Episode 249: Moving Beyond Function in Product Management with Nesrine Changuel

In this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast, Melissa Perri welcomes Nesrine Changuel, a seasoned product coach, trainer, and author, known for her work at Google, Spotify, and Microsoft. Nesrine shares her journey and insights into creating products that users truly love by focusing on emotional connections and the concept of "Product Delight” - the name of her recently launched book.

She discusses how understanding both functional and emotional user motivators is crucial in designing tech products that stand out and are memorable. Throughout the conversation, Nesrine explores the challenges and strategies for implementing emotional elements into product design, emphasizing the importance of balancing functional needs with the emotional experiences of users. She shares examples of how tech giants approach product delight and the significance of inclusivity in product design.

Want to learn how to create tech products that are not just functional but also delight users on an emotional level? Tune in to this enlightening conversation with Nesrine Changuel.

You’ll hear us talk about:

  • 06:39 - The Pillars of Product Delight

Nesrine explains the three pillars of product delight: removing friction, anticipating needs, and exceeding expectations. She shares how they apply to products like the Revolut app, which continuously surprises users with new, useful features.

  • 13:40 - Tackling Zoom Fatigue

Nesrine discusses how Google Meet tackled user boredom and low interaction during COVID-19 by introducing features like background blur and emoji reactions to enhance privacy and engagement, helping alleviate "Zoom fatigue."

  • 36:46 - AI and Emotional Connections

Nesrine expresses her concerns about AI's current inability to address emotional needs in products, emphasizing the importance of maintaining emotional connections in the increasingly functional world driven by AI advancements.

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Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] Nesrine Changuel: for me, the most important and impactful segmentation is the motivational segmentation, which means you segment your users based on why they use your product.

And it's really surprising if you dig deep into that to, and you will understand that your users are using your product for different reasons. So it's really important when you do this motivational segmentation, you identify the functional motivators. That's the foundation. When you are building a new feature or when you are crafting new product. It's really important to list both the functional motivators.

I'm pretty sure everyone is really good into identifying the professional motivators, but also the emotional motivators so that we can create solutions that honor for both.

the reason why I wrote this book is of course to break the myth and make sure that we're not talking about the delight as the confetti effect. I'm not a big fan of confetti. Confetti has to be there only for a reason. If it's not for a reason, don't put confetti in your products. But the beyond confetti effect is the concept is about, it is about making sure that the emotional side is addressed within the solution. It's not adding on top of the solution, some emotional, surprising, fun, and celebration effect, but rather craft solutions that address the emotion as part of the core of the solution itself.

[00:01:24] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.

Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.

[00:02:02] Melissa Perri: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast today I'm excited to have Nesrine Changuel with us. Nesrine is a seasoned product coach, trainer, and author with a wealth of experience from top tech companies like Google, Spotify, and Microsoft. Her work on emotional connections and tech products makes her insights incredibly valuable for anyone looking to create products that users truly love.

I'm excited to dive into her new book, Product Delight right here, and explore how we can transform tech products into unforgettable experiences. Welcome Nesrine. It's great to have you here.

[00:02:35] Nesrine Changuel: Hi, Melissa. I'm excited today.

[00:02:37] Melissa Perri: I'm excited too, and congratulations on the book.

[00:02:40] Nesrine Changuel: Thank you. It's it's my new baby, as we said.

[00:02:43] Melissa Perri: It's been a work in progress for a while. I know.

[00:02:47] Nesrine Changuel: Yes. Happy to have it in your hands as well.

[00:02:49] Melissa Perri: Yeah.

[00:02:50] Nesrine Changuel: That's an incredible achievement by itself.

[00:02:52] Melissa Perri: Nesrine, you worked at some of the biggest companies in the world, some of these like tech companies that people would, die to work at Google, Spotify.

Microsoft. Tell us a little bit about your career journey and how did you get into product management?

[00:03:05] Nesrine Changuel: Yes. So I started my career as a researcher. I've been I did a PhD in signal processing and video compression, and then I started as a research engineer at Bell Labs. I've been a researcher for about five years, and after being in research, I wanted to explore the real application side. Like in research you do mostly prototype and then you hand over to other departments where you don't necessarily see what happened to your baby. So I moved to product and that's where I landed within the Skype team in Stockholm, then I moved to Spotify and lately at Google where I manage both Google meet first and then Chrome lately. So for almost 15 years I've been leading and crafting and creating these globally used and loved products, and at some point I realized that of course I have this experience of creating loved products. And actually there is a theory behind it, like being at the Microsoft, Spotify and Google, I realized that. Like creating loved product is not just a random thing. There are techniques, there are frameworks, there are tools that people can even use. And I sometimes like get people say, yeah, I mean these products are successful or loved because they are Spotify or because they are Google. So of course you can allow creating some delight into these products. And my theory is the opposite. These products or these companies are successful because they know the tool and they know the technique, how to create delightful and successful products.

