[00:00:00] Nesrine Changuel: What do you want your customers to feel while using the product? Do you want them to feel like energized? Do you want them to feel proud? Do you want them to feel like in control? What do you want them to feel?

[00:00:20] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.

[00:00:33] VO: How do you build a habit forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn.  You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing. 

[00:00:46] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics, and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.

[00:00:57] Andrew Michael: Hey, Nesrine. Welcome to the show. 

[00:00:59] Nesrine Changuel: Hi, Andrew. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:01] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Nesrine is the founder of Product Excellence and the Product Management Career Lab Director at ESSEC Business School. Prior to Product Excellence, Nesrine held senior product roles at Google, Spotify, and Microsoft. So my first question for you today is, what does the future of product management look like?

[00:01:22] Nesrine Changuel: Yes, it's an up-to-date question because I'm hearing a lot of people saying the role of product management is being changed with AI taking over a lot of tasks from product managers. I want to share a little bit of optimism. So I've been a product manager for almost 15 years, and I know exactly what a good product manager is supposed to do to be valued in the company, but also to create standout products.

[00:01:46] Nesrine Changuel: A product manager is supposed to handle like two pieces. One is of course the discovery part, like how can we make sure that we are building the right thing, why it matters for the business, why it matters for the customers. And of course, there is a second part, which is the delivery part. And a lot of organizations today like call the role product owner, and product owner, to be honest, is the operational part, which is the delivery part, not the discovery part.

[00:02:11] Nesrine Changuel: So from my perspective, with a lot of AI tools being rising nowadays and helping in our tasks, it's mainly helping these tasks to be executed in the delivery part, not the discovery part. Meaning that our skills, when it comes to understanding human being, understanding user's behavior, we're going to remain dependent on our skills and our performance. That's the discovery part that will remain. However, AI tools is going to make the delivery much easier and maybe more performant in my perspective. So maybe if you are a product owner, purely product owner, a lot of your tasks could be enhanced or even sometimes replaced with some AI tools. However, real product managers will require their skills for many, many years to go.

[00:03:01] Andrew Michael: Many years. Yeah. And I saw as well, I think in a previous role, you were a technical product manager as well. I think that was maybe at Microsoft, if I remember correctly? Yeah. So I think also like from a product management perspective, I think those that were a little bit technical now become like super technical and can do a lot more than previous, I think are in a much better advantage... advantageous position now to be able to ride this next wave. 

[00:03:26] Andrew Michael: But yeah, I definitely think like there is, I think this word taste now has been used a lot by people. And so it's the one of the things that I think like, even when you're asking something like a Claude or ChatGPT, you're getting generalized things back, but having just a little bit of taste really allows you to like enhance the outputs and the decisions even as well that are made in these documents that you may be producing as product managers and product owners.

[00:03:51] Andrew Michael: One thing I forgot to mention as well is that you're also the author of the Product Delight book. And actually, that was one of the things that caught my attention the most, to be honest, when I reached out to you, because I really believe as well, like now at this stage, it's an end of the era of like MVPs. And then we went to like MLPs, which is like minimal level products. But now I think like, in order to stand out, you really need to create delight. So like, what drove you to write the book? Like, give us a little premise of like, the context and why you believe delight is important.

[00:04:23] Nesrine Changuel: Absolutely. So let's be honest, I had the luxury and the privilege to work on building products that are globally used and loved from the start. Like I'm talking about the real Skype, the early days Skype that everyone loved and of course used a lot. And then I moved to Spotify. And then during COVID, I've been working as a product lead at Google Meet and recently Googled Chrome. And of course, like everyone in the room, usually in the conference, they at least have used, maybe if not very likely all of them. So this is something of course, it comes with heavy responsibility.

[00:04:57] Nesrine Changuel: But to be honest with you, I also noticed that throughout this career and working for these companies, there was something in common. Like when I reflected and I said like, what was in common between these successful products? It was mainly the fact that while working on this product, we did not only focus on the functional part of the product. Of course, the product has to function. It has to meet what users need from a functional perspective. However, there was another component that was essential in building the entire experience, which is understanding the emotional needs of users and then building the experience in the way that it meets this emotional experience.

