The Science of Product Delight: How Great Teams Build Emotional Connection at Scale

All right. Hello everybody. Come on in. I can see people flooding in already. Welcome. Get yourself settled. Hi everybody. I'm Janna from ProPad. Get yourself settled in. Find yourself over the webinar chat there and say hello. Drop in a note about who you are, where you're coming from. Feel free to share your LinkedIn. Connect with your fellow product people. We've got a decent crowd with us today. So jump into the chat. Say hello. Hello folks. Welcome. I can see Matt from Edinburgh. Hello. Good to see you. We've got a bunch of other people joining in now. Hey folks, we got David from California. Thanks, David. I'm really excited about this topic as well. So, we're going to kick off in just a minute once people get settled in. Say hello. Again, feel free to drop where you're coming from. your LinkedIn if you want to connect with people. Hey, Jason. So, we've got people from all over the place now. Three different time zones. Yay. Good to see everybody here. Hi, Michelle. Somebody else from UK. Brilliant. Somebody else from California. Hi, Geneva. All right, we're going to kick off in just a minute. I'm going to let you guys get settled in. Hello, Jane from East London. You guys are getting sun there as well. I'm in Brighton and it's been a lovely sunny day. Hey, Mitchell. Good to chat to you. We've been chatting a lot on LinkedIn, so that's been fun. And good to see some friendly faces here. regulars back, some new faces as well. And yeah, get yourself settled in, say hello, and we're going to kick off in just a minute. All right, I think we've got quorum. So, hello everybody and welcome. So, welcome to the product expert series that we run here. It's a series of webinars that we've been running for quite a few years now. And so, you can see our history if you head to prod. com/webinars. We've got a whole bunch of these recorded in the past. It's always with a focus on the experts and the experience that they bring. It's a focus on the content and the learning and the sharing bringing experience from the field. Like all of our past talks, today is going to be recorded. It's going to be shared with you afterwards. You will have a chance to ask questions as well. Our series has always featured a mix of presentations and fire sides. Today it's going to be a presentation from Nazarine followed by a Q&A session. So keep your questions to hand. Feel free to drop them into the Q&A section right now if you've got something that's already burning or drop them in as Nazarine chats and we'll pick them up before we wrap up the session. Feel free to use the chat as well. We want to hear your reactions. We want to see what you guys are thinking about with all of this. We want to hear your examples reflected back. So, make use of that and we're going to have a lot of fun today. Before we jump in with introductions and kicking off, I want to tell you a little bit about what we do here at ProPad. ProPad is a tool that myself and my co-founder built ourselves because we were product managers. We needed tools to do our own jobs and it just didn't exist. And so we built something to help keep track of all the experiments and all the feedback and all this other stuff that we're trying to keep track of based on where we were now and where we're going. We needed something to help us map out the road map and capture all the different goals and metrics that we're tracking. And so we built Prodpad and it gives you a sense of organization and control in the product management space. It helps you communicate where you are now and where and why you're moving in these next steps. It creates this single source of truth for you and your team and creates transparency into the product management space so that people aren't always wondering what's going on in product and why was this decision made and is now used by thousands of product managers around the world. It's a tool that you can try for free. We even have a sandbox version that preloaded with example data so you can see things like now next later road maps and OKRs and how they all fit together and our team is made up of product people as you might imagine and so we'd love to get your feedback on it. Give it a try and let us know how it works for you. In the meantime, let's jump straight in to chat about what we're going to be chatting about. So talking about the science of product delight. how great teams build emotional connection at scale. And with us today is Nazarine Chungal. She has spent over a decade building products that billions of people use every day. She's worked on Skype, Spotify, Google Meet, Chrome, so all of you have used her products, probably multiple of her products. And across that, her focus has been on something on what product teams often struggle to prioritize in their backlog. how the product actually makes people feel. She's got a PhD from Bell Labs. She's a product coach and trainer, and she's the author of Product Delight, an amazing book on the topic of product delight. It's all about how teams can build emotional connection to the products deliberately and not by accident. And she's joining us today from Aerys Ezre. Hello. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us here today. I know that you've got a presentation, so I'll let you take over with the sharing. Sure. Hi, Jenna. Thanks so much

