From Spotify to Google: Mastering Delight for Success (With Nesrine Changuel, PhD ex Google, Spotify & Skype)

In this episode, Ben Maynard sits down with Nesrine Changuel, PhD, a distinguished product management professional with a rich history at leading tech companies, including Google, Spotify, and Skype. Nesrine is passionate about building innovative products that solve users' problems. Known for her self-management skills, excellent team and relationship-building abilities, and strong communication, Nesrine enjoys collaborating with others to create impactful products. She shares her incredible journey from a research engineer to becoming a product coach and delves into the importance of delight in product management. The conversation explores how delight can create a lasting competitive advantage, drive user loyalty, and enhance product shareability.

Learn more about Nesrine's coaching and advisory services for product teams. Nesrine on LinkedIn - https://bit.ly/4ctz0Sh

Key Highlights:

🔍 08:13 - The Importance of Delight in Product Development

🔍 10:26 - The Power Of Emotional User Connection

🔍 12:25 - Cracking The Code To Product Delight

🔍 20:18 - Strategic Product Development Decisions

🔍 28:22 - The Story Behind Spotify's Discover Weekly: The Importance of Familiarity

🔍 39:32 - Designing For Delight: Product Principles 

Discover practical insights on how to elevate your products by focusing on delight, balancing innovation with user comfort, and fostering a playful and safe organisational culture.

Join us as Nesrine Changuel shares her expert insights and learn how you can create products that not only meet user needs but also bring joy and surprise to their lives.

Reflective Questions for Listeners:

1. How can you create moments of joy and surprise in your product to delight your users?
2. What familiar elements can you incorporate into new features to make them more engaging?
3. How does your organisational culture support or hinder the creation of delightful products?

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends, colleagues, and network. Subscribe to the Product Agility podcast for more insightful conversations with industry experts.

