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Product Thinking
Episode 249: Moving Beyond Function in Product Management with Nesrine Changuel
00:43:37
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A
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 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 when you're crafting new product. It's really important to list both the functional motivators. I'm pretty sure everyone is really good into identifying the functional 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. I 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 or concept is about. It's 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.
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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 product pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
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C
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today I'm excited to have Nesrin Shanghal with us. Nesrin 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 Nesrin. It's great to have you here.
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A
Hi Melissa. I'm excited today.
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C
I'm excited too. And congratulations on the book.
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A
Thank you. It's my new baby.
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C
As we said it's been a work in progress for a while. I know, yes.
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A
Happy to have it in your hands as well. Yeah, that's an incredible achievement by itself.
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C
Nesrin, 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?
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A
Yes, so I started my career as a researcher. I did a PhD in signal processing and video compression and then I started as a research engineer at Bell Labs and 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. And then I moved to Spotify and lately at Google where I manage Both Google Meet first and then Covid 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 creating loved product is not just a random thing. There are techniques, there are frameworks, there are tools that people, 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.
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C
That's amazing. And so that's how we got product delight. So can you explain what do you mean by product delight?
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A
So every time I go for a conference or give a workshop, I always start with this 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 sometimes 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 the light. So the light 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 esthetic part or in the. In the design part. Because 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.
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C
Do you have an example of a product that you think just nails that product delay aspect of it?
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A
Yes. So when we talk about the light, of course there is the theoretical part where like, it's an emotion. It's. By the way, if we talk about theory, the light 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 the light stands on three pillars. And I really want to make sure that people understand exactly these three pillars. The three pillars are. The 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. So when you're crafting a new product, it's really important to make sure that this product is going beyond. It's not just meeting expectation. Because if you're meeting expectation, there is no surprise. You're 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. Because 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 are adding new things that I didn't even anticipate or I didn't even thought about. And they are so useful. Like recently I 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 an E sim. You can just buy it from the from the app. So they are, if you can see here, there is anticipation of the need like people didn't ask for for esim. There's exceeding expectation by giving them all these within the same app.
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C
How do you think you balance that? I feel like that's a big topic. 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 want to surprise somebody, do you still keep it grounded in strategy and you know what's going to solve the problem there?
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A
Absolutely. So if you want to start with this concept or if you want to call it a 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 or 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 too and you will understand that your users are using your product for different reasons. Just think about, let's use Spotify, for example. I sometimes go to Spotify because I want to listen to a specific track or I'm searching for a specific track or I might go to Spotify because I want to get inspired. I have no idea what I want to listen to, but inspires me. And sometimes I go to Spotify Because I feel lonely or I want to get more productive, I want to have some vibe, I want to feel connected. So it's really important when you do this motivational segmentation, you identify the functional motivators. I want to search for a track or the emotional motivators. I want to feel less lonely or I want to change my mood. So that's the foundation. That's why I'm taking some time yet to explain. Because it's really important when you are building a new feature or when you're crafting new product, it's really important to list both the functional motivators. I'm pretty sure everyone is really good into identifying the functional motivators, but also the emotional motivators so that we can create solutions that honor for both the.
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C
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 would you see?
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A
Yeah, yeah. 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, even the behavior completely changed. Like we moved from having meetings in offices and clinics and classroom into 100% remote. And I just joined the team like 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 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 replays, background blur, these things that came within that Covid time. But also I wanted to understand if there is any emotional impact. And of course we came with a list of motivators and sometimes demotivators as well because it's actually much easier to identify what frustrates people than what makes them happy. So sometimes 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 demotivators. Like when you're having back to back at home it might feel a bit sometimes too bored. The second thing is low interaction. People like love the time where 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, which is the zoom fatigue. So zoom fatigue came exactly during that time where people were experiencing 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 emoji reactions where you can send a thumb up 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. Oh yeah, let me explain why, by the way, why minimize self view? 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. Because our brain and our eyes are so automatically drawn into seeing our self reflection. So we allowed for self minimized 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 examples where we first started by having this deep investigation of motivators and emotional elements and turn them into real and concrete product opportunities.
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C
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?
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A
So you need to take your time when it comes to things like that and more particularly in the emotional sides because we don't want to make mistake and we don't want to just judge based on our bias. So for the zone fatigue part, I'm going to be very transparent. It's going to. We had a lot of luck because there have 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 the 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 sometimes we make mistakes. 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 going to 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. Sometimes 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 reactions, 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 image reaction, people loved it. Like people didn't just use the feature, they reached out asking for more emojis and they wanted to express even more feelings and more emotion through more emojis that we got these requests from users.
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C
Looking to level up your product management career, I started Product Institute to help you do just that. Trusted by over 15,000 students in Fortune 500 companies worldwide, our seven courses cover everything from product foundations to advanced product strategy. Right now you can get our bundle of all courses for 40% off with code learn2025 go to productinstitute.com to learn more about our options for individuals and teams. So when you're thinking about the difference there, right with engagement versus fun, what's your process? Are we running 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, say, delightful rather than just eh, it was good, it checked the box.
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A
So the interesting part about delight, and maybe that's something that I didn't mention so far, like during my time at Spotify and at Skills Skype, I was A regular pm. So 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 the light 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 we're 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're getting any negative effect that we don't want to get at all.
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C
That's really fascinating. This reminds me, and I'm sure everybody's going to sit there, 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 too? 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 out of my fricking way. Like, I want to use this product here. Like, I don't want to answer the survey now. I'm not now. Like, how do you get around that and actually get those accurate measurements?
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A
So 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 rarely about the feature, it's about the overall experience, it's about the journey. I think what is most close to hats would be CSATs. That's the closest thing I would compare. However, CSAT is one time HATS is like over time. If we need to note a difference, this is the overall, the biggest Difference. Now the other thing is that it's rarely in product. You we don't want to have this pop up like destroying and distracting the experience. It's more like a call for survey where you can open on the 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 this 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 that easy to answer and can be tracked over time.
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C
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 going to. You're going to really see if that's working or if it's not.
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A
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 remember that very well, a static image. And then very quickly we introduced background replace with a video. And then we introduced background replace with immersive background. I don't know if you used the immersive background where it's a little bit like video but the movement is much slower like a chimney 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 movement 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 love 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 want to surprise them once you want to surprise them. You want to keep this feature living and you want to 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.
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C
Yeah, I really love that you want to keep them happy over time. You want to make sure that 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?
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A
I think it's really important to start with a Delight grid, because 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 that 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 a metrics. So on the Y axis you place all these functional motivators. And then on the X axis you could place these emotional motivators. What you get is a big matrix. Now you're going to 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 function 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 a 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 category called Surface Delight. Now if one of your solutions is solving for both a functional motivator and an emotional motivator, then it belongs to this category called Deep the Light. So having these categorization by itself is very helpful because you can understand if your roadmap is you have a diversity and variety of the Light 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 functionality. It's here just to make you feel cool and you can probably share with your friends. And of course it drives a lot of adoption and love from our users. But it's a Surface Delight feature. A 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 connected. So it's part of this Deep Delight category. So the Light Grid is a categorization tool that helps you understand the different level of the light. Why this is important is because I advocate for the model called 50 40, 10. What I mean by 504010 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 service delight, just for the personality and the brand of the product.
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C
When we're thinking about crafting these solutions too, one of the things I get into arguments about with companies, let's say that have very transactional natures of their product. Imagine a B2B workflow. And I always hear from their product managers, our people have to use it, so why would I bother improving the UX or making it better? It just needs to 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 would 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.
- [26:17]
A
So we used to think that usability and UX and design and delight is more like the lecture 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 want to be more satisfied with our B2B products. And when I talk about the light, remember what I said is that the light is an emotion and we need to make sure that we are addressing users emotions. And when I talk about emotion, I think doesn't really make sense to only consider B2C in that sense because if the product is used by human being then they deserve their emotion to be honored. So that's why I advocate more for the B2H space which is business to human. So here is my theory. My theory is that if, if the product is used by human, 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 most of my experience is 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 themselves. That's also one of the needs that is hundred thanks to Atlassian.
- [28:18]
C
For example, 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.
- [28:32]
A
So I got surprised by a few things. One thing was from GitHub, like when I think about GitHub, the light is definitely not the first thing that comes to my mind. I mean for sure. And I was talking to a product person there and they surprised me by telling me that they have a metric called Doof and D stands for the light. So the light, usability, utility and product market fit. And the way how they measured the light is exactly the way how I'm talking about the light. Now GitHub, this is not a feature thing but they are measuring the light on a regular basis and they have even a home crafted metric for that. The other thing that surprises me, maybe from Dropbot is that they have a product pillar which is 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 publish 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 projects. So these are becoming more and more best practices and it's definitely not a luxury or a nice to have.