for the intro. Thanks for having me on the show as well. Just going to take a second to share my screen so we can go ahead with that. Do you see my screen? — Well, you can see your screen. Yeah, — cool. Great. So, again, we're going to talk about product delights. Maybe some people don't know this concept yet. So, I'm going to give you a brief introduction what it means, but also why I'm so passionate about that and why it's so critical nowadays to talk about this kind of topics. more particularly nowadays because I think like the word need more emotion. We need more emotional connection as well. So this is I see it as my baby but also my passion and I would love to pass this passion to you and to the world of tech and in order to get and jump straight into the product delight concept. I want you to think about your very favorite product. I want our audience as well to think about their very favorite product. You don't have to overthink. Maybe use the chat. We have the chat. So, just write down your very favorite product. It doesn't have to be the product you're working on, but the one that you just feel like you love and you enjoy using, you enjoy telling the world about it. And so, I love starting my talk asking about this question, like asking the question of what's your favorite product? Because I'm usually fascinated by the range and the variety of answer I usually get. And what's even fascinating is that we connect with product at two different levels. We might connect and love product for the functional part. I want to send an SMS. I want to book a flight. I want to listen to music. So these are functional needs. And we might connect with the product for honoring these functional needs. But also at the same time we might connect with product for some other type of needs which are the emotional needs. I want to feel reassured. safe. I want to feel confident and it's really important to recognize that as users when we are using a product we're using product for of course the functional part but also for giving some positive emotion that we are looking or seeking for satisfying and let me tell you something actually for 15 years building product I've seen that the very best products that are actually standing out and making huge success are those who are actually blending those two dimensions together meaning that they are of course honoring the functional part but they are doing it in a way that make us feel good and make us feel safe and make us maybe feel better version of ourselves. So now maybe just briefly on why am I so passionate about that? Why am I telling you so much about this concept of emotional connection and delight? I spent most of my career right after my research time building products and I had the luxury to work on globally used and loved product from Skype, Spotify, Google Meet and of course Google Chrome. And what maybe people don't necessarily know about my career is that there is one specific role where it's a bit special compared to others like I've been wearing different hats but at Google meet I was the product leader for delight and I actually discovered that there is such a thing that delight can be actionable it can be intentional it's definitely not magic it doesn't happen randomly so I also discovered that delight rely on principles rely on ways of working rely on concrete processes says, "So, I fell in love with this concept and started to travel the world and talk about the light on different stages. But, uh, I'm going to share a story, maybe an anecdote that just triggered everything that I'm holding nowadays is that I remember one day I was on the stage in Lisbon and someone came to me and said, "Of course you can talk about the light cuz you are Spotify, you are Skype, you are Google, so of course you can afford working and talking about the light. " And that actually turns me nuts. I was angry about that because it felt the exact opposite. We are Spotify, we are Google or we are Skype or we used to be Skype because we invested on emotional connection and delight. It's not the other way around. So that kind of conversation just gave me the motivation to leave the corporate world and take this as a mission. So about 18 months ago, I left Google and I took it like entirely as a mission to take the delight outside of the luxury tech world and make it actionable and accessible for everyone. So since 18 months ago, I started doing research on the topic. I started like writing a book about the topic and now I'm even teaching it across companies. So let's quickly dive into what I mean by delight. By the way, the reason why I chose the word delight is because every time I spoke to a product leader or product director, they all agree on one thing. They almost literally said the same thing. They all say something like we need to delight our customers. But also while talking to those directors, I realized that yes, they agree on the goal, but most of them don't know what it means or even how to achieve that. So I realized that oh okay, at least the why is clear, but we don't know how to get there. So what is light? Delight

by itself is an emotion. Think about it from a theoretical perspective. It is a secondary emotion. And there've been a lot of research done on the topic. And there's one of them done by Pluchik, Professor Pluchik, who actually conceptualized the light as the combination of two primary emotions. These two primary emotions are joy and surprise. And now I want you to pause for a second and try to imagine you're expressing or you are feeling joy and surprise at the same time. It makes you feel good of course but that's the light. So the light is the combination of these two emotions. Now in practice and when we talk about tech products we're not always using a product to feel the joy or the pleasure or the happiness. The reality is that we might use a product to feel proud about ourselves, to feel confident, to feel reassured. We want to feel safe or in control. So the set of emotion could be much wider than the joy itself. Joy could be one set of emotion for a specific products. But your role as a product builder is actually to identify the set of emotions that your users are seeking while using the product. So whether it's a B2B or B2C hardware or software the set of emotion that your user want to honor is definitely different from a product to another and that's your job actually to identify it. So now I also want to highlight something that I was fighting against for a couple of months now which what the light is not because when I started talking about the light when I started writing about the light I quickly realized that there are plenty of misconceptions and there are a lot of misunderstanding and people are coming with their old ideas. So I have this mission to change your old ideas about the light. And the first misconception is that delight and the delight actually I'm talking about has nothing to do with aesthetics. I'm not talking about emotional design. I'm talking about crafting an entire experience where people feel good while using the product. I'm not talking about confetti. I'm not talking about Easter eggs. I'm talking about the entire experience. And of course I'm not against the design element related to emotions. they are just complimentary. But I'm now here talking to product builders, business people who actually care about creating a great experience. The second misconception actually the light has nothing to do with gamification. I was giving a workshop yesterday and this question came to me is it feels like there is there are some similarity and honestly they have nothing in common. I'm going to tell you something even more shocking. I feel like delight is the opposite of gamification. So gamification is a tool that is used to make you stay longer in the product. The purpose and even the success is measured by the time spent in the product. However, delight is about making you feel good while using the product. It's not about making you stay longer. And it's about the quality, not the quantity. So let's imagine for example I'm scrolling on Instagram and after a few minutes I get the popup saying hey you should probably stop that and do something better with your time. I would find this delightful. Okay. And the third misconception of course that is changing over time and I see the trend that it's coming now the is not tied to B2C only. It's actually everywhere because if you are using a product or if you are building a product for a human being not I'm not talking about product that are going to be used by agent or machines or robots but if your end user is a human then they definitely have emotions that need to be honored. And so I'm usually advocating for B2H when I talk about delight which means like business to human because if they have some emotions we they need to be honored. Okay. So these are the three misconception related to the light. Now I want to maybe convince you from a business perspective because I guess a lot of our audiences today are of course has some stakeholders and leaders who need to be convinced why they should invest in delight. And I have three key metrics that I will share with you that will definitely help you convince your stakeholders and leaders on that. Actually, when I started writing my book, I realized and I was really lucky to find that there are four key studies that actually studied the exact same thing. And these studies are coming from serious firms like Cup Gemini, Mckenzie, Deoyet, Harvard Business Review. They all studied the impact of emotional connection and delight on product adoption and these has been conducted in a complete set of studies and reports and I was spending weeks trying to read through these reports and I found out and that's fascinating by the way that there is a consensus there's a consensus over these four completely independent studies that shows that delight can have huge impact on three key product metrics. These product metrics are