So my goal was like last year I left Google with the idea of creating a book and creating a theory where people can actually benefit from these techniques and make it more global and accessible and actionable for everyone.

[00:04:44] Melissa Perri: That's amazing. And so that's how we got product Delight. So can you explain what do you mean by product delight?

[00:04:52] Nesrine Changuel: So every time I go for a conference or give a workshop, I always start with a simple question like, tell me about your favorite product. And even if it might seem like a simple question, what I usually love is the diversity of answers. People sometimes give their favorite product based on the productivity or the functionality part of the product. And sometime they give answer based on the emotional sides or for the feeling that it allows them to get without even knowing exactly how to explain that. And that's the beauty because the best successful products are those who can create this deep emotional connection while serving for functional and productive needs. And that's the essence of delight. So delight is all about creating these technical products that of course serve for functional need and at the same time, honor those emotional needs and blend that together. So that's my concept of product delight, is how can we shift from only functional and create functional plus emotion altogether.

But here in the product side, not in like a, in the aesthetic part or in the in the design part. 'cause actually, emotional connection has been widely covered like in design, in marketing, but what I realized like two years ago is like this area is not that much covered in business and product, and that's why I wanted to get this concept into product hands. And the second reason why for me, this is extremely important, is actually because there's misconceptions, like people, when they hear the word delight, they think about the aesthetic part. They think it's a nice to have, but the reality is this is the differentiator. This is what will make your product stand out, and that's why people will love it and will remember it and will keep using it.

[00:06:39] Melissa Perri: Do you have an example of a product that you think just nails that product delight aspect of it?

[00:06:44] Nesrine Changuel: Yes. So when we talk about delight, of course there is the theoretical part where like it's an emotion. It's by the way, if we talk about theory, delight is the combination of two emotions. It's the combination of joy and surprise. If you think about yourself in a moment, experiencing joy and surprise at the same time, you are delighted.

Now, if we think from a practical perspective, like delight stands on three pillars. I really wanna make sure that people understand exactly these three pillars. The three pillars are light is about removing friction, like making sure that the journey is as frictionless as possible, like removing these pains throughout the journey. And the second pillar is about anticipating needs. And the third pillar is about exceeding expectation. when you are crafting a new product, it's really important to make sure that this product is going beyond, it's not just meeting expectation, 'cause if you are meeting expectation, there is no surprise.

You are just honoring whatever people are asking you for. And also, it's about going beyond and anticipating the need. And you asked about the example. Of course there are many of them, but there is one that is particularly successful nowadays, mostly in Europe, which is Revolut app. 'cause the reason why I'm mentioning this particularly is because it's always surprising me on different level.

Of course it's a FinTech app. It's supposed to be about managing my money. Nothing delightful, nothing fancy. But every time I open the app, I realize that they're adding new things. I didn't even anticipate, or I didn't even thought about and they are so useful. Like recently, I real realized that I can book hotel and like travel there. I realized recently I've been on a trip to Singapore and I was having panic moment because I realized my SIM card did not work. Like my French plan does not operate in Singapore, so I had to figure out how to get a local sim card, and suddenly you open the app, you realize that there is a e-sim, you can just buy it from the, uh, from the APP.

[00:08:40] Melissa Perri: That's cool.

[00:08:41] Nesrine Changuel: So, there are if you can see here, there is anticipation of the need, like people didn't ask for. For e-sim, there is exceeding expectation by giving them all these, uh, within the same app.

[00:08:51] Melissa Perri: How do you think you balance that? I feel like that's a big topic in product management is like the surprise factor versus what people are actually looking for and expecting it. How, when you're thinking about building a delightful product and you're like, I wanna surprise somebody, do you still keep it grounded in strategy and you know what's gonna solve a problem there?

[00:09:09] Nesrine Changuel: Absolutely. So if you wanna start with this concept, or if you wanna call it the mindset first, because we really need to adopt it as a mindset, as first. And in order to get that, for me, the very first step is to understand your users from the motivational side. Not only from the behavioral side or the demographic sides.