[00:05:34] Nesrine Changuel: So what I found quite interesting is that the very best products are those who actually create and design an experience that blends the two dimensions together. Meaning that you of course honor the functional need. I want to send an SMS. I want a book of light. I want to listen to music, but also in a way that meets the user's emotional motivators. Meaning that I want to feel safe. I want to feel in control. I want to get like a... whatever, by the way, emotion. 

[00:06:01] Nesrine Changuel: Emotions could be different from a product to another, but your role as a product builder is to understand these emotional motivators and then build an experience that align with those. So that's the concept of delight. Delight means that we are building a product that honor for those two dimensions. And I guess these days are becoming more and more... building for delight is becoming more and more important, particularly in these days, because like the technical barrier is getting lower. Almost like everyone can build product in days and weeks. However, this is mainly the functional part. And if we do not pay attention to the emotional part, product will be just like random objects.

[00:06:39] Andrew Michael: Yeah. So I'm actually a huge believer of this as well. I think like the things are being compressed in our timelines have been compressed. And so like going the extra mile now is really bringing that delight. And as you mentioned, like understanding, like how to drive emotions with our products. So like, maybe you can give us a little bit of a practical example though, and like walk us through what a typical one would look like company.

[00:07:01] Nesrine Changuel: Sure. So it's hard to pick an example here, but let's pick one. Let's pick Chrome. Okay. Chrome is a very famous product. Everyone is at least using it in a good and bad ways as well. Why I'm saying this, because as a product manager working on Google Chrome, I was focusing on tab management on mobile. And as a product manager, we also noticed that a lot of our customers do have hundreds of tabs open on their mobile. This is not great. Of course, from a technical perspective, it takes memory, it slows down performance. I mean, it's not something that we would love to encourage. 

[00:07:36] Nesrine Changuel: And we put a lot of encouragement in the app in order to help people close their old tabs. And people don't necessarily follow these recommendations or these notifications, and they end up like accumulating many, many tabs open. Just for the anecdote, I mean, we do have users having thousands of tabs open, and that's sometimes insane. 

[00:07:57] Nesrine Changuel: So from a technical perspective, we don't want that, but we didn't want to jump immediately into like closing super old tabs on users' behalf. It could have been an option or maybe compressing thumbnails or coming with whatever technical solution. Instead, we started talking to customers, understanding the relationship they have with their tabs. So we had a lot of users interview asking them how they navigate through their tabs, what matters for them, what do they value with this relation. And by the way, the reason why I'm using the term relation is because we found out that there is a relationship between users and their tabs. I mean, with a big R. Some people, when we told them about the option of closing their tabs, they started like getting scared. Don't close my tabs. Don't even dare closing my tabs. I mean, for them, this is something like beyond what they can expect from a product, of course. 

[00:08:49] Andrew Michael: They're managing their life in their tabs. Yeah.

[00:08:53] Nesrine Changuel: Exactly. I mean, some people would keep tabs open as reminders or as to do's or as who knows, maybe I might need it at some point. So we completely forgot that option of closing super old tabs on users behalf. We also realized that some people felt ashamed sometimes. You know, when they are navigating through their tabs, they would say something like, oh, usually I don't have so many tabs open or something like that. I mean, there was this...

[00:09:18] Andrew Michael: I've heard that a few times on video calls, people just sharing their screens and now even doing interviews about it.

[00:09:25] Nesrine Changuel: So these are, instead of just laughing about these insights, we took notes and we realized that there are these feelings of feeling unorganized, there is this feeling of feeling confused, and there is this concept of relationship. And we took these insights as very important input to build the solution for it. So the solution that we ended up building is an inactive tabs group. So it's a tab groups that holds all tabs. I mean, tab that has not been touched or opened for more than 21 days. So users know that they are there. They know that, okay, it's not gone, but at the same time, they are freeing the space of the tab grid.

[00:10:02] Nesrine Changuel: So they have fewer tabs grid. They feel there's a fake feeling of being organized. And also from a technical perspective, we were able to act on these inactive tabs. We can compress them. I mean, it was doable to solve technical parts. So using this example as instead of jumping as most company like building the functional solutions, we took our time to understand the relationship, the behavior, the needs, the emotions that users are seeking to feel, and then build an experience aligned with that.

[00:10:35] Andrew Michael: Yeah, that's super cool too. Yeah. Because I think like you said, like most companies might have just said, okay, like this is drawing up too much memory on device, this is causing things to crash. Let's just sort of cut this. And then you took the back and said, wait, let's first understand like, how these are being used? Why are people accumulating them? Because maybe to like, from your perspective, you might be like, I never had more than three tabs, like this makes no sense. And then the easy thing would have just been say, okay, like you get max 10, and that's it. And that's really like spending the time to do the work, I think like that needs to be done. And I think that's also like far too often what ends up happening is that like, we make assumptions too early of what we believe the user wants or needs. And then we jump into like solution and building as opposed to really like trying to understand things at a deeper level.

[00:11:20] Andrew Michael: So you mentioned like these, this is one of the common traits amongst the three companies. I'm curious to understand what was like the most different thing about the three companies you mentioned. So Microsoft, Google, Spotify, like, what was like one thing you're like, wow, why is it... Why are we doing things like this? Yeah, like we never did this Microsoft or we never did this at Spotify, like, this makes no sense to me.

[00:11:42] Nesrine Changuel: I would say the biggest difference is the speed level. So when you work like specifically at Spotify, when I was there at that time, it was like... a still like a startup style. It was not a startup anymore, but it kept the mindset and the spirit of the startup. So we have been experimenting a lot, we have been allowed to fail, we have been shipping a lot on the fast cadence. So it was really fun to be a PM working at Spotify just for this part of being able to ship fast and see results quickly and adjust and iterate. So that was the very well-encouraged mindset at Spotify. Like even our CEO was telling us like, we want to be failing fast, meaning that we want to... if we want to fail, fail, but do it in a quick way. 

[00:12:27] Nesrine Changuel: However, for other companies like Microsoft and more particularly at Google, the process is much, much longer to avoid failures. I'm not saying that we are not allowed to fail, but there is a very well-established process to make sure that we minimize failures, meaning that you have to go through legal, through security issue. And I mean, there was really, when I say many steps, it's really many steps to make you avoid failures. And of course, then getting a feature out was something that is quite slow. So the development part could be very quick, but then getting a feature on user's hand can take months. It's really rare that you get something out within a quarter or so. So this is also something that PM has to be comfortable with. It's not your fault. It's the process part that would take that time. 

[00:13:17] Nesrine Changuel: So I would say this is the biggest difference. However, the mindset, meaning that focusing on customers, being customer obsessed, focusing on opportunity, not only problem. I mean, this is also a really interesting part. Now I hear a lot of PM talking about problem space. We're not building product only to solve problems. I mean, if you want, you can, and in that case, you will be only focusing on identifying problems, but a lot of products exist today out of no problem. It exists from an opportunity. So it's also a mindset that I have seen a lot as a product leader, where we try to shift away from looking into a problem, but rather trying to explore opportunities that could enhance the experience.

[00:14:00] Andrew Michael: Yeah, that's interesting. Because I think most of sort of like the startup mantra is sort of like you need to solve user problems, and you need to understand the problems and just having a little bit of a shift in mindset to see actually where might there be an opportunity that hasn't... that people aren't even aware yet there's a problem. Nice.

[00:14:18] Andrew Michael: The one thing like you mentioned, it struck me because I think I've noticed like a difference now lately is that at Microsoft, you mentioned things were a lot slower to get things out, obviously with legal and so forth. And it used to be sort of this idea for startups that when an investor said to you, hey, like, what if Microsoft or Google just copy you tomorrow? You'd be like, oh, they'll never be able to do that. Like they move so slow and there's bureaucracy and to get things out. And that used to sort of be like an acceptable like argument back to investors. They'd be like, okay, that's fair, whatever.

[00:14:48] Andrew Michael: I think that like timeline is compressed like insanely now with AI. And I think these startup, like these companies are now operating like startups. Like, what is your opinion? Like, how do you see this? Do you think like maybe Microsoft is operating at a different cadence now to then when you were there?

[00:15:05] Nesrine Changuel: First of all, if the giants want to copy you, they will copy you. I mean, I don't see any challenge they would have to copy like startups ideas. But what I've seen also from the insights is that these companies do have a very strict and clear vision and mission. I mean, they know exactly where they're heading to. However, they don't see value in copying others' features if they are not 100% aligned with where they're heading to.

[00:15:31] Nesrine Changuel: Let me give you an example. I've been a product leader at Google Meet for almost like three years. And when I joined Google Meet, it was right during COVID, like the pandemic period. It was a quite fun time to be working on Google Meet during COVID because Google Meet has been reinvented entirely. I mean, Google Meet was working really well in a corporate and office meeting style. However, when COVID hit, we realized that the entire video conferencing tool has to be revisited for the remote experience. So we have been adding many features that, of course, are part of the product nowadays, like background replays or noise cancellation and stuff like became must-haves in a remote environment. 

[00:16:15] Nesrine Changuel: But why I'm sharing this story is because at the same time there was Zoom. And there was Zoom that has been like, for me, more like a feature factory. They have been shipping like crazy. Like based on our cadence, like we used to ship, like, of course, we accelerated our cadence during COVID because we wanted, of course, to give these features as fast as possible, but we were not at the scale of Zoom. Like Zoom has been putting many features per month.

[00:16:41] Nesrine Changuel: At the same time, that was not a threat for me because Zoom is Zoom, Meet is Meet, and we want to have our brand. We want to have our personality. We want to have our design as well and our experience itself. So I was actually holding myself from trying to check what's new in Zoom so we don't get influenced by what they are adding into their products. However, we were obsessed about something else. 

[00:17:08] Nesrine Changuel: Instead of being obsessed about comparing what competitors are doing, we were obsessed about the best-case scenario. What is the best-case scenario for Google Meet? It's actually when we're having the meeting in a room physically, right? So that's what we were comparing ourselves to. How can we get as close as possible not to Zoom or Teams or whatever? How can we get as close as possible to this best experience, which is having the meeting physically in a room? And that actually influenced a lot Meet and the experience and the behavior, etc., that users are experiencing within the product. 

[00:17:43] Nesrine Changuel: Like we developed features like hand raise or image reaction and things that have been spontaneous in a physical meeting, but then came as a good addition for a video conferencing tool. So this is a nice story to share because it also influenced how we are comparing ourselves, how we are building our brand and our personality, not by comparing to others, but rather to being religious about where are we heading to and what's our mindset.

[00:18:12] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I think, I mean, the single thread, yeah, and it's so important is like understanding the vision and where you're heading. Because I think like, one, I have my pet peeves about Zoom, and I think it is a lot to do with like velocity. They try to add too many things at once. But also like I've noticed like this, there's obviously like this AI psychosis that's going around as well. But I think there's also like this AI feature psychosis that's going around where like, everyone now is like rushing to try copy the next competitor. And because everybody can ship features, now everybody's trying to ship increased velocity, but nobody's really taking a step back to saying like, okay, like, why are we building this to begin with? Like, what is the problem? Where do the opportunities lie?

[00:18:50] Andrew Michael: And we're just like looking over to the next, oh, they just ship this, we need to do that we need like... and I think like now is a really important time to actually take the step back and say, okay, just because we can build anything doesn't mean we should. And how do we sort of like build something that we feel is going to last and that has an opinion, and that we have a clear direction that we follow? Because otherwise, you just end up building these Frankenstein products that end up like at some point or another starting to just not work well together, people don't understand them.

[00:19:18] Andrew Michael: And actually, you get the inverse, like where you think you're adding all this value to the product, people end up churning because they're paying for something that they're only using half of the features. And it's like, okay, well, yes, I'm paying for something that I'm only using half of what's there. How are you seeing this in the market? Like what are you seeing amongst companies? Because obviously, you're advising and you're speaking to a lot of like product managers and like, is this like feature psychosis real? Like I mean, at least from the outside, I'm seeing it and like, I don't think it can be healthy for like the quality of products we end up shipping to end users.

[00:19:49] Nesrine Changuel: So it's really interesting that you're bringing this topic now, because I think it's only like four days ago, there was very recently a podcast that was shared by the COO from Uber. Have you seen it? Maybe? I mean, it's worth sharing this with the audience. It's really new one. And it's really interesting because we are talking about the COO from Uber, who's actually talking about... we have been investing very heavily into adding AI features into our products. I mean, of course, they added this into the price determination in the trajectory optimization, et cetera. 

[00:20:24] Nesrine Changuel: And what he said is really interesting. What he said is that we already consumed our entire budget, like our entire AI budget within the first quarter. I mean, the budget that was supposed to be allocated for the year got consumed just for the first quarter. And what he's also saying even more interestingly is that we cannot justify the value of this cost yet. Meaning that they have been looking at the metrics, at the retention, at the churn, at the adoption, whatever metric you care about, even if these features are there, even if the budget got consumed, they are not still yet, like firmly, it's not still possible to justify this cost from a metric perspective.

[00:21:05] Nesrine Changuel: I'm not saying that this was not worth it. I'm just saying that we need to be mindful, why are we adding these features in the products? And this always goes back to the why, identifying the right why and making sure that we are building the right thing, not building it right. Of course, AI is helping us to build it right, but it's all about building the right thing. And that goes back to the real skills of a product manager that we started this episode talking about, like making sure that we are able to identify the right opportunity to be added. 

[00:21:38] Nesrine Changuel: And by the way, I also want to add something else, which is these products, these users, the companies that are successful, like Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, Spotify, they have the right mindset. They are successful even a lot before AI age. They have been very widely used, people love them because they have the right mindset of building product. It's not thanks to AI that they will become even more successful. They are already successful because they know exactly how to build product from a user's perspective. So I think it ties back to the mindset and ties back to how you are identifying the right opportunities.

[00:22:16] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I haven't actually listened to the episode. I'll give a listen, but I did see the stats floating around X or the comments floating around X. And yes, because I think it's definitely like something I noticed... I think like at the size and scale of Uber, you can maybe say, okay, like, maybe a counter-argument that's like, it's a really well mature established product. And unless they're like going into new areas where they could be discovering opportunities or solving new problems, it might be difficult to move the needle like to an extent on specific metrics. But maybe for like earlier stage startups, the counter argument would be like, well, we don't really have a product yet. And we need to create a whole bunch of stuff to sort of establish ourselves. But I think still to the point that you mentioned, like all of these companies were successful prior to AI, all these companies are most likely going to be successful post AI. And it's because they have these core principles that they believe in.

[00:23:09] Andrew Michael: What's one thing that you know today that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

[00:23:15] Nesrine Changuel: Okay. This is a, by the way, I'm going to share maybe my... the mistake of my early PM dates. So you mentioned earlier that like I'm a technical person, so I actually did an engineer degree. And then I got even myself deeper in tech because I did a PhD on video compression and signal processing. So I started my career as a research engineer. So I was a research engineer for about five years working on video compression and signal processing. And I was very excited about being an IC.

[00:23:46] Nesrine Changuel: And then Microsoft reached out to me and they said, like, we are hiring for a video PM at Skype. Would you be willing to join us? Of course, like this is Microsoft. So I give it a try. And I said, like, I had no idea what PM is. I'm talking about like 20 years ago. I'm a researcher, but I would love to explore. And turns out that the interview went really successful and I got the job. 

[00:24:07] Nesrine Changuel: I got a job as a technical product manager. Why they have been looking for a technical product manager at the time is because it's a quite special squad. The squad is owning video at Skype. So I was actually managing everything related to video at Skype. So we have been doing the compression, the group video call, and like all pixels related features. And the mistake that I made coming from research and coming from a pure IC, I was very, very close and very involved with engineers. 

[00:24:36] Nesrine Changuel: Okay. Now you might be like surprised. Why is that a mistake? I was actually almost 80% of my time helping engineers, doing grooming, doing breaking features and breaking roadmaps and trying to understand the house with the engineers, talking their language too much. That almost took 80% of my time. And that was like allocating maybe the rest, like 20% of my time into like, why are we building it? What should we build, et cetera. And that's the discovery part. 

00:25:04 Nesrine Changuel: I was very excited about doing this and being able to help the engineers. But over time, I mean, it took me almost 18 months to realize that this is not my value. I mean, they could have hired another engineers in that case. Why are they hiring a PM? And so I slowly over my career, I have been reducing that 80% until like when I got to Google, I was like almost the opposite. I mean, when I worked for Google, I was 80% discovery and 20% delivery, like meaning that I was not babysitting the engineers anymore. I was not even helping them to break features and work on the how anymore. I was just talking with them, but I'm not involved in their role and their job.