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Transcript

0:00

Make you sure many people listening to this would probably jump into the command. They would say, yeah, delight is great, but risky if if you don't have a strategy to be clear here, any delightful feature that you bring will have to be aligned with your vision and have to be aligned with your strategy. It's not because it's delight that you can permit to completely deviate. I mean, I see people adding this kind of small, nice shiny interaction just to make the product more bright and more fun and enjoyable to use, But at the end of the day, it does not align with your strategy at all. So the way how I usually operate and that's how I crafted strategy in the past is like I add pillars and those pillars are my guiding policies, meaning that how do I want my product to look like or what are my principles when it comes to building product. And most of the time, I always added delight or one of the pillars of my strategy, meaning that I'm hoping that every product or every feature that I'm bringing into the product will bring a little bit of enjoyment to the users. Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast, the missing link between Agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies and stories from world class thought leaders and practitioners. Why I hear you ask? Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product is a deep rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. Hello and welcome once again to the Product Agility Podcast. My name is Ben Maynard, I am your host and today we are joined by Nazreen Shangal. Nazreen is someone who isn't A to the podcast because we were at Productize 2023. We've had a really brief, too brief conversation around the talk that she gave at which was focusing on what we focus particularly on delight. Now Nesreen has got an amazing career. She is a what is it? How many years did you say you've been in the product management world now about 12 years. Phenomenal experience. And if it's OK Nesreen, rather than have me tell everyone how awesome you are and your experience, would you mind giving people a bit of an insight into your, I would say, very esteemed career and your experience? Thank you, Ben, I will try to make a chart, even if it's hard. Let's start with the beginning. I started my career as an engineer. Like I had my engineer degree in France and then I got myself deeper in tech because I did a pH D and an industrial pH D. So I my first career role has been a research engineer. So I've been a research for about 5 years at the Nokia Bell Labs. And after a few years, I mean five years in research, I realized that I'm missing the reality of the things. Like in research, of course, you're prototyping, you're trying to bring new innovation and innovative solutions. But then when the idea is amazed, like the organization is amazed about the idea, they give it to the R&D and then you lose your baby. So I wanted to see what the what happened to the baby on the other side. So that's how I get to discover the product management. So I've been approached by Microsoft for a role of product manager at Skype in Sweden. Let's be honest, at that time I was in Paris, had no idea what PM is. I had no intention to go to Sweden and Skype. I mean, I was amazed by Microsoft Skype. So I said what could possibly go wrong? Let's go and explore and try it out. And let's be honest, I also felt in love with that, with that discipline, with that role. I realised that even I had no experience in the past in product management. The, the thing that I learned from my research time, like the exploration and the problem, getting in depth into the problem during the research helped me a lot in my PM path. So I've been a PM for Skype for about four years and we worked on features like introducing group video calls on mobile. Sounds like super old school now, but you need to remember those days where we couldn't do more than two people on the on the call. We also introduced live translation and so many other cool features at Skype and also on Lync and that get free branded to Teams now. So after a few years at Skype, I kind of came to hypothesis or conclusion at the time that video conference get into a mature state, it was a bit hard to innovate in that space. So I wanted to explore something that has been at the time extremely innovative and new. And so I went to Spotify. I mean, being in Sweden, I couldn't go anywhere else on Spotify, joined Spotify as the media PM. We worked on the media experience, meaning that you as a Spotify user, how can you have the best media experience independently of your device, independently of your network? How can you bet get the best experience over your time there? So we introduce the things like maybe you're familiar with the video podcast. So how to enhance audio through video? We introduced video clips and and so many other audio and video features that just was for the purpose of improving the experience. After four years at Spotify, I I mean, came the time for covet. It was covet time. And let's admit my hypothesis that the video conference tool that was mature turns out to be completely wrong. I mean, when we all found ourselves locked at home and having video calls with our doctors, our friends, our family, our colleagues, I mean, we realized that the tools that we had at the time had a lot of limitation for security and privacy and many other tools. So Google Meet at the time has been looking for PM to work specifically on that kind of challenges. And I joined Google four years ago to work on improving Google Meet and make it more compatible for the working from home environment. So again, just to reveal how how things go so fast, we introduced a background, replace background viewer, a video background. We introduced also features like noise cancellation. When you're working from home and you have a baby crying, how can you hide that misery? So that was a very fun and interesting time and the last two years has been. Part of Google Chrome. So I joined Google Chrome. It was also the very first time for me, but I left media. I mean if you notice like Skype, Spotify and Google need it involved a lot of my experience as a media PM. But then the last two years, I completely removed my hat of media and became like just PM. And I realized that being APM for whatever product work because at some point you gain so much experience as APM that you can apply to any type of product. So we worked on tab management and how can we help user navigate through their tabs on the Chrome app. And early this year, I left Google to become a product coach. So I'm 100% now dedicated to advise and coach product teams and leads and product manager, help them build better product that has higher impact and also hopefully delightful products. The list of companies you've worked out is phenomenal. Skype, Spotify and and Google, I mean, particularly, particularly, I mean, Skype was at one point that was a bigger name than it is now. But Skype was, yeah, it was an amazing product back in the day. And when you were talking about it reminded me of a gentleman called Amir Kaplan. Who we had on who worked for a company called Oovoo, which was another company about doing video calling and conferencing like way back in the day and he was their main product person for many years. Yeah, this is I love all those early technologies. So going back in time a little bit and just thinking about how how wonderful of them but how impactful they were so that your experience there's this sounds fantastic and Spotify and Google