A 4-step framework for building delightful products | Nesrine Changuel (Spotify, Google, Skype)

I feel like there's two buckets of teams. There's the product teams that are just like, "Of course we need to make our product delightful. That's how we win." And then there's just a bunch of product teams that are like, "What are you even talking about? We have features to ship. We gotta close some deals. We don't have time for this."

Sometimes people think about delight as the confetti. If you shake the phone, you have snowflake falling. But that's not the delight I talk about. Delight is actually this ability to create products that serve for both emotional need and functional need.

I know exactly what you mean. I never check Instagram anymore. I just don't feel good when I open it. The feeling of the product makes me not use it anymore.

How can we build products where we can achieve delight goal? Recently, I booked an Uber. I was waiting for the driver. And suddenly, the driver canceled for no specific reason. But what happened is that when get to the app, there've been only two clicks to get refunded. Bingo. Your money is back. The emotion was supposed to be low. And suddenly, the solution completely removed the stress and the friction.

Let's talk about how to actually approach this systematically.

We need to satisfy three main pillars. The very first one is ...

A big elephant in the room, when is this not worth your time? Companies like Workday, SAP, and Salesforce, that did really well, very undelightful.

The hard truth is that ...

Today my guest is Nesrine Shangal. Nesrine was a longtime product leader at Skype, Spotify, Google Chrome, and Google Meet. And through her experience building some of the most widely used consumer products in the world, she developed a really pragmatic framework for how to build delightful and retentive product experiences. A lot of product leaders talk about building great user experiences and making their products delightful, but I've never seen a concrete and repeatable approach to actually doing this, especially one that helps you separate low impact confetti features, as Nesrine calls them, and ones that actually drive your KPIs and keep people coming back. In our conversation, we talk about why product teams with limited resources, lots of fires and priorities should actually spend time on making their products more delightful. I found this part super interesting and surprising. We talk about what sorts of product teams and companies should invest in delight, particularly B2B versus B2C. And then we dive into her specific four-step framework for discovering the highest ROI opportunities and prioritizing across them. Nesrine shares a bunch of really cool real-world examples from her time at Google Meet and Spotify and Chrome and also examples from Apple and a bunch of other companies she's looked at. A huge thank you to Matt LeMay for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. That helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 15 incredible products, including a year free of Lovable, Replit, Bolt, N8n, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatPRD, and Mobben. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Nesrine Shangal. Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers. To thrive in the AI era, organizations need to adapt quickly. But many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions, like which tools are working? How are they being used? What's actually driving value? DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift. With DX, companies like Dropbox, Booking.com, Adyen, and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity. To learn more, visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny. That's getdx.com/lenny. You fell in love with building products for a reason. But sometimes the day-to-day reality is a little different than you imagined. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers, and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and roadmap updates and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible. Introducing Jira Product Discovery, the new prioritization and road mapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian. With Jira Product Discovery, you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize confidently, finally replacing those endless spreadsheets. Create and share custom product roadmaps with any stakeholder in seconds. And it's all built on Jira, where your engineering team's already working, so true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams, not just engineers. Sales, support, leadership, even Greg from finance, anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback, and insights in Jira Product Discovery for free. No catch. And it's only $10 a month for you. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never-ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's possible with Jira Product Discovery. Try it for free at atlassian.com/lenny. That's atlassian.com/lenny. Nesrine, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.