[00:25:45] Nesrine Changuel: And so the reason why I'm sharing this is because I actually realized that my, I was recognized. I was valued. I was respected by the engineers more when I was 20% with them than when I was 80% with them. It might sound surprising, but because engineers hate working on the what. They hate working on the why. But when they get the clear why and they get very well-developed document describing what are they building, that's how they value their PM. This is how they respect their PM and they start to collaborate with the PM in a much better way. 

[00:26:20] Nesrine Changuel: So this is maybe the, I don't know if I call it mistake. This is how we learn, by the way, the job. We learn the job the hard way, but if you want to be like very well respected and get your job right, then at least start with 50-50 and shift slowly into doing more of the why and the what and less of the how. 

[00:26:40] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I love that because I think like from a PM's perspective, that sort of like creating tickets and breaking things down is like busy work. It's almost like adds no value at the end of the day. And as you said, it's like almost like babysitting engineers and engineers are the ones who really understand like the technicalities more than the PM's normally. So they're better suited as well to like decide how to break things down and to split work up and whatnot. And then the real value really lies in when you can actually take that step back and say, okay, like where are we heading? What's the vision? Like why are we building this to begin with? Like answering all the why's is always going to be the most like highest impact work you can do, I think in many cases. 

[00:27:23] Andrew Michael: You probably as well get like asked a lot of questions when it comes to product management. What's one question that you wish more people would ask, but they don't?

[00:27:34] Nesrine Changuel: You mean for interviews or for the topic itself?

[00:27:38] Andrew Michael: The topic itself on product management.

[00:27:40] Nesrine Changuel: Okay. There's one particular question that I care a lot about. I mean, as a product manager, I cared a lot about and now even in my coaching, I ask my coach a lot and my mentee as well a lot. He's like, how do you want your users to feel while using the product? This is a really interesting part because I realized that they don't even know in the beginning. Like I was coaching the other day, like a CEO, and I was helping them with building their product strategy. And before we get to the product strategy, I asked the CEO, like, what do you want your customers to feel while using the product? Do you want them to feel like energized? Do you want them to feel proud? Do you want them to feel like in control? What do you want them to feel?

[00:28:24] Nesrine Changuel: And it came out as something he never thought about. And if you'd never think about that, you will never achieve it. I mean, that's the bare minimum. First, you need to think about it. Then you have to work on it and then you need to implement and build to achieve it. So I think this is the most important thing that we need to shift our mind from what do we want our users to do to what do we want our users to feel? And honestly, like, believe me, if you can make these positive feelings to happen within your customers, you will build that emotional connection. People will be emotionally connected with your product.

[00:29:01] Nesrine Changuel: And do you know what? If your customers are emotionally connected with your product, you will double retention, you will double referral, and you will double revenue. I'm not coming up with these numbers. These numbers have been proven by studies from Capgemini, McKinsey, Harvard Business Review. And they all actually said that emotionally connected customers can give you 50% more revenues, 50% more retention, and 50% more referral. So aim for this emotional connection by first asking the question of what do I want my customers to feel while using the product?

[00:29:38] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I definitely believe those numbers. And I think [inaudible] myself, I see like, the products that I stick around longest with, or I'm happy to spend the most amount of money, I do feel that the biggest emotional connection, too. And that's either within like, maybe comes in different areas, or like maybe come from the brand that they've built. And I just like resonates really well with me. And I feel like they understand me as a person, or it may be the support I received at some point in time. And I was just like, Oh, wow, like, never expected to receive support like this and now become sort of a customer to life. But then it goes back down to the beginning of like, okay, like, how do we drive emotions within our customers? How do we really like get to the core of what drives them so that we can we can push this forward? I love hearing this as well.

[00:30:22] Nesrine Changuel: By the way, there's a very… it is a quite famous framework, but I'm not sure it's if it's still famous or not. There's a framework called the User's Hierarchy of Need. Have you heard about the pyramid of User's Hierarchy of Need? It was actually developed by Aaron Walter, who used to be the VP of design at Intuit as part of MailChimp. And he actually came with this framework a couple of years ago. He actually said that for a product to succeed, it has to go through four important layers.

[00:30:52] Nesrine Changuel: The first layer is functionality, the product has to work. The second layer is reliability. It has to work all the times. Fourth layers is usability. It has to be usable and easy to use. But he also had the top of pyramid that was called pleasurability. The product has to be pleasurable to be used. It has to make you feel something, hopefully positive, not negative, of course.

[00:31:17] Nesrine Changuel: And for many years, this framework has not been very popular because reaching the first two or three layers has been very costly. You need to raise money, you need to hire teams, you need to spend a lot of money to build at least the functionality, reliability and usability. But you know what? And you also mentioned this in the beginning with AIs, we're getting this functionality, reliability and usability quite easily and in a fast way, which makes it like the top of pyramid becoming even more important these days.

[00:31:50] Nesrine Changuel: And I think that this framework is coming back as one of the most important framework, because this is what will make your product stand out. This is what will make your startup also stand out. It's not by the functionality part, it's by that top of pyramid, which is the pleasurability and the feeling part that you can offer to your customers.

[00:32:10] Andrew Michael: Yeah. What would you say is like, maybe give us like a couple of examples, because I think Google is kind of one of those ones that brings sort of those moments of joy to the product. Like what are a couple of your favorite things that you worked on at your time that really brought that joy to the product?

[00:32:25] Nesrine Changuel: So it's not only about joy, by the way. Let me give you an example. So when we talk about delight, delight is about meeting what emotions users are seeking to feel. So it could be joy, of course, it could be reassurance, it could be safety, it could be in control. It's maybe a feeling of a better satisfaction about yourself. I mean, these could be different.

[00:32:48] Nesrine Changuel: However, I want to share a personal story with you, or maybe that's a personal example, not something I worked on, but I experienced it a lot as well. So I'm obsessed about using Uber because, I mean, of course I know that the taxi driver, the local taxi driver, maybe are more experienced and they know the city better than any Uber driver, but I still always book an Uber for different reasons.

[00:33:10] Nesrine Changuel: The first one is because I'm that person that will always lose receipt. You know, when you get a paper receipt, I will always lose it. However, the fact that I know that I will get that receipt by email, I have that confidence that I will never lose the receipt. The other thing that I want to mention about Uber that also ended up making me quite loyal is because the other day I was in Uber at night coming out from Charles de Gaulle airport, and I realized that there is a feature that you can activate where, for example, a close one, husband, wife, a parent can follow your journey.

[00:33:47] Nesrine Changuel: Meaning that I had like a 45-minute journey, and I was able to activate the feature so my husband can follow my journey. And I felt safe as like a, okay, nothing could happen. He knows exactly where I am, et cetera. So these are like features where we don't necessarily see features. We see real human behind the product. And we start to start feel the safety. We start to feel the confidence. We start to feel the in control that makes you loyal and emotionally connected to the product.

[00:34:15] Andrew Michael: Yeah, it's brilliant. Actually, you reminded me of another story as well that happened to me recently. I moved into a new house and I had a water filter system. And I contacted the existing company. I was like, Hey, I'm moving in a new house. I want to get a new system. Like I didn't hear back from them. I called them three, four times, like didn't hear back from them. And there was this other company I was considering randomly, the company's name is called Karma Waters. Karma like K-A-R-M-A.

[00:34:40] Andrew Michael: And I went to fetch my son from school and I was like trying to cross the road and this van stopped to let me cross the road and was like Karma Waters. I was like, Oh, this is like, it's Karma. So let me give them a ring and like book a deal. And so like, it's just something so like serendipitous, like just because of like the way the staff like treated somebody random on the streets. I was like, okay, like, maybe they deserve this deal more than the company I've tried to call four times. And it's more like, it's not the product feature itself, but it is like a part of the whole philosophy, I think of like the way you operate and it transcends into the features and things you build. 

[00:35:15] Andrew Michael: It also reminded me as well, like of another framework. I don't know if you're familiar with Darius Contractor's PSYCH framework, where he has sort of like a way to analyze your product to understand like how people are feeling throughout the stages. And so like, maybe the first step there are they're really excited. They've just found this product that solves their problem. And then they get hit with like a five field form and like, okay, this is work now, I don't want to do this. And did you have any similar frameworks or things that you approach like the work that you were doing? Yeah. And how did you?