as well and now you're out there as a product coach and I think that's yeah, amazingly brave step and I think you're gonna smash it right. You've got an amazing experience. And if I think about what we're going to be talking about today is, yeah, I suppose elaborating and dive diving a bit deeper on the conversations that we were having when we met up in last October. So the working title I had for this was, yeah, a deep dive on delight because I'd like the alliteration of all the DS. And I think that if we're going to spend some time talking about that, the, the big question for me, and I think for our listeners as well, is that why? Why is delight important? And, and what, what do we actually mean? Like when we're talking about delight, brilliant word, but how the hell does it fit into this context? Indeed, Like it's a brilliant word, but also it's a complex word because we do have different understanding of what delight is. It turns out even to become a buzzword. Hey, let's delight our users. But let's first understand what does it mean to delight our users and what is it to bring delight into the product? So more than the buzzword, it's definitely a technique that help teams create lasting competitive advantage. I mean, if you see product today, most of them, they look quite similar. So how can you as an entrepreneur or as a product manager can distinguish like differentiate your product from others? So it's one of the best way to do so. And when I came across the definition, So what, what does it mean even to, to bring divide to users? And the easiest way to explain it is to show to your users. That behind the product there are real people as well. It's not a robot, it's not a machine that is offering you a solution. So the best way to explain delight is to show to the users that are real human being behind the product. It also has a more theoretical definition. So it's also an emotion. So if you think about the light, many scientists even studied the light, you need to emotion in order to create delight. Those two emotions are joy and surprise, meaning that if you combine a moment where you express joy and surprise, you are delighted. So if you go with this definition, it's also about creating moments within the product journey for the users where they can experience joy and surprise at the same time. I'm not saying it's easy, but it's beautiful and it's very, very, very impactful. So now if we get to the why it's important, I think it's very important for different reason. And I want to talk at least of two of them. The first one, since it's emotion, then creating emotional connection with the users is extremely rewarding. Maybe you heard about a study that has been published a couple of years ago at the business Harvard Review. The study actually studied the difference between users who are highly satisfied versus users who are emotionally connected. And they found out that users who are emotionally connected are 50% more loyal, 50% more able and willing to use your product versus the highly satisfied 1. Ben, I'm not even talking about the users who are not satisfied. I'm even comparing the top of the top here. So it's, it's, it's clear that connecting with your users at the emotional level is extremely rewarding. So that's the one thing. The second thing is that think about it yourself, like when you are connected emotionally and when you are surprised while using a technical product, you want to share it, you want to share it with others. I mean, if you're surprised about how great the product is and how fulfilled you feel while using it, you want to share it with others. So we see a clear trend and correlation between delightful product and the shareability within the environment. So it has a huge impact on the word of mouth. So those delightful feature will allow people to talk more about your product and share it with their friends. And guess what? The more they share about your product, the more your product will become successful. And no, now that's what we want to achieve. There's an app I use called Runner, which definitely ticks those boxes for me. I'm always telling people to use it, and I think it does. It has surprised me and it does bring me joy. And I'm just now reflecting on the podcast as well. What can we do to surprise people and bring people joy in this episode to give them some delights? If you're listening to this and you are going to be surprised and delighted when you hit that moment by surprise and joy and you hit delight, tell someone about it. Share the episode because why not share some of that delight? Now you, you give a very compelling pitch there. And there's room for why delight is important and, and also the, the constituent parts of it. And what I'm interested in just a little bit is when we talk about joy and surprise, like, is there any way that you've found to measure that? Or at least when you feel hypothesizing that something is gonna give that combine those two things into those moments. Like how do you, how do you hypothesize that? How, how do you discover those moments? Great question. So customers are considered delighted with the product or service or whatever. It's usually when the product aligns with their motivation. You see, there is a huge correlation between the delight is happening versus the motivation that drives the users. And it's all about trying to identify what help the user fulfill their often unknown, sometime like or unconscious desire from the users. Like the users themselves don't even know what motivates them emotionally. So the hard job for every product manager is to try not only to identify what users want from a functional perspective, what do they want to achieve from a practical aspect. But we try to dig further and further and try to get to what do motivate our users on the emotional level. You see, it's not only about what do they want to achieve, but what do they want to feel? What do they want to experience during those moments? I want to share a very concrete example here. So during my time at Google Meet, when we worked on how to improve Google Meet for the working from home environment, it was Kovid time. And I mean, we all found ourselves most of the day on video calls, which came with with a lot of emotional demotivation. I mean, I spoke about emotional motivation, but also there is a negative emotion that came sometime by doing a certain habit. And those emotional demotivation where the boredom, the fact that you bored from having so many video calls during the day, it could be also the lack of interaction, lack of engagement. I mean, I'm not engaged enough. It's very different from when you're in a room and you can engage at anytime. So we studied this demotivation. We try to understand what really creates this boredom, like the boredom aspect, where does it come from and how can we reduce it in a way that we make it a bit less boring? Let me share a funny story, or at least an interesting story about studying boredom. When when we start thinking about boredom. I made the mistake of thinking that the opposite of boredom is having fun, that I'm having fun. Yeah, I'm not bored. I'm having fun, which is a mistake. It is a very big mistake. I mean, think about it. If you go to Disneyland three times in a row within a week, I mean, you, you will hate. I had that experience one time because I was forced to. But honestly, the third time I was like what am I doing here? So if if it's about fun, then I mean we will always enjoy it. So it's not fun. It's not the opposite of boredom. However, by trying to dig further and further into what is the opposite of boredom, we found that that we are not bored when we are engaged and when we feel alive, meaning that we feel belonged and we feel part of something and we bring something useful into that environment. So I'm trying to tell the story just to share that out of this study, we came out with a feature that's called Google Meet reactions. Maybe you experienced it or tried it sometime. It's like when you see these bubbling hearts or waving hands and this kind of nice interaction that could happen during meet call. It's much less invasive than and muting yourself and saying, I do agree or or thank you. I mean, just send this in a, in a more natural way than in a comment or by unmuting yourself. So that was an example how we discovered a feature out of emotional demotivation aspect, something you said there. And just to clarify, so we're saying that it was about finding boredom, right? And then looking to, I suppose, avoid or yeah, not reduce. We don't reduce boredom. We just want to avoid boredom. And you said there's about engagement, there's belonging, there's that kind of connection. And I just could be thinking because I one of the things that's always in my mind deliver a product that we're building is around things like TripAdvisor particularly. Like people seem to love providing reviews and I'd always thought people were doing it for reasons of ego or having the awareness right. But now when you said that being useful, I thought, well, maybe actually people are leaving the reviews and given their feedback because they want to feel useful rather than anything else. You just really got your thinking that, I mean, you need to be aware that people do things for different motivations and that's also the job of a PM to try to identify these different motivation within different personas. I mean, one of the mistakes that could easily be made is that you make a hypothesis that everyone want to be useful. You're correct. I mean, some want to be useful, some want to do it for the ego's eye, some would do it for just for the visibility or whatever reasons. And this is something that you need to study. If you ask your users why you're doing it, they may not give you the right answer, but the more you observe this kind of behavior, the more you realize what kind of feeling and emotion does it surface out of doing such a thing. By the way, there are two type of emotions. There is the personal emotion, meaning that what do I want to feel while doing this or using this product. The other type of emotion is the social emotion, meaning that what do I want the other to feel about me using the product. I mean, it's a huge difference, but at the same time, both matter. Maybe those who are writing commands, they want to be seen and perceived by others and their community as the active advisors and and provider. I'm helpful. I'm useful. It's not only for themselves, but for the community. That's interesting. When I think of the notifications I get in Google Maps because there are times that I have put photos on Google Maps because actually I wanted to be useful because I'd had a great experience or bad experience or just because it's like at my friend's restaurant and an amazing time there. So I wanted to kind of share to help them generate business. And the notifications I get in Google Maps are always like this. Many people have found your photo useful. By the way, since you're talking about Google Map, one of the nice feature that by the way, I didn't notice until recently, it's when you're going home. Let's imagine that you're not going to another decision. You're going to your home place and you already registered that place as home because you can do it on Google Map. When you arrive, it doesn't say you reached your destination as any other place you're going to. When you go home, you get a nice pop up, say welcome home. And these are like kind of nice delightful moment that just show that we distinguish between what you value and what we don't necessarily value as. So yeah, it's about what we value. And it's about as it's kind of building that maybe a connection with this inanimate kind of product almost. And so we talked about discovering delight and we're talking about boredom. In your career, what's the the most unexpected place you've kind of uncovered the opportunity for delight? OK, the expected place where we discovered the light. Actually, it could be almost anywhere. Let's first try to agree on one thing. As long as the product is used by a human being like by a person, that product deserve a little bit of delight. Those people who will be using your product will will need or will will enjoy these kind of small things. And for example, we introduced delights in different places in the product. However, some do have more impact on the users than others because it depends on the moment where it show up. Is it the peak moment or is it like a moment where the users do not express any feeling during that time? So you need to be extremely mindful about when to bring that those moment of delight in the product. It doesn't have to be a lot of them. It just have to be small pieces that are put there carefully and they are put there because we believe the user will enjoy them. So if I take a different angle on this, and I think what some people may be wondering is that if you're in a situation where you are looking to get feature parity or you're looking at your competition and they've implemented something, which is then you're looking at and you're wondering, oh, OK, people seem to really like that. What advice would you give to product people, product coaches or maybe even aspiring product people in that situation? Is it just a case at all? Let's copy that what they're doing or would you then take a different approach? I mean, I, I never considered the copying as a strategy, by the way. And, and I love how most of the company I've been working on maybe because I had the luxury to work on only like a huge company, they never considered a competitor as a source of innovation or source of new features. I will give you a very nice example when I work at that Spotify, like Spotify did not consider like YouTube Music or Amazon or whatever as as competitor. However, they consider the radio as a competitor. Do you see like the one of the reason why people don't go on Spotify in their car is because they found it probably easy to turn on the radio then turning on Spotify. So it's much better and much more insightful to think that way rather than trying to try it and copy. And those competitor build those feature for a specific reason for a specific need that they thought that would make sense for their users. The best strategy, because you asked about what's the best strategy, is to always include in your reason research and all your interviews a rubric or like a column about what my users is feeling in this moment. Like when you're doing let's say a live interview with the user is trying to use your product for live version or session. Try not only to list what they are doing, but also what do they feel. Are they feeling anxious? Are they feeling lost? Are they feeling maybe bored because it's too long? And these are very, very valuable inside that you can bring in later on and try to say, OK, this sounds like a a valley moment. How can I lift them a little bit up? Beautiful. Thank you for that. I totally agree on the Spotify and the radio comment because I think there are people that I've worked with and, and I've experienced this myself, where people think they've got, and they may well have a really unique brand new type of idea. And you