- [30:15]
C
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 going to get disrupted by somebody who just makes it ten times simpler and gives that customer the feeling of, oh, we actually care about you. Like, I want to do this in a way that delights you. I want to do this in a way that makes your job easier because they use it every day in B2B. That's your whole life, right? That's your job.
- [30:46]
A
Absolutely. And there's one thing that I also try to make clear in the book, which I call the Beyond Confetti Effect. The reason why I wrote this book is, of course, to break the myth and make sure that we're not talking about the light 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 or concept is about. It's 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.
- [31:38]
C
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?
- [31:50]
A
Yes. So once, let's imagine you did Delight Grid 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'm 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 going to 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 site the other day I was giving a workshop day to a company who actually said hey look Nasrin, we have a delightful feature. You shake your phone and suddenly you have a snowflake falling. I mean, does it serve any need? 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 going to give you an example here, a concrete example where sometimes confetti like align with users 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 and my biggest goal is to get that superhost batch. I want to be a super host. I do my best. Every time I'm having a guest, I want to 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 confetti. And these are quite special moments because 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 excellent checklist. Number one is making sure that the feature is aligned with users needs as well as the business is 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 destructive? Is it going to interfere between the user and the experience and the product? Because we don't want the light to be something that interfere but rather to help and facilitate the experience. Like almost you don't feel it. These are the emotional sides 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 going to have any impact on me tomorrow or next month. So how can we make sure that we create products that do not harm in any way? And there are unfortunately plenty of examples that tried, 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 Delivero, the delivery company, actually tried to do like a delightful campaign, if I can say. And actually they send 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. So if you look 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 flower. Delivero can do that for you.
- [35:55]
C
I'm already shocked because I know where this is going exactly.
- [35:58]
A
Because this feature had the worst press. Deliverer had to apologize and. Exactly. You see, I think I don't even have to explain what it is. But the problem is actually everyone can experience this in the same way. Some might feel happy, other might feel grief or shocked or sorrow or whatever. We are not experiencing these kinds of things the same way. So this is a pure example of when you don't address inclusiveness at the right time at the right place.
- [36:24]
C
That's a great one. I think that's so important on a checklist. One of the things I want to ask you about too, is obviously AI. Like, there's always going to be an AI question in a podcast. So when you're thinking 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 delay, I'm excited.
- [36:47]
A
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 increased. 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's the. That's the challenge that I see. And that even makes 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's 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 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 size. So don't get it as a dramatic thing. I'm not saying like, AI is going to make things look like robotic. I'm just going to say this is going to accelerate functionality and our responsibility is to make sure that the emotions are part of this whole experience.
- [38:15]
C
I think. Beautifully put. I'm worried too, with the vibe coding. I'm already seeing it. I think it's fantastic to get certain things out the door, but it doesn't understand the user so well where it's going to invent new or delightful experiences for them or ways to do it right. It's just going to 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 going to happen is everybody's products are going to converge and start looking and feeling exactly the same. And that's why I think your topic, product delight, is that's going to be the edge, right? That's the thing that's going to make a difference when you're in a world where everything's the same.
- [38:53]
A
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 and 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 because 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'm saying relationship is because there is a real relationship between users and their tabs. For users, there is a connection. For certain users, it's a. It's something so important that they don't at all accept 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 a 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 emotion side, I love that.
- [40:49]
C
And Nasrin, my last question for you. If you were to go back in time and give your younger self some advice when you're first starting out in your career, what would it be?
- [40:57]
A
So when I started as a pm, I came from an IC word and even a very solo work. 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, I 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 and 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.
- [42:20]
C
Great advice for people out there listening. Nesrin, thanks so much for being on the podcast. If people want to go and get your book, where can they get it?
- [42:27]
A
Yes, Product Light is available on Amazon, all countries. They can also have information about the book in www.productdelightbook.com. they can of course reach out to me. I'm available on nistreen-angel.com if they have any question or if they want to share any delightful story with me, I would love. By the way, just for the anecdote, as soon as I started talking about this this Delight topic, I started receiving random delightful stories like either personal or professional ones. And I love listening to this. So if you have any delightful story you want to 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.
- [43:15]
C
Amazing. And we will link to all of those links that Nesrin just mentioned on our show notes@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 dearmelissa. 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.