[00:35:45] Nesrine Changuel: Yeah, so we are lucky to operate in a space where we see more and more framework that do pay attention to these kinds of concepts. So for example, I use a lot user journey map. And I'll talk about user journey map, not the... I'm not interested in the journey itself, but I'm interested in the feeling curve part. So the user journey is supposed to draw the journey of customers throughout the different steps. And then at some point, you have to highlight the different feeling of the customer throughout the journey. 

[00:36:14] Nesrine Changuel: And so you identify these moments where users are feeling frustrated or excited. And I call these moments of delight. Moments of delight are corresponding to the peak moments or the valley moment. By the way, both are interesting opportunities. Why? Because if the customer is excited, he's happy. He's in a cheerful opportunity, then he's actually open to be emotionally connected. So you can probably give the user way of recognizing his or her emotions. 

[00:36:43] Nesrine Changuel: For example, I'm an Airbnb user, both as a guest and as a host. And every time I'm aiming for a super host badge, like this is my ultimate goal. And every time I'm getting a super host badge, I'm opening the app and the app turns into confetti. And I feel like the app is recognizing my effort and like celebrating these important moments with me. So this is what I call like peak moment celebration.

[00:37:06] Nesrine Changuel: And also valley moments are when users are not feeling that good. And these are also opportunities where you can make the experience better if you can. But if you can't, let's imagine that, I mean, it's internet running out. Instead of giving a message of alarming, you can turn it into similar to the dino in Chrome. Instead of having a blue screen, you get a playful game. And that turns that negative emotion into something hopefully a little bit more positive. So user journey map is a really interesting framework because it helps you identify these moments and helps you act on these moments in a good way.

[00:37:43] Andrew Michael: Nice. Yeah, I think there's a lot to learn from this. And it's all through the theme as well. The book, will definitely add it in the show notes. People need to pick it up. I think the central theme is now like, because it's easy to build anything, you shouldn't... you should have like core principles, core values that you stick to, you need to be understanding like how your user are feeling across the different stages of their journey so you can bring different moments of delight, whether those be negative or positive aspects in their product.

[00:38:10] Andrew Michael: And yeah, I really appreciate this. It's been great chatting today, Nesrine. I think we could continue chatting for like another hour, but I see we're up on time. Is there any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with before we wrap up today?

[00:38:20] Nesrine Changuel: Yes, maybe the final thought is to move away from the misconceptions. While writing my book, I realized that there is a lot of misconceptions around delight. I interviewed a lot of product leaders and directors and I found out that a lot of people think of delight as the aesthetic part, you know, like making the product shiny, add confettis, add Easter eggs. This is not the delight I'm talking about. The other misconception is that they see that delight is more a B2C, not a B2B product. Honestly, I completely believe that the light is B2H, meaning that business to human. If your product is used by human, then they deserve their emotion to be honored. The emotions won't be the same for a B2B product as in the B2B space. However, it's your job to identify them and honor them.

[00:39:08] Nesrine Changuel: So delight is not a nice to have anymore. It is becoming a must-have. And the good thing, it's not magic. It's actually intentional and it's actionable. I mean, that's why I wrote the book. The book is not only to inspire. It comes with a framework. I'm calling it the Delight Model Framework that helps you step-by-step to achieve that goal within any product in any space. 

[00:39:30] Andrew Michael: I'm so glad you mentioned like the human component of it because I think that's like far too often, especially in B2B, especially enterprise, ideas get shut down and they're like, oh, this is not going to fit. So it's not going to be right. But I think ultimately, we forget at the end of the day, it's just another human at the end of it. And that's why most products can just become these serious, bland, emotionless products, but they completely forget it's actually like another human at the end of it. And it's actually using the product and you need to now start to stand out.

[00:39:58] Andrew Michael: Nesrine, it's been amazing chatting today. For the listeners, we'll make sure to leave everything we discussed in the show notes so they can pick that up there. And I wish you the best of luck going forward. Thanks again for joining.

[00:40:08] Nesrine Changuel: Thank you.