may ask them and say, well, who's your competition? And they to them and say, we haven't got any competition. We're the only people doing this. When actually the question isn't that you haven't got that direct competition. What you have to think about is where else are people going to go to fulfil whatever need are looking to fulfil. And with Spotify, seeing radio as a competition for me makes perfect logical sense because I get in the car and I put on the radio and sometimes I put on Spotify. It depends what kind of mood I'm in. So I think this is a really interesting thing is that maybe your your competition isn't the people that are doing exactly the exactly the same thing as you, but they are people. Or services or products which your users are going to turn to to fill that gap in that fill that need, whatever that need might be, even if it isn't exactly the same as you. Yeah, like, think about it as what do my users use as an alternative, not what do my users use as another product. Is that what are the alternative for Google Meet? I would say the rooms like meeting rooms are alternative of course because imagine if we are all working from offices. Do you even need Google me? Ironically, that's the biggest examples where there is a meeting in an office and people still join from their desks. Oddly, yes, that's becoming a habit after code. Excellent. So we've we've spoken about the definition of delight and why we might want delight and we covered things. Yeah, but I love what you said. Delight means you get a lasting competitor advantage. We were like you mentioned about Robert Pritchik and the two emotions of joy and surprise creating moments that get that they creating those delightful moments for people. You spoke with that HBR have a business review article about satisfied versus emotionally connected users. Actually the real significant difference that makes. And now we're not talking about Dissatis, right? Uh. Customers use this here we're talking about the the top and how we can build on that as well and that amazing statistic. I'm going to have to dig out that article. We spoke about boredom and then how we can combat boredom and actually boredom. The opposite of boredom isn't fun. It's about trying to find ways to engage and connect and collect sense of belonging and perhaps usefulness for our users. But it all kind of really just feels down to really let's understand our users and understand whether those dips are in the emotional journey for them, as well as the kind of more kind of standard, the journey through the products which we can see of our eyes. We want to know what's happening in their their hearts and their heads at the same time now. So we spoke a little bit maybe how we can discover those lightful features. So what are some of the best practices, rules or principles and for really making this a core part of our approach to product management? I do think there are a couple of them. So it depends how how long we want to go through this section. But I mean, if we first start by understanding what's delight is, that's already great. But in order to put it in place, it has to follow quite strict and clear principles to make them successful. The very first one is that as in, let me try to explain this with an example. Like again, during COVID time, something that I personally missed a lot was going to restaurants. So I mean, that was a very nice moment of the week and I always wanted to go out for a nice meal. But since we are all like not allowed to do that anymore, I bring to myself, brought to myself a new habit and new passion, which is cooking. So I started to learn how to cook new and nice meal that we can imitate like a restaurant environment hope. And while doing that, I realized that chef. Do not season the food in the beginning or at the end of the preparation. By looking at great chef, you realize that chef do season their food throughout the entire process of the cooking. Of course they taste, they try to see if it's good or not. They add they, I mean, of course some, some spices has to be in the beginning, some have to be at the end. So there is like even the science behind where you put the, the spices to make something delightful that you will end up enjoying at the end. So now think about it from a product perspective, especially that I said earlier that delight has a component of surprise. It has to be a surprise. Does it make sense that you just do delight in the beginning and then it's over? I mean, you would be surprised in the beginning and then the surprise goes away. So the first principle I would say it's the continuous delight. Delight has to be something in your road map in a continuous way. You need to keep surprising your users, at least throughout the year. Maybe if you're not able to do that every quarter, but try to bring 2 delightful feature a year, that's already a bare minimum. So I would say the first one would be continuous delight. By the way, in Google Meet, when we introduced a background replace, we first just introduced a static background and then we introduced a video background and then we introduced an immersive background where you like, You don't necessarily have the background, but you have the lighting as well. And then we introduce an AI based background. So this is an, a pure example of how can you introduce delight and maintain delight. So your users will always connect with you. They are always willing to know what's new within. So then there's some incremental work you can do onto an existing feature to help maintain and enhance that delight overtime. Rather than just thinking that we've released, we've released this feature, we've achieved some of the delight, Now let's find another feature. There's an incremental element to that as well, Yes. And the second principle, which for me also as important as the first, is the familiarity. So we're human being. Lie to ourself and say that we love innovation and new things, the reality of things, we only love what's familiar to us. I mean, think about it one more time. Like if you try to think about what really what do you enjoy most, you will find out that you will enjoy things that sounds familiar for you. So even if the marketing campaign and all those video people are telling you, you hear the word innovation and new product, etcetera, what we will end up loving and using most are the those where we are familiarized with or we know what it's about. And I want to share like a very interesting story here because when I worked at Spotify was a time when Spotify introduced Discover Weekly. I will share a story. I don't know if you heard about Discover Weekly, the story behind Discover Weekly. It's a nice example to share why familiarity is important. So Discover Weekly, as you know, you have a playlist created for you based on your taste, so that every week you have a new playlist that you can enjoy. And the idea behind creating Discover Weekly, and that's the original idea, was to create a playlist of songs that you never heard of, the something that you never came across, but that are supposed to meet your taste. So based on what you have been listening in the past, we think that those track will be something that you will enjoy. And when the Discover Weekly released, it got like a tremendous success. From a number perspective, it was a big success. And a couple of days later, here comes the nice part. They realized that there is a bug in the system. They realized that the playlist that's created is not completely new, but from time to time there are some tracks that are added to the playlist that has been already listened to by the users. So when the engineers discovered this bug, they immediately removed it and remediated and bring it to the original idea where all tracks has to be new. And guess what? Numbers get significantly lower. Interesting after fixing the bug. And that interesting experience LED us to know that actually users love Discover Weekly because from time to time they find their track and they relate to it's familiar for them. So it starts becoming Rediscover Weekly rather than Discover Weekly kind of exactly. So they, they brought the bug again like they, they went back to the buggy version because actually users love the buggy version, not the the complete new version of the Discover wiki. So I'm just sharing this example just to share that when you are bringing some delight, it doesn't have to be completely new or something that the user has never seen before. By the way, the other example is Google Glass when Google Glass got released. Like it wasn't a success at all. Like people didn't even know what they can do with it. But see, now when Apple Vision Pro released their, their, their, their new device, it had much, much higher success. You know why? Because it's becoming familiar. I mean, people have seen it in the past, OK, They've seen it. They didn't know what to do with it. But now they've seen it and they know what to do with it. So I find it fascinating because when you mentioned familiarity and you have to bear with me whilst I try and explain this because I am, this is a partially formed thought and I might talk myself out of it as I go through. But when I think of familiarity and I think of say a new feature which is being released. So I kind of think of the carne model and things become like a threshold, the types of things that people just expect. And the first of us, what I thought you were saying, we released a feature, it delights people and then after a while people just become to accept it. But actually kind of what you were saying there was that even if a new feature, if it can serve up something new, but also serve up something which is familiar as well, it allows us to kind of create an emotional hook in there somewhat. So it isn't necessarily about the feature itself being familiar. It can be a brand new feature and things in a very different way, but sometimes serving up with something familiar within that as well as something a new experience can help people engage with it. Really interesting. OK, so all of this has sounded like a palacea, right? Like this lovely, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or something, right? And we should all go there and we'll all be delighted and we'll all be dancing to like grooves in the heart by delight or something like that. I mean, what a world to live in. Surely there's some risks of doing this? Yes, yes, it's a bit risky because as I said, when you're touching into users emotion, you're never sure what trigger emotion for you is not necessarily what trigger emotion for me. What make me laugh is not necessarily what makes you laugh. So you need to be one of the strongest. I would say principle that we didn't touch in the previous section and could be a high risk is if you're not inclusive, every delightful feature that you bring and you think is gonna be amazing for your users think is it inclusive enough? Does it work for all users and personas and all emotions and all needs? I, I do have an example here like recently, maybe late last year or something like Apple updated the iOS 17 into a new version and the new iOS came with a new feature where if you do a gesture like this, or I don't know exactly the gesture, but some gestures, it will trigger some, some effects, like it will trigger some maybe fireworks or some bubbling hearts. I mean, the intention is great. It's supposed to bring delight, et cetera. But what did happen is that right after the introduction deduction of this feature, there have been a lot of articles saying that I've got an embarrassing moment with my therapist today. I was showing my finger to the therapist and then like fireworks started like during the therapy session. I mean, this is a pure exam. I do 100% agree Apple is doing maybe is the best when it in terms of bringing delight to their users, but they are doing so much that they are sometimes finding themselves into situation where it's risky or they are missing out in some cases and that specific example shows that they miss it. A type of persona or a type of use of the product. Of course, they had to later on adjust the iOS, so it's not turning on by default anymore. But it was like a triggered by the users, but it was a bit too late. Some embarrassing moment happened already. So I would say Zivi, like diversification is extremely important when you're dealing with delight. So they're not assuming that we know our users inside and out and really trying to understand some of those edge cases I suppose as well, because we just don't know. I mean, that's why I wonder because in some cultures, you know, that the that thumbs up isn't a universal good thing. I know there are some cultures where actually it's it's it's a rather offensive thing to do. And I'm not sure if how well that would then transfer across cultures. Yeah, that's a very concrete example. And there's another one that Airbnb like has been through, by the way, which is like when you're booking a place through Airbnb, usually you used to. That's not the case anymore because it has a lot of buzz. You used to get like some nice messaging, like, hey, enjoy your trip, I hope you're getting a great time, et cetera. And then at some point there was a user who wrote to Airbnb and said, actually, I received these kind of messages while I booked this Airbnb because I'm attending the funeral of my grandparents. What kind of enjoy your trip are you talking about? So I mean, it was so true when you hear the message like, yeah, she's she's right. So from that time, you need to think about what are all the cases that the users are using the product for and instead of only thinking about the light. And now I'm touching a much, much bigger topic. The best way is not only to focus on the light, but to focus on all emotions. All emotions matter. Maybe you need to try to trigger other type of emotion, hopefully not the negative ones, of course, with frustration and anxiety and all that kind of things. But be empathetic and try to understand what kind of emotion user is going through at this moment. Because I says the danger is if people are listening and then they're going back to their daily work and they are saying, oh, well, hold on a minute. Like we, we're going to be doing this. But what if this edge case happens and this is the wrong message to send? The danger is that then what that might lead people to doing is kind of homogenising everything and playing it so safe that no one's delighted because you're not taking any risks. And so it isn't OK. We're not saying take the safe road and you know, it's about understanding the risks instead and perhaps find a way to understand. And I'm not sure this is a throwaway thing. I'm not saying this is a good or a bad idea, but if Airbnb were to say, what is the purpose of your trip? And if you know they're going for a good time, then you can send them the good time e-mail. And if it, and if they don't put anything or just say, I'd rather not save it, you don't send them anything, but at least then you're, you're still kind of delighting those that are going for a good time and you're not upsetting the people that aren't going there for a much more serious reason. So we're not saying that never send the never send the e-mail saying having a good time. We're just saying actually make sure you know which users you're sending it to and, and specifically which emotions you're trying to invoke within that. So when you have something to actually then test against, yeah, yeah. Another example just happened to me quite often. But one time it was also awkward. When it happened to me, I was running because the the school called me, Hey, your son is not feeling well. You have to come and pick him up right now. And I was wearing an Apple Watch. So I was really running because I was scared and I it was like a shaping in my waist. And it says, hey, Congrats, you looks like you're exercising. It's like, yeah, yes, I am. I'm not exercising. I'm just running because I'm in trouble. So it's, you see, delight is great, but you need to be extremely mindful about those moments when you are building them for everyone. Yeah, totally. I mean, I'm getting old, right? I'm getting the word cantankerous with things. You know, I get grumpy, but I find delight very hard to find at this age. I'm joking. No, I find that like. The night is harder to find, I think as you get older, I think. And so, so there's, there's someone we're talking about. There's the risks of it, I suppose, knowing your users. It really does come down to you really knowing your users. And if you've got a grumpy old cantankerous podcast host who doesn't like some of the things that other people do, but then then you, you, you wouldn't push them in certain directions. But everyone is different, right? Everyone's unique. And I suppose then what the other challenge there is, is it is understanding your users, but also, and This is why I like so gesture behind me because I've got the radicals book here, but radical product thinking, because what I really loved about that was it said like, seriously, who's the one person whose world you want to change? Everyone else is part of the the strategy for getting there. But who's that one person whose world you want to change? And I think that is so very important because you can be in a situation where you could probably afford to piss off a few people on the on the periphery here if it isn't going to get you to that ultimate vision. So what's, I know this wasn't one of the part of the structures that we had, but maybe I could phrase it in a way that is part of the structure. Is there a risk that you can't delight if you don't have a good vision? For what you for your products, this is actually a very good point because I'm pretty sure many people listening to this would probably jump into the command. They would say, yeah, delight is great, but risky. If, if, if you don't have a strategy. And to be honest and clear, let's be clear here, delight, any delightful feature that you bring will have to be aligned with your vision and have to be aligned with your strategy. I mean, it's not because it's delight that you can permit and allow yourself to completely deviate. I mean, I see people adding these kind of small, nice shiny interaction just to make the product more bright and more fun and enjoyable to use. But at the end of the day, it does not align with your strategy at all. So the way how I usually operate and that's how I crafted strategy in the past is like I add pillars and those pillars are my guiding policies, meaning that how do I want my product to look like or what are my principles when it comes to building products. And most of the time I always added delight as one of the principle of my strategy. Or one of the pillars of my strategy, meaning that I'm hoping that every product or every feature that I'm bringing into the product will bring a little bit of enjoyment to the users. Of course, you can add other pillars like effortless, easy to use, whatever, but delight has to have a very permanent place in your strategy. Something we didn't get deep into is that there are usually two type of delights. There is what we call the surface delight, and there is the deep delight. The surface delight are those nice animation that you see from time to time in websites or apps that will bring like a small joyful moment. For example, the other day was my hurt, my birthday, and while wearing my Apple Watch, there was a small balloon pop up saying happy birthday. Yes, yeah, yeah, why not? I mean, I like it. This is a surface delight and this is honestly the easiest delight that people could bring into their product. Just require nice interaction and good designers to bring in some nice animations. The real delight is what we call usually the deep delight. It's when you already satisfy the functional need and the usability need and you're adding on top something that will be will make you the use of the feature more enjoyable. And I compare it to like, it's like a personal assistant next to you that will help you do the work in easier way without interfering, I mean, without animation or whatever. And the best example I would share here is like smart composing. So when you're writing an e-mail and you get these great suggestions to finish your sentence and all you have to tap is tab, tab, tab. And your e-mail is already ready. This is a nice deep delight example for me because what you wanted to do during that moment is to write an answer. And Gmail helped you writing that answer in a nice way and easy and effortless way. So the best way here is to focus more on the deep delight. And the deep delight is achieved when you're having in your MVP, the usability, the feasibility and the delight of this time. Great advice. Really got me thinking giving. We've got here the planning session I have later. I'll be mentioning some of this now we are getting towards the end of our time, sadly. But there is one topic which we haven't quite touched on, which I think was one that I actually got quite excited about when we were talking before we hit record. But just around culture and can cultures, organizational cultures that are not delightful, like can they? Can those organisations then create delightful products? I'm a strong believer. Again, this is me and I 100% believe that delightful product are usually the reflection of a delightful culture. So if you are having a delightful culture within your organization, that will reflect. What does it mean? A delightful culture means that you have a culture that empower employee to show their creativity, you show their curiosity and everything they want to add to the product in an innovative way. Spotify is known by its five values like they have 5 values. And those values, ours are almost in all walls within the offices and you can even Google them and find them on the web. One of the value is called playfulness. One of the value in addition to creativity and all the others values is playfulness. And don't get me wrong, playfulness here is not about having games in the office or having a ping pong table in the office or whatever. It's about having a lighthearted attitude and doing things in the sake of doing them and without mistakes or without judgement, meaning that everyone that Spotify is of course empowered to take initiatives and try things that will fail. Of course, they will fail most of the time without any judgment. So psychological safety was extremely important as important piece of the culture of work at Spotify. By the way, we use it to have like all hands every month. And there was slides for what we achieved what we did great. This slide specific slide for what failed, what we failed on the thing that completely failed And when this thing got introduced for the