retention, meaning that delighted customers are 50% more likely to stay longer with your product. The second metric that we all love is revenues, meaning that delighted customers are twice more likely to spend more like money on getting more product and services from you. And the third one is actually not surprising. It's actually referral, meaning that delighted customers are 60% more likely to recommend your product among their friends, colleague, and maybe even family members. And honestly, I've been building product for many years. I haven't seen any other element that could double retention, revenue, and referral at the same time or even more as we can see for referral here. That's a proof by itself that we should not let go this opportunity and only focus on functional elements. Now we're stepping into how to make this practical. And I really met when Jenna like you reached out to me about this talk. I said like I was obsessed about I want to make a talk where people can bring something home with them. I need to share something that people can immediately apply things to their products. That's also was my obsession when I wrote the book. I know that I'm coming from a specific industry mainly B2C but during that time I interviewed a lot of leaders from different spaces and different industries and I was obsessed about creating a framework that could apply for different industries and different type of organizations as well. So I created a framework that I'm calling the delight model. I'm going to walk you through this model for the next couple of slides and maybe I can use some case studies to make it clearer for your site as well. So this is the framework. It's actually very simple. It operates on four steps. I was completely aware when I came up with this framework that oh people would say oh again another framework in the product space. But I was also extremely serious about how can I make it lightweighted in a way that integrate with any other framework. I don't want people to throw what they're using and start using let's say the delight framework. Instead, this is more think about it as a mental model where you can think the light at every step of the product building process. And the very first step which for me is fundamental. It will change everything in the way you're building product is identifying your users's motivators. And what I mean by that is that every time you're building a product or you're building a feature, the very first thing you start doing is segmentation. You need to build your persona knows who are you building it for. And there are three types of doing segmentation. There is the basic one which we call demographic. It's very much related to the who are they and there is a second one which is the behavioral which is very much related to what are they doing with the product or what kind of features are they using. But the very best one I've seen working so far is the motivational segmentation. It's very much related to the wise. I know it might sounds a bit surprising but actually your users are using your product for different reasons and it's your job to identify these wise. It's also important to recognize that there are two types of wise. There are the functional wise. We call them functional motivators. What motivate your customers to use your product from a functional perspective but also and that's how I started the talk by the way. There are the emotional motivators. It's actually what motivate your customers to use your product from an emotional perspective. And in order to get this even better, I want to do a quick case study with you. Let's use Spotify as a case study. It's a product that is very close to my heart. I spent about 5 years there, but also a product that everyone is familiar with. As a Spotify users, what could be the functional motivators and emotional motivators to use such a product? People are loving Spotify. Me too, by the way. So from a functional perspective, it could be a long list, but let's say I would use Spotify to enjoy high quality content or maybe because I want to discover new content. I have nothing in mind to just inspire me. Or it happens to me that I just heard that Tyler Swift released a new album. I want to go ahead and search for it. Searching for an audio content. You might think about I want to create a playlist or I want to listen offline. The list of function moderators could be a long one, but this is just to illustrate the example. It's even more important now to think from an emotional perspective. What motivates you as a Spotify user to use Spotify from an emotional perspective? And it happens to me sometimes that I go to Spotify because I feel lonely. It feels like empty at home or because I want to feel more productive or because maybe immersed. I want to feel some self-expression. It's also because my community is using Spotify. So, I want to feel connected to my community as

well. I want to feel nostalgia as people are saying or I want to maybe empathize my mood. I'm sad. I just want to listen to sad music. I'm happy. I want to get that mood attachment and alignments as well. What I want you to get out of this exercise is your job is actually to have a spreadsheet. just simplify it and have a spreadsheet where you're actually listing what motivate your customer from a fictional perspective and then what motivate them from an emotional perspective. And I want to insist on something. This is not an ending exercise. It's a living document. Every time you have an opportunity to talk to your customer, