solving a specific problem, then that belongs to still like this bucket of functional motivators. However, on the emotional motivators, uh, and that's something that I love talking about. There is two bucket. There's the personal emotional motivators and there's the social emotional motivators. Let me explain. The personal emotional motivators is how users want to feel while using the product. The social m- m- uh, emotional motivators is how user want others to feel about them while using the product.

    4. AGAakash Gupta51:57

       Mm.

    5. NCNesrine Changuel51:58

       You see the difference?

    6. AGAakash Gupta51:59

       Yeah.

    7. NCNesrine Changuel51:59

       So for example, a lot of people would go to Spotify because they wanna feel part of the vibe. They wanna feel part of the community. They wanna... I mean, this is a sense of proudness. It's a sense of community that most of the successful company, by the way, build. Like if you think about company like Slack, it's not only the product that is successful, it's the community. Like people are bringing in their knowledge. They are bringing in their bots and their, their, their experience into the community. And, and the same for Spotify, like we developed a feature like Jam. It's the possibility to, to listen to music with others. It's the collaborative playlist, which is one of the most successful feature by the way, because it give you that sense of belonging, give you that sense of connection. And, uh, I'm gonna share with you a, a concrete example by the way, 'cause I truly believe that for a product to succeed, there's a true connection between success and the sense of proudness. Like remember this Dyson thing I told you, like I'm proud of showing my vacuum cleaner. It might feel weird, but it's so true because the other day I was actually, uh, coaching a founder of a company. The company is about helping music curator to get, um, like artist, sorry, like music artist get connected with curator in order to get known in the music space and like get, uh, some, some advertisement and some promotion. And so when I asked the founder like how things are going, et cetera, and I asked the following question. I said, "Hey, do you think your users," I mean these artists who's getting your service, "are proud to use your product?" And he actually said, "I, I don't think they are. I don't think they are proud because if they are using my product, they might feel like they are little. They are not big artists. They need our help in order to get known." And we stopped there, and then two weeks later he came to me and said, "Hey Nesrine, we really, really need to work on this particular point. We need to shift our strategy toward how can we make our users proud enough to tell the world, to tell other artists." 'Cause you cannot play the game by yourself. You need to get the help of your users who will be proud and delighted telling others to bring you more users.

    8. AGAakash Gupta54:24

       Hmm. Yeah. I've noticed that in my own business [laughs] for the newsletter and podcast. That's the absolute only way to grow sustainably, especially at scale. So important. So you put together this delight grid that helps us walk through these. Can you walk us through that?

    9. NCNesrine Changuel54:37

       Yes. So delight grid is another tool that I'm also like describing very well in the book, and it's why, by the way, I created this delight grid. It's about helping teams who still wonder like, "Is my feature delightful? Am I into the delight, uh, surface delight or surface delight? Am I into the deep delight?" I created what I call this delight grid. And the best way to think about delight grid is to use the motivators that we

14. 55:05 – 1:02:39

    The Delight Grid & 50/40/10 Rule

    1. NCNesrine Changuel55:05

       just spoke about. So remember, I spoke about functional motivators and emotional motivators. All you have to go, to do is to go to your grid and write your motivators in the grid. So you see here on the vertical side you have the functional motivators. On the horizontal side you have all the emotional motivators. Why do we do that? Because once this is done, you're gonna go and place your ideas from the backlog, and if a feature is only solving for functional motivators, then it belongs to the low delight category. If the feature is, uh, solving only for an emotional motivators, then it belongs to the surface delight. And, um, we spoke of that. And then the rest is about deep delight.

    2. AGAakash Gupta55:49

       Mm.

    3. NCNesrine Changuel55:49

       And what I love about-The Delight Grid, it's not only a categorization tool. It's a tool that will force you that every feature you're building in the product is connected to a motivator. I mean, if you can't map it in the grid, it's probably not something that need to be there at all. And, and I did this workshop with a lot of organization where we try, like, to categorize their features in the Delight Grid, and we end up having, like, three, four features that we are not at all able to map them. It's like, okay, if the user is not at all asking for it and there is no motivator for it, do you think it's really necessary to build it? And it's usually a great food for thought to think whether it's really needed or not.

    4. AGAakash Gupta56:35

       Can you give us an example? Maybe walk us through the grid with an example product.

    5. NCNesrine Changuel56:39

       Yes. Uh, since we spoke about Spotify, maybe we can continue talking about Spotify. So when I worked for Spotify, features like... Uh, by the way, my team helped developing, um, uh, video podcasts. So we introduced video podcasts into Spotify. We also introduced, like, uh, lossless, which is, uh, the, uh, the ability to stream music in uncompressed music. Those features are usually more toward the low delight category, so we would bucket them into low delight. However, on the other side, features like the progress bar that turns into light or the wrapped feature would be more into the emotion motivators because it's making you feel connected, it's making you feel immersed. So these are some emotion motivators that you're honoring through these features. On the other side, feature like Jam or Discover Weekly, by the way, it's an interesting example to talk about here, are more into the deep delight because it's about helping you, uh, find, like, a new track or getting more inspired by a new playlist while listening with others. There's a sense of connection. There's a sense of belonging. There is a deep level of personalization in Discover Weekly, for example. So this is, this is maybe an example where you can think about the Delight Grid in action at Spotify. But let me maybe add one more thing here. Since we're talking about Delight Grid, I usually... I wanna be very clear. I'm not here to say that it's not because it's called low delight that we should not invest in low delight, and here is my clarification. Uh, I ask a- I get asked a lot of time about, "Hey, how do we prioritize between this low delight versus deep delight and, and surface delight?" So I came with this rule that I'm calling the 50/40/10. The 50/40/10 is a recommendation. Think about it as a recommendation where I recommend your backlog or your roadmap to look like the following: 50% would be, would be more for low delight, 40% for deep delight, and only 10% for surface delight. You might be surprised me telling you 50% of your roadmap should be low delight, but it's actually so necessary. I mean, your product exists for a reason, and this reason need to be there and need to function the right way. Now, if you can allocate 50% of the rest of your backlog toward the surface delight and deep delight, then you're gonna win. That's what will make you different, and that's the pure delight.

    6. AGAakash Gupta59:10

       I love this framework because there's a big weighting towards deep delight here. It's like you might have some surface delight. We talked about things like, that are good examples of that, but you... The more weighting you have towards deep delight, the higher returns you're gonna get, the better retention you're gonna see, the better word of mouth you're gonna see.

    7. NCNesrine Changuel59:27

       Yeah, absolutely.

    8. AGAakash Gupta59:28

       This is fascinating. We've been talking a lot about AI products. How would ChatGPT map to the Delight Grid?

    9. NCNesrine Changuel59:34

       Yeah. I think independently of the product, again, it all come to the fact that we need to identify what motivate users, both functional side and emotional sides. It applies to hardware, software, AI. By the way, um, the way how I see AI is more like an ingredient. Like technology, s- uh, features, they're all ingredient toward human connection. And so AI is one of the ingredient that we can, of course, well use or not well use, depending on the, the purpose, to achieve human connection. And if we wanna talk about ChatGPT, of course, it's a great example 'cause it's, uh, one of those great example that we feel a certain human connection between us and the product. And so if we try to map it to the Delight Grid, uh, I see clearly three buckets into how we are getting value out of ChatGPT. The first value belongs to this low delight. It's more about the how accurate are the answers. Uh, I mean, also the quality of the answers, the speed of the answer. Um, I mean, this is all related to the low delight category. The second category, which is the surface delight, might be much more related to the tone and the warmth that you get out of the, the style and the voice if you're using, like, a voice, uh, command. It's, it's also about these emojis that might be added. It's about, uh, again, how the, uh, you're getting the answer. It's about this, uh, m- emotional connection there. And the deep delight comes more from create- like combining those two together so that you feel like a, the, the sense of belonging and the sense of connection with the product. So think about, for example, uh, so if you get like... O- one of the things that I love most about ChatGPT is that the fact that I'm using it over time, and the more I use it, the more the, the product get to know me, and the better the answers get customized and personalized to what I'm looking for. So the fact that I'm getting answers aligned with what I'm looking for and aligned to what I value is an example of deep delight because the quality combined with how I want to get them is an example of deep delight. So-You see, we're not talking about confetti here at all. We're not even talking about design. We are talking about how these three can be combined together to create the best experience.

    10. AGAakash Gupta1:02:03

        So one more thing that you had put in the book that was a very interesting tool that I thought I personally will take away and use is the delight checklist. Can you walk us through that?

    11. NCNesrine Changuel1:02:12

        Yes. So the delight checklist is a tool that comes more toward the fourth step of the process. So when we are done with, like, generating ideas, categorizing idea, understanding how much of them is low delight, surface delight, deep delight, then comes the time when you're about to start building them to check like, is it really delightful? Is it bringing me the value that I want to bring to the customer, to the user, and to the

15. 1:02:39 – 1:12:42

    The Delight Checklist: 10 Questions

    1. NCNesrine Changuel1:02:39

       business? So the delight checklist, think about it as a guideline that you take every feature and ask the following questions. So it's not only a list of category, it's a list of questions as well. So the first two, which for me are really important, is like, is this delightful feature bringing any value to the business and does it bring any value to the user? Because for me, delight is not an excuse to add confetti.

    2. AGAakash Gupta1:03:05

       [laughs]

    3. NCNesrine Changuel1:03:05

       It's about, again, aligning with business goals and, and KPIs and, and metrics. And also the same, I mean, we spoke about this example of confetti, and I would love to share an example since we talk about confetti here. It's like I'm ... I wanna share an example from Airbnb 'cause I'm an Airbnb user both as a guest but also as a host. And as a host I have a goal, and my goal is to make sure that I maintain my super host, uh, tag. Yeah. I mean, I work hard.

    4. AGAakash Gupta1:03:35

       Oh, okay.

    5. NCNesrine Changuel1:03:35

       I work hard to get that. I mean, for me it's an achievement and of course I depend on users' review. I depend on my quality of service, a lot of things. But, uh, Airbnb actually reassess my ability or to remain super host every three months. And you know what? Every three months when I am still a super host or I'm reevaluated to stay super host, the app turns into confetti. Again, this is surface delight, yes, but for me it's an interesting example because I feel like Airbnb is valuing the effort and recognizing the effort I've been putting into that goal. So I feel like the app is celebrating it with me. So confetti or not confetti, is it aligned with your business goal? Is it aligned with your user's goal? Those are the two, and the rest is like other, other guidance. Like for example, have you been investigating enough to get insight from your users? Have you collected motivator from your users and from your data? Uh, you can also check whether the feature is looks familiar or not. Uh, I, I really, uh, like this example because if you come up with something completely new, I mean, of course we are told that we love innovation, but we actually hate when it's completely new. Uh-

    6. AGAakash Gupta1:04:50

       Hmm

    7. NCNesrine Changuel1:04:50

       ... I mean, I see you surprised, so I will, uh, share a s- a story with you.

    8. AGAakash Gupta1:04:55

       [laughs]

    9. NCNesrine Changuel1:04:55

       A story you might even know about, which is, uh, the story behind Discover Weekly. So Discover Weekly turns out to be one of the most successful features Spotify. And do you know that Discover Weekly, the success of Spotify really came out of a bug?

    10. AGAakash Gupta1:05:12

        Really?

    11. NCNesrine Changuel1:05:12

        Because the real story behind Discover Weekly is that it was supposed to bring you only new track that you never listened to before. That's why it's called Discover. It's all about making you discover new tracks. And so when we ship at Discover Weekly the first time we checked metrics and we've seen that they are all successful, things are going so well, but two weeks later the engineers realize that there is a bug in the feature, and the bug is actually injecting some liked song from time to time into Discover Weekly. And we started to question, what the hell? This is not supposed to be that way. And so they fixed it. And do you know what happened when they fixed it? Absolutely. Things went down. And so that was an interesting moment to think like, hey, people love Discover Weekly because from time to time they found something familiar into it.

    12. AGAakash Gupta1:06:03

        Yeah.

    13. NCNesrine Changuel1:06:03

        But if it was completely new for them or unfamiliar, then it won't get that success. So inspired by that story, I put familiarity as an interesting point to check when you're building feature. Think about like even like Google Glasses didn't work the first time because we've never seen them before. However, nowadays, like when you see someone with a Apple, like the Apple Glasses or like the, um, those are like start to become more familiar and so more successful. So again, I don't think we have time to go through them all, but it's about making sure that it's feasible, it's inclusive. Again, this is really, really important. We sp- we started the session talking about it, and it's never enough to talk about inclusiveness when we talk about emotion. It should not be, uh, distractive. It's not about distraction. It should almost do not feel there. I mean, the m- most delightful features are those that you almost do not notice it. Uh, so, uh, if, if it should not interfere between the user and the product. It's about the experience, not the feeling. Uh, again, continuity. We spoke about habituation effect. Uh, do you have a plan to make this continuous? Do you have a plan to make this delight continuous or is it like a one-off and then you move away? And of course it's about measurability because people think that delight is not measurable. However, there are ways of assessing user satisfaction. There are way to measure user's happiness, and you need to align your delight metrics with your business metrics in order to make sure that you're serving for the right thing.

    14. AGAakash Gupta1:07:36

        We've been talking a lot about delight. We've shown people how through the delight grid they can create cl- delight. They've engineered it. What is anti-delight, the flip side of delight?

    15. NCNesrine Changuel1:07:46

        Actually, let me correct something here. Anti-delight is not the flip side of delight. It's not even the opposite of delight because here's the reality. The opposite of delight is disappointmentI mean, if you want to have your users not delighted, you're gonna get them disappointment. However, anti-delight is more like a deliberate technique that is sometime used deliberately by certain products. Uh, it could be in the design, it could be into the way how they're building product in order to give you a sense of the product, but not the full experience. Uh, so it's, it's sometime... It's used actually in a lot of products. Some of the example we can talk about here is like the, uh, if you're a freemium user at Spotify, you have a limited number of skips. It means that you can enjoy the feature for a certain time, but then I have to limit that experience for you so I can drive you toward the premium. So you're not delighted at that moment, but at the same time, you're getting the full experience or part of the full experience. And, and it's a bit risky, by the way, because you need to balance between giving you enough information and enough experience, but also not enough to, uh, encourage you to move to the next tier. We see this a lot in B2B product as well when I give you the experience for a certain time or for a certain seat, and then I ask you to pay for extra. So these are like a... Anti-delight, for me, is more a technique that forces users to, or encourage user, let's say, to move to a, to next plan.

    16. AGAakash Gupta1:09:21

        If you had to summarize, what are the things that PMs or founders miss when they're trying to create an engineered delight?

    17. NCNesrine Changuel1:09:27

        I think we, especially... Let me be transparent here. This emotional connection thing is not a new thing. I'm not the first one talking about emotional connection. It's even very well covered in design. It's very well covered in marketing. I mean, the best marketing campaign are the emotional ads. The best design is the emotional design. But here is the truth. I realized that, and I've been a product manager my- myself, like product managers and business people are not educated toward building delightful products, and that by itself creates a gap. Meaning that you have marketers building to, like, trying to aim for delight, designers aiming toward delight, and then business aiming for North Star metrics, revenues, OKRs, and metrics, and then that creates gap, that creates misalignment. So one of my biggest goal out of, like, evangelizing around delight or writing the book Product Delight was, number one, bringing this topic to the same level, like making these cross-functional people talk the same language and aim for the same goal. Uh, and that's by itself a huge step because if we make these people work together, then we can achieve that, that goal. So that's my first goal, and the second goal was to... Actually, we don't know how to. So the biggest mistake usually is when I don't know how to, I get back to my, like, original mistake or my, my habit, which is, okay, let's build feature. Let go fast. Let's go feature. And the other mistake I've seen is that people think that, okay, I will bring delight later. I mean, let me get it to the market. Let me assess users feeling, and then I will bring delight fe- later. I agree that you need to work on functionality first. I agree that your product need to function first. However, if you bring delight too late, you already built that perception, you already built that personality and that brand, and it's much harder to change it later. So I highly encourage people to think about delighting their customers as early in the process as, as later 'cause we might for- forgive for lack of functionality, and we spoke about, like, ChatGPT earlier as an example where we see, like, accuracy is, is a low delight, uh, category. And sometime we get inaccurate, uh, answers from ChatGPT, completely non-accurate, and we forgive ChatGPT. Why? For the rest of the experience. 'Cause don't aim for perfection of functionality. Bring in delight as early in the process as you can.

    18. AGAakash Gupta1:12:07

        Amazing. So we talked a lot about delight. I have to ask you this question about Google because you were a PM there. What are the biggest misconceptions people have about being a PM at Google?

    19. NCNesrine Changuel1:12:18

        Okay. So before, maybe I had that misconception myself. So before I joined Google, I thought that working for Google will be about having very clear, very structured processes, and we're gonna be v- very, like, strict about these steps and, and it will be very well managed. And as soon as I joined Google, I quickly realized

16. 1:12:42 – 1:18:45

    Leaving Google to Solopreneur

    1. NCNesrine Changuel1:12:42

       that it's definitely not about having a clear and structured process. It's about being able to navigate through chaos because there is chaos. I mean, there's absolutely no way for me to describe to you a single process how we build product at Google. It's a lot about back and forth. Of course, there are, like, strict rules about making sure that we do not violate, like, a legacy, privacy, security, inclusiveness. Of, of course, like, Google is very strict about those kind of things. But we, I mean, we allow ourself to go crazy, and it means if you wanna allow yourself to go crazy, it means that you're not gonna follow all the rules. And so, uh, maybe that's the biggest misconceptions about thinking that working, like building product for Google is, is about step-by-step process, but the reality is that about going back and forth and, and, and being comfortable with, with chaos 'cause it's chaos everywhere.

    2. AGAakash Gupta1:13:40

       I loved all the short stories you shared about Google, even just going back to the checklist that we talked about at the beginning for diversity and inclusion around these filters that we were putting, that you guys put into Google Meet. So there's so many interesting anecdotes you shared with us today about your time at Google. How in the world did you leave? What are you up to now? Why did you leave this job that people consider having golden handcuffs?