very first time, people didn't felt extremely comfortable like feeling in that slide. So what my manager at the time did was that he took the initiative of starting sharing his failures. Like every month he was the only one sharing, hey, I failed in this and this. And by you doing that couple of times, it turns out that people became much more comfortable sharing their failures. And it's a gold source of learning and knowledge. So I would say that's one example. The other example is that again, that's Spotify. We do have a lot of hack days, but every month we have two hack days per month. At the end of the year, we have a hack week. And these days, I mean those my preferred days of course of the year, but those days are where people and employee are empowered to work on things that they love and they would love to bring to the product by themselves without constraint or whatever. So hack days are the birthplace. Of so many cool and amazing features that made the success of Spotify like podcast daylight and even the rapt rapid feature that is becoming viral like every everyone is is sharing their rapid feature at the end of the year. By the way, rapid by itself increases the download of the app in 2022 by 20%. So rapid doesn't came for any functional reason. There's no functional reason why would you need functionally and practically to get rapid feature. It's just for the emotional need, especially the social emotional need to share to the world and to your friend. Hey, this is what I've been listening to this year and people love it, they do. But I wonder if the world's changed. Things have moved on so much. Before, when we were sharing things when I was younger, you'd be picking up the phone and you'd be talking about things and there'd be in the playground. Or when we kind of went out on a Friday night, you'd bump into people and sure, we've shared stuff. But now I think sharing has become so much part of just how we do things and there's so much more we're able to share. I suppose that there are kind of larger waves of change that happen globally. And in order to find delight, we need to stay on those waves of change, you know, because I think if we were just not appreciating, for example, how much certain people do love to share stuff and making it easy to share. It's just similar. It's word of mouth. But in the, in the modern age, absolutely. There's even a very and it's a study as well that have been done in that is there is a high correlation between. Sharing and surprise, I mean, if you are surprised in a good way, the first thing that comes to my mind, I want to share it to others. I mean, I love it. I need to share it to my friends. Sharing is the best marketing campaign. I mean, there is nothing better than having your users sharing your product. I mean, whatever marketing you do, it will already it. You will beat it by the sharing. Well, maybe just to take this opportunity, if you listen to this episode and you've enjoyed it, please share it with LinkedIn, share it with your friend. I don't know, send someone a link over WhatsApp, whatever it takes. But sharing is fun and sharing is rewarding. I mean, I think that I'm, as I mentioned earlier on in the episode, an app called Runner that I use RUNNA. And I'm, I'm trying to see if I can entice someone from Runner to come on the podcast because the two founders have just been put on the Forbes 30 under 30 list. They've done phenomenal. And it's the only app I've ever found where actually from a health and fitness perspective, if I feel it's, it's almost tailored for me. It's tailored for my goals and, and it helps me along with and I get so much delight from doing it. And it was soon as someone says to me, oh, I'm thinking about doing this. But I've tried runner and I'm always pushing on people because it gives me a lot of joy and it's made a big difference for me. And I think they are. Yeah, for me, that's one of the. Such a great example and yes, it feels like promotion. I'm not paid for this. I just love it. There's there's not been an app that's kept me running and improving for so long about injury before we kind of kind of draw it to a close. Is there, is there anything that hasn't been said that you'd like to say, anything that we can add? I would say again, delight is definitely a mindset. We absolutely need to be aware that it's important. Sometime we get the question, how can I convince my manager that this is something that we need to work on? And the very best example is the best way is to share examples how people managed to do it and how that impacted impacted their business. But then the second part that we didn't at all discuss it about is how can we prioritize the light? Because in the reality of thing and I 100% sure that most of people listening to us will resonate with that. It's the difficulty is not about discovering delightful feature. I'm pretty sure that most of people listening today have a very long bag or backlog of delightful features waiting for them. It's just about prioritization. How the hell can I get this done? I mean, with all those functional features and all those practical feature, how can I squeeze in some delight into there? And it's not easy. It's only doable if you're convinced. And the rule that worked for me, and I'm pretty sure it would work for anyone listening to us today, is the rule of Seventy 2010. So what's the rule of Seventy 2010? So everything you bring to the product will have to have 70% of your effort related to metric movers. So most of the feature that you should be working on, 70% of them should move your metrics, meaning that it will increase your adoption, increase your attention in your engagement, whatever. 20% of them should come from users, meaning that feature request, these are what your users are explicitly asking for you before. And 10% should be for those sparkling moment, those moment of delight, those moment that will make your users more emotionally connected with your product. If you put this in mind every time you do your road map or your quarterly planning, think about that. Do I have enough delight feature? Do I at least have 10% of delightful feature into my road map? It's not too much, but it's so impactful. That really really solid practical advice there so 70% things that they can choose to metrics things you can be you've already made an articulation you're going to hold yourself to account for 20% coming from the users and 10% looking at those delightful moments fantastic look at that What a way to end it. Thank you so much for taking this time to share this with our listeners and and to talk to me. It's been lovely to spend a a nice chunk of time of you rather than that fleeting moment in in Portugal for people who want to discover more about you, then is the best place. I'm always responsible. Fantastic. Well, we will be promoting this episode on LinkedIn. We'll make sure that we tag you in all the promotion that we do. But when you see it pop up, listeners, make sure you like make sure you share, share, share the post with somebody. They spread, spread some of our love because there is so much useful information in here, which I think is even if you're not in product management, I'm sure you can reflect on all of this and see just how many times are you delighted on a day with the apps that you use, with the products that you use. And perhaps if you're not getting delight from something you're using, maybe it's time to find something else. Nezrin, again, thank you so much for your time and everyone. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back again, this time next week.