This concept of segmentation is absolutely not new. People are segmenting their personas, et cetera. But most times, and nowadays I'm coaching company, I realize that most of segmentation are based on demographic or behavioral. What are they doing and who they are. And for me, the most important and impactful segmentation is the motivational segmentation, which means you segment your users based on why they use your product.

And it's really surprising if you dig deep into that to, and you will understand that your users are using your product for different reasons. Just think about let's use Spotify for example. I sometime go to Spotify because I wanna listen to a specific track or I'm searching for a specific track, or I might go to Spotify because I wanna get inspired.

I have no idea what I wanna listen to, but inspires me. And sometime I go to Spotify because I feel lonely or I wanna get more productive. I wanna have some vibe, I wanna feel connected. So it's really important when you do this motivational segmentation, you identify the functional motivators. I wanna search for track or the emotional motivators, I wanna feel less lonely, or I wanna change my mood. So that's the foundation. That's why I am, I'm taking some time here to explain because it's really important when you are building a new feature or when you are crafting new product. It's really important to list both the functional motivators.

I'm pretty sure everyone is really good into identifying the professional motivators, but also the emotional motivators so that we can create solutions that honor for both.

[00:11:03] Melissa Perri: The emotional motivators are probably the part where people get stuck a little bit more. If you were to take an example of a product that you worked on and said here are examples of what I would write as emotional motivators, what, what would you see?

[00:11:16] Nesrine Changuel: I think the best example is an example from Google Meet where I personally worked on. So the funny story is that I actually joined Google Meet exactly when COVID hit here, particularly in Europe. So the same month, the same year. What an amazing time. It's especially for Google meet, like the usage the, even the behavior completely changed.

Like we moved from having meetings in offices and clinics and classroom into a hundred percent remote, and I just joined the team. Hey I'm joining Google Meet. What can I do? And actually, I spent the first three months, literally the first three months trying to understand the emotional impact of this new behavior.

This new things of having a hundred percent meetings from remote. And so within these three months, I had to understand how people are experiencing this, of course, from a functional side, like for example, we came up with features like background replace, background blur, these things that came within that cOVID time. But also I wanted to understand if there's any emotional impact. And of course we came with a list of motivators and sometimes demotivators as well. 'cause it's actually much easier to identify what frustrate people than what makes them happy. So sometime if it's it's harder to get motivators, get into the demotivators. And during that time, we came to the conclusion that people feel bored. Like boredom was one of the demotivates like when you are having back to back at home, it it might feel a bit, sometime too bored. The second thing is low interaction. People like love the time where with, they were in the meeting room and they interacted together.

So low interaction was another thing and there was even a new term. And I guess you know it very well, but she's the zoom fatigue. So zoom fatigue came exactly during that time, where people were experiencing and and talk about zoom fatigue. So we as a team, working for Google Meet, had to analyze these demotivators and then try to come up with solutions that solve for those demotivators.

For example, as I mentioned to you, like of course we introduced background replace, that was something to honor the need of protecting privacy and that was more functional. But also we introduced imagery reactions where you can send a samba, or you can send the heart. These are small features that we introduced to align with the need of getting more interaction and getting less bored in a meeting. We also introduced a very tiny, small feature, by the way, which is called Minimize Self-View.

[00:13:40] Melissa Perri: Oh.

[00:13:40] Nesrine Changuel: Let me explain why, by the way, why minimize cells you, because one of the causes of zoom fatigue. Was the fact that you see yourself. It's not about seeing others, it's about seeing yourself. 'cause our brain and our eyes are so automatically drawn into seeing our self-reflection. So we allowed for self minimize self-view just to try to leverage and reduce that fatigue for a full time or a full day, full of meetings. So these are some example where we first started by having this deep investigation of motivators and emotional elements and turn them into real and concrete product opportunities.

[00:14:18] Melissa Perri: How did you discover that? Like a bunch of that fatigue was just staring at your face? Because I remember you told me about this at a conference last year. And I was like, oh, that makes total sense. Yeah. Who wants to just stare at their face all day? It feels like you're just watching yourself on it. And I totally understood what you're talking about, but it wasn't something I realized what was happening. So I'm sure your background as a researcher helped with this. Like how do you go about like actually uncovering something like that?

[00:14:45] Nesrine Changuel: So you need to take your time when it comes to things like that. And more particularly in the emotional sides. 'cause we don't wanna make mistake and we don't wanna just judge, judge ba based on our bias. So for the zoom fatigue part, I'm gonna be very transparent. It's gonna, we had a lot of luck 'cause there've been a very recent research report done by Stanford at the time that actually came with the list of causes of zoom fatigue. Zoom fatigue was such a big thing so that everyone studied that. And the research lab published a list of zoom fatigue. And by the way, self-reflection was one of the top causes of zoom fatigue. So of course we relied on this kind of information and we needed to, of course, get our own observation, but also get some help from whatever other source of research. However, when it comes to, for example, I mentioned boredom.

Boredom was a challenging thing for me. And particularly because let me give you just the flow, how we thought about boredom and sometime we make mistakes and that's part of the journey. One of my first mistake about boredom was that I thought that the antidote for boredom was fun.

If someone tell you, Hey, I feel bored in meetings, then we need to help them get some fun. And that the reason why I'm saying that was a mistake is because people were not looking for fun. The real opposite of boredom was feeling alive, not having fun. You can get bored from fun itself, like imagine going to Disney every day. Just think about yourself the third day or the fourth day. It's not gonna be fun anymore. The reality is that people will never, ever feel bored if they are engaged, if they feel part and they are present. Sometime you take an element, you think about it as your basis or your foundation, and then you try new things and you expose that to the user and see reaction, see impacts, and it's okay that some path might work, other might not work.

At the end, what matter most is the reaction of users, whether they are using it, they are enjoying it. Like for the imagery reaction, people loved it. Like people didn't just use the feature, they reached out asking for more images and they wanted to express even more feelings and more emotion through more images that we got these requests from users.

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So when you're thinking about the difference there, right? With engagement versus like fun. What's your process? Are you, we running like experiments to test different ideas and see what was there? How did you follow up and make sure that things that you put out there are truly like, say, like delightful rather than just, eh, it was good, like it checked the box.

[00:17:39] Nesrine Changuel: So the interesting part about delight, and maybe that's something that I didn't mention so far, like during my time at Spotify at Skype, I was a regular PM. what I mean by regular PM is like I was managing a product team and we had a very busy backlog with competing priorities and features. However, during my time at Google Meet, I was the PM for delight, which means that I had a specific mission within Google Meet to help user having a delightful experience and turns Google meet into a delightful product. And that's how I started to realize that, hey, there's a theory here, there are metrics and for example, at Google we look at delight as something that we can monitor. Of course we can check the impact of the feature on adoptions, retention and churn, whether people are deactivating a feature or not. But also we even had a metric called HATS. It's called HATS as Happiness Tracking Survey, which is actually an in-product survey where we actually track happiness.

It's as simple as tracking happiness. And the reason why we track that, I mean in the term it says happiness tracking, we track it over time because happiness vanish and there is this concept of habituation effect. You can get surprised the first time or happy the first time, and then that surprise and happiness might differ over time.

So we don't only look at the impact of the feature right after the launch, but also we look at it like over time to see if the perception, if the surprise, is maintained and kept over time, or if we are getting into any negative effect that we don't wanna get at all.

[00:19:20] Melissa Perri: That's really fascinating this reminds me, and I'm sure everybody's gonna sit there and talk about like the NPS survey. How is this survey different? How do you position it to the users where you get like an accurate happiness answer to? Because I feel like people struggle with the NPS especially like it popping up in the middle of your workflow and they're like, are you satisfied?

And you're like, I just get outta my freaking way. Like I wanna use this product here. Like I don't wanna answer this survey. No, I'm not now. Like how do you get around that and actually get those accurate measurements?

[00:19:47] Nesrine Changuel: Yeah, NPS is quite different in the sense that it usually get the overall experience of a product. So when we talk about NPS, it's really about the feature, it's about the overall experience, it's about the journey. what is most close to hats would be csat. That's the closest thing. I would compare.

However, CSAT is one time. Hats is like over time. If we need to know the difference. This is the overall, the biggest difference.

Now, the other thing is that it's rarely in product. You, we don't wanna have this popup like destroying and distracting the experience. It's more like a call for survey where you can open on a web. That's also one of the foundation behind hats. It's an in-house build survey, but the good thing is that it was published by Google Research Department and there is an entire research paper that describe even example of questions that could be included in the survey. And the foundation is that it should not distract from the overall experience. And the second it should be simple questions like easy to answer and can be tracked over time.

[00:20:52] Melissa Perri: Fascinating. So the, and I like the overtime thing, because obviously you're making changes to the product. So as you make changes, people are gonna, you're gonna really see if that's working or if it's not.

[00:21:01] Nesrine Changuel: Yeah, let me give you an example. When I, when we first introduced background replace, we first introduced background replace with an image, and you'll remember that very well

[00:21:10] Melissa Perri: yes.

[00:21:10] Nesrine Changuel: On the static image. And then very quickly we introduced background replace with a video. And then we used

[00:21:16] Melissa Perri: yeah.

[00:21:17] Nesrine Changuel: background replace with immersive background. I dunno if you

[00:21:20] Melissa Perri: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:21] Nesrine Changuel: background, where it's a little bit like video, but the movement is much slower. Like a shimmy or like snow falling very smoothly. Much less destructive as the first version of the video background where we had the disco or the classroom. The trials of the video background were in the beginning quite. like with a lot of movement. And then we learned from that might be a bit destructive. So we turned video background into immersive background where people much loved those version much more. And then even after immersive background, we introduced AI generated. Like personalized background, and this is the essence of surprising users.

You don't wanna surprise them once you wanna surprise them. You wanna keep this feature living and you wanna surprise your user over time. And that's why we track the happiness, but not, this is not just random. You need to work on the continuity of the delight in your product.

[00:22:17] Melissa Perri: Yeah, I really love that you wanna keep 'em happy over time. You wanna make sure that.

[00:22:21] Nesrine Changuel: Yeah.

[00:22:21] Melissa Perri: Things are special. And you talk about, you've been talking about the methodology of delight and in the book you do talk about this. You've got two things. We got a delight experience checklist and a delight grid. When we're talking about the methodology and where to start, where do you recommend and how do you use these tools?

[00:22:38] Nesrine Changuel: I think it's really important to start with a delight grid 'cause it's really simple and I will, I can easily describe this in like maybe in a minute. So it's a, let's think about it as a metrics or a grid where, remember I really said like it's really important to start identifying the motivators: the functional motivators and the emotional motivators. If you did, or you've done this exercise very well, then you place those in the metrics. So on the Y axis you place all these functional motivators, and then on the a x axis, you could place these emotional motivators. What you get is a big metrics.

Now look at your roadmap or your backlog and check your solutions or the features that you're thinking about implementing. Let's take one example of features and you look at it and say, is it solving for any of the functional motivator or any of these emotional motivators? And the reason why we do that is because if the feature is only solving for one function motivator. Then this belongs to a category that I call low delight. There is delight because you're serving for function, but it's low delight. If the feature is solving for a surface delight or sorry. If the feature is solving for an emotional motivator, then it belongs to this feature this category called surface delight. Now, if one of your solution is solving for both: a functional motivator and an emotional motivator. Then it belongs to this category called Deep delight. So having this categorization by itself is very helpful 'cause you can understand if your roadmap is... if you have a diversity and variety of delight or not? Or is it only functional?

Maybe to understand the difference between surface delight, low delight, and deep delight, we can take some example. Surface delight could be any feature that is just serving for any emotional need, like take wrapped. For example, wrapped for Spotify does not solve for any functional need.

It's here just to make you feel cool and you can probably share with your friends. Of course it drives a lot of adoption and a lot from our users, but it's a surface delight feature, like improving search at Spotify, that would be low delight. It's really important, but it has to be part of the low delight. However, let's consider Discover Weekly, for example, discover Weekly is a feature that helps you discover new content, but in a personalized way where you feel like heard and understood and and connected. So it's part of this deep delight. Category. So delight grid is a categorization tool that helps you understand the different level of delight. Why this is important is because I advocate for the model called 50 40 10. What I mean by 50 40 10 is that I believe that the best product need to have a bouquet of the three type of delight. You need to have 50% of low delight, 40% of deep delight, and a tiny 10% for surface delight, just for the personality and the brand of the product.

[00:25:38] Melissa Perri: When we're thinking about the crafting these solutions too, one, one of the things I get into arguments about with. With like companies, let's say, that have very transactional natures of their product, right? Like a B2B, imagine a B2B workflow, and I always hear from their product managers our people have to use it.

So like, why would I bother, like improving the UX or making it better. Like it just needs to like function and work. When you're thinking about, crafting a solution. Do you believe like there are just ones where it will only be functional, there will be no emotional, or do you believe that there are ways to craft solutions that do include some of those emotional delight factors too, to bump it into those categories?

[00:26:17] Nesrine Changuel: So we used to think that usability and UX and design and like delight is more like the luxury of B2C. What I start to see, and nowadays I'm coaching more and more companies from both the B2C and B2B words. I start to see that the expectation is getting higher. Like people are getting more and more exposed to B2C products, of course, and then the expectation from the B2B products are also like getting increased.

So we start to believe that we wanna be more satisfied with our B2B products. And when I talk about delight, remember what I said is that delight is an emotion and we need to make sure that we are addressing user's emotions. And when I talk about emotion, I think, doesn't really make sense to only consider B2C in, in that sense because. If the product is used by human being, then it deserves, they deserve their emotion to be honored. So that's why I advocate more for the B two H spat, which is business to human. So here is my theory. My theory is that if if the product is used by human, whether it's consumer or business, then we need to include their emotional needs into the solution that we are addressing.

And that's what will create this differentiation. We see companies like Atlassian, for example, that is like a pure B2B company or Intuit. And I actually, while writing this book, I was aware that, uh, most of my experiences coming from the B2C space, so I wanted to interview companies that are completely outside of my of my expertise. So I interviewed people from Atlassian, from Dropbox, from Snowflake, and even GitHub that are complete like tech companies. And I realized that these successful companies do address emotional needs. Maybe in a different way, but they are not just functional, they are successful because they are addressing the pain from a stress perspective, for example, they allow user to feel a better version of themself. That's also one of the needs that, uh, is honored thanks to Atlassian, for example.

[00:28:19] Melissa Perri: When you were interviewing these companies, like what was maybe a feature or an example of something that surprised you that was like, oh, this is a B2B thing, but the way they did it is just amazing or delightful to their customers?

[00:28:31] Nesrine Changuel: So I got surprised by few things. One thing was from GitHub, like when I think about GitHub, delight is definitely not the first thing that come to my mind, I mean for sure, and I was talking to to a product person there, and they surprised me by telling me that they have a metric called DUUPF and D stands for delight. So delight, usability, utility and product market fit.

And the way how they measure delight is exactly the way how I'm talking about delight now. GitHub. This is not a feature thing, but they are measuring delight on a regular basis and they have even a home crafted metric for that. The other thing that surprises me maybe from Dropbox is that they have a product pillar called Cupcake.

It's not called delight, but it's called cupcake. And when I spoke with that product person, again, I understood that the word is different, but the meaning is exactly the same. It's about helping user feeling more joyful and happier during the experience. So that's why I said like I discovered over these conversations that they are addressing more and more the emotional needs and they are even measuring and tracking it.

Atlassian, for example, recently they published a recent blog called The New Jira. I can share the link maybe with you as well, but the new Jira, if you look at it, it's a list of features and I've been looking at them one by one. I would say almost 70% of the features in the new Jira blog post are about delight. It's about how to customize your templates, your view, how to add colors, they even added confetti when you achieve a milestone in your work or your products. So these are becoming more and more best practices and it's definitely not a luxury or a nice to have.

[00:30:14] Melissa Perri: I love that and I think it's so important. I do agree, like anytime I see a B2B company and they're sacrificing like things to actually work or feel good for the customers, let's say that. Being like, oh, we don't need that, our customers will put up with pain. I just keep thinking about how they're gonna get disrupted by somebody who just makes it 10 times simpler and gives that customer the feeling of oh, we actually care about you.

Like I wanna do this in a way that delights you. I wanna do this in a way that makes your job easier. 'Cause they use it every day, in B2B. That's your whole life, right? That's your job.

[00:30:45] Nesrine Changuel: Absolutely. And there is one thing that I also try to make clear in the book, which I call the Beyond Confetti Effect, and the reason why I wrote this book is of course to break the myth and make sure that we're not talking about the delight as the confetti effect. Confetti is just one side that, of course, might be valuable or not, by the way.

I'm not a big fan of confetti. Confetti has to be there only for a reason. If it's not for a reason, don't put confetti in your products. But the beyond confetti effect is the concept is about, it is about making sure that the emotional side is addressed within the solution. It's not adding on top of the solution, some emotional, surprising, fun, and celebration effect, but rather craft solutions that address the emotion as part of the core of the solution itself.

[00:31:38] Melissa Perri: I love that. And we were talking about the two things. So we start with the delight grid, but then you also talk about this delight excellence checklist. What do you do with that once you've looked at your features on this grid.

[00:31:50] Nesrine Changuel: Yeah, so once, let's imagine you did the right grade, the correct way, and how can you make sure that the solution you created are delightful? You at least have an idea what, which category and then how can you make sure that you're not doing it the wrong way? Why I am saying that is because when we talk about emotions, we might do mistakes, and that's why came this idea of creating the delight excellence checklist, which is about making sure that whatever feature I'm building is satisfying the criteria or is not gonna harm be harmful or distract the experience. And the very first thing or the very first element of the delight excellence checklist is this feature is aligned with the business goal and the user's needs.