    3. NCNesrine Changuel1:14:04

       Okay. I usually sometime tell people in order to leave Google, you either have to be crazy or you have a great mission. [laughs] I don't think I'm crazy. At least I don't hope I'm crazy. But I, I really left Google with a very clear mission in mind. Like, having built product for over 15 years in, let's say, globally used and loved products, from Skype time, by the way, to Spotify, Google Meet, I started to acquire this concept of how to build successful products. And when I joined Google, I actually realized there is even a discipline called delight, and we know how to delight our customers, and most people don't know how to. So when I left, I was like, "This is really a mission I wanna bring to the world. This is what I wanna teach others about. This is one... What I wanna demystify," because unfortunately, it's very much seen as a buzzword. So when I left, I left with a lot of insights in my head, and my first step was to put that into a written format. So I spent most of the first months trying to, of course, interview, like put my hat of researcher back, you know, to consolidate the biggest knowledge, and then put that on paper, and I wrote Product Delight. So I was really excited to bring Product Delight to the world through f- few, um, weeks ago, 'cause now it's available on Amazon. And, um, what I do nowadays is actually I help organizations, uh, through coaching, but also, uh, training, 'cause I organize what I call Delight Days. So Delight Days is this like, uh, Delight workshop where we work together not only on understanding the concepts, but also get our hands dirty into building delightful features for their own products.

    4. AGAakash Gupta1:15:46

       So for the PMs daydreaming about a mission like yours that strong, I'm curious, what's the real talk here? And feel free to not share if you d- aren't comfortable, but, you know, how is life like post-Google? That's a really secure place. How big is the business as a solopreneur now?

    5. NCNesrine Changuel1:16:03

       I think from the beginning, in the very beginning, it came with a lot of uncertainty. I'm gonna lie to you if I say I, I left Google with a lot of confidence. Let me be transparent with you. When I left Google, it was the, the most terrifying decision I made in my life. Like, most of the experiences or, like, the, the jou- the career change I made so far are toward going to the best, like going from a product to another, trying to acquire more knowledge and more experience or better level, at least, like moving from a PM to senior PM or a leader. And when I moved away from Google with a such established role and company, it was a lot of uncertainties. Like, hey, now I'm getting into this pure, uh, unknown world. But I'm very surprised nowadays that this is opening for me a lot of opportunity that I didn't get back then. Uh, let me give you, uh... I'm gonna be very transparent with you today. I love being on stage. One of the thing I do a lot nowadays is public speaking. I speak a lot about different topics. Actually, I started in this during my research time. Like, when I was a researcher, I traveled the world and I did a lot of conferences, and I kept this for me even during my PM roles. And before leaving Google, the thing that terrified me was like, what if nobody would invite me on stage anymore because I won't have this like senior PM from Google or senior PM from Spotify? I was terrified by that idea. But let me tell you the truth. The reality is that I'm getting maybe easily 20 more invitation and talk opportunities than before because-

    6. AGAakash Gupta1:17:51

       Wow

    7. NCNesrine Changuel1:17:51

       ... I'm not a PM anymore. I'm a creator of a model. I try to be... I'm moving away from being a coach. I'm not just a coach. I mean, I don't see myself as coaching company based on others' framework. I'm really putting my heart and soul from my own experience to share my model and the, and the framework I created. So I see that the, the career is taking another dimension, and I'm really enjoying it a lot. And at the same time, I'm doing things that I, I love, like teaching MBA students. And I mean, I have the freedom to do the things that I really love at the scale that I love.

    8. AGAakash Gupta1:18:31

       Amazing. What a role model for people who wanna follow that. Do check her out, theproductdelightbook.com. She has an amazing LinkedIn presence as well. Nesrine, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

    9. NCNesrine Changuel1:18:43

       Thank you, Akash.

    10. AGAakash Gupta1:18:44

        Bye, everyone.

17. 1:18:45 – 1:19:22

    Outro

    1. AGAakash Gupta1:18:45

       So if you wanna learn more about how to shift to this way of working, check out our full conversation on Apple or Spotify Podcasts. And if you want the actual documents that we showed, the tools and frameworks and public links, be sure to check out my newsletter post with all of the details. Finally, thank you so much for watching. It would really mean a lot if you could make sure you are subscribed on YouTube, following on Apple or Spotify Podcasts, and leave us a review on those platforms. That really helps grow the podcast and support our work so that we can do bigger and better productions. I'll see you in the next one.

Episode duration: 1:19:32