Why? Because I don't want delight to be an excuse to add as I mentioned earlier, like the confetti side. The other day I was ha giving a workshop day to a company who actually said, Hey, look, Nesrine, we have a delightful feature. You shake your phone and suddenly you have a snowflake falling.

I mean , does it serve any need? Uh, Is it helpful in any way? Is it like aligned with any of your business goal? If not, don't do things like that. And I told you like I'm not a big fan of confetti unless there is a need for it. And I'm gonna give you an example here. I can create example where sometime confetti, like aligned with user's needs. I'm for example, a user of Airbnb, both from a guest and host perspective. I'm having a place that I put for rent on Airbnb and my biggest. Goal is to get that Superhost, batch. I wanna be a Superhost. I do my best every time I'm having a guest. I wanna do my best to make sure that they are having the best experience. And of course, Airbnb is renewing every three months. Your Superhost. Batch. And you know what? Every three months if you remain a Superhost, you open the app and the app turns into a confetti. And these are quite special moments. 'cause I feel like the app is recognizing my effort and recognizing this as something I've been doing my best to achieve.

So in that case, celebration makes sense. That's why, like I said, I'm not a big fan unless there is a reason or it's aligned with the users. The delight excellence checklist, number one is making sure that the feature is aligned with users' needs as well as the business. Is it aligned with what the company want to achieve? Then there is another long list. It's a list of nine things we can, they are very well detailed in the book.

One of them is distraction, for example, could my feature be distractive? Is it going to interfere between the user and the experience and the product? Because we don't want delight to be something that interfere, but rather to help and facilitate the experience. Like almost you don't feel it. These are the emotional sites that we want to accelerate not the not the visible ones. It's all about making sure that that we're doing it the right way.

One element that we did not touch at all, which is for me the most important one, and it's included in the delight checklist, which is inclusiveness. Because when we talk about when we talk about emotions, what makes me happy is not necessarily what makes you happy. And I might be happy with something that is not gonna have any impact on me tomorrow or next month. So how can we make sure that we could create products that do not harm in any way, and there are unfortunately plenty of examples that try like it's a good tentative for delight, but turns out to be completely and inclusive. The example I have in mind is something that actually happened last year here in Paris, in France. It was Mother's Day and Deliveroo, the delivery company actually tried to do like a, a delightful campaign, if I can say. And actually they sent a notification. So you receive a notification on your app or on your phone, and the notification look exactly like a missed call from your mom.

[00:35:45] Melissa Perri: Oh,

[00:35:46] Nesrine Changuel: at your phone, it look like missed call from your mom, and then you click on it and then it says it's Mother's day, think about your mom, send her flowers, deliveroo can do that for you.

[00:35:55] Melissa Perri: I'm already shocked 'cause I know where this is going.

[00:35:57] Nesrine Changuel: Exactly. 'cause this feature had the worst press. Deliveroo had to apologize and exactly, you see, I think, I don't even have to explain what it is.

[00:36:04] Melissa Perri: Yeah. I'm like, oh, wow, who did that?

[00:36:06] Nesrine Changuel: Everyone can't experience this in the same way. Some might feel happy, other might feel grief or shocked or sorrow, whatever. We are not experiencing these kind of things the same, the same way. So this is a pure example of when you don't address inclusiveness at the right time, at the right place.

[00:36:23] Melissa Perri: That's a great one. And I think that's so important on a checklist. One of the things I wanna ask you about too is obviously AI, like we're, there's always gonna be an AI question in a podcast. So when about, coding people are using it to speed up the product development process, get in there.

What are you worried about when it comes to like adding AI into your product or using AI to build products? When it comes to product delight?

[00:36:46] Nesrine Changuel: I'm excited, but I'm also worried, here's why.

For sure, AI is contributing in a very positive way in improving the functional side of every product. Products are built in days or hours. Productivity is increasing. We can create products like literally in, in a day. However, remember the best products are those who are balancing both the functional side and the emotional sides. And AI is currently, at least currently, is not addressing very well the emotional needs and identifying the emotional needs of our users. So what will happen is that I feel like functionality will accelerate. And emotional needs is gonna have to like, catch up and that, and that's the, that's the challenge that I see. And that even make the topic of emotional connection and delight even more important because we don't want to live in the world of robots and everything feel like it is only functional. I think it's actually even a better time to talk about emotional connection because if we bring awareness and make sure that these kind of things are taken into consideration, addressed by us as a human being, as product managers and product teams, then we can catch up and make sure that we don't end up into only functional sites. So don't get it as a dramatic thing. I'm not saying like AI's gonna make things as look like robotic. I'm just gonna say this is gonna accelerate functionality and our responsibility is to, make sure that the emotions are part of this whole experience.

[00:38:15] Melissa Perri: I think beautifully put, I'm worried too with the vibe coding, I've, I'm already seeing it. I think it's fantastic to get like certain things out the door, but. It doesn't understand the user so well where it's gonna invent like new or delightful experiences for them or ways to do it, right? It's, it is just gonna take a standard and be like, oh, these are the best practices, let's put them together.

And I think at the end of the day, what's gonna happen is like everybody's products are gonna converge and start looking and feeling exactly the same.

And that's why I think your topic, product delight is that's gonna be the edge, right? That's the thing that's gonna make a difference when you're in a world where everything's the same.

[00:38:52] Nesrine Changuel: Maybe I have another example that could help highlight how important is this topic, which is like, when I worked for Chrome, the Chrome team, I had to address one of the biggest challenge of Chrome. Or maybe I can say the biggest challenge for any browser, by the way, which is how to help people navigate or manage their tabs. And we know that most people at least a lot of people are having a lot of tabs open. And more particularly on mobile, like I was part of the mobile team. My mission was how can I help people have less tabs and help them like navigate and find tabs in the tab grade? Of course, the problem started as a functional problem.

We don't want to have so many tabs open 'cause it makes the app heavier, like from a memory perspective it's not great. So it started as a functional problem. But then we interviewed a lot of users and started to understand what I call the relationship between users and their tabs. The reason why I am saying relationship is because there is a real relationship between users and their tab. For users, there is a connection. For certain users, it's a, it's something so important that they don't. At all except that any product would close tabs on their behalf, for example. Don't touch my tabs. And we interviewed people where we asked people to navigate how they find the tab among a list of long tabs. And some people had to apologize, like for having so many tabs open, or some people felt frustrated and stressed during that experience. You know what, the reason why I'm sharing this example is because these kind of frustrations, or a shame or whatever feeling I was mentioning now, could not be identified with any AI agent today.

So yes, you can rely on AI for accelerating the solutioning part, but we still have to have this deep conversation with our users and identify their needs on the emotional side.

[00:40:47] Melissa Perri: I love that. And Nesrine, my last question for you. If you were to go back in time and give your younger self some advice when you were first starting out in your career, what would it be?

[00:40:56] Nesrine Changuel: So when I started as a PM I came from an IC world and even a very solo world. I told you I worked as a research engineer before. And for me it was really important to make sure that I understand the topic, I understand the technology. So when I joined the Skype team, joined the video Skype team, which means that, for me, it was really important to understand the technical words, the technical part of the problem. For me, it was really important to understand the solutioning discussions, to understand the technology behind the solution, so I felt that would be very helpful. It was helpful for some time, but I quickly realized that my very biggest value was definitely not into contributing into these how conversation, but the biggest contribution and the biggest value came from having a clear why. So that was the shift for me in my career. The biggest shift happened when I started to give up a little bit into getting deep into the how. Having a big focus on the why. Because if you have a very clear why and well articulated and well-defined, and you can go and debate for it forever, then you gain respect from your team, from the organization, and from the leaders. So the time you become so expert in the why, that's where you become a better pm from my perspective.

[00:42:19] Melissa Perri: Great advice for people out there listening. Nesrine, thanks so much for being on the podcast. If people wanna go and get your book, where can they get it?

[00:42:27] Nesrine Changuel: Yes. Product light is available on Amazon, all countries. They can also have information about the book in www.productdelight book.com. They can of course, reach out to me. I'm available on nesrine-changuel.com, If they have any question or if they wanna share any delightful story with me, I would love. By the way, just for the anecdote, as soon as I started talking about this delight topic, I started receiving random, delightful stories.

[00:42:54] Melissa Perri: I love this.

[00:42:54] Nesrine Changuel: Either personal or professional ones. And I love listening to this. So if you have any delightful story you wanna share with me, I would love that. And I even initiated a Substack newsletter called Delight Tips, where I share stories for those, of course, who are open and allow me to share delightful stories and also tips and techniques to put that into practice.

[00:43:15] Melissa Perri: Amazing, and we will link to all of those links that Nesrine just mentioned on our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back on Friday with another dear Melissa, if you have any questions for me that you want me to answer on one of those upcoming episodes go to dear melissa.com and let me know what your product questions are. Then we'll be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest. We'll see you then.

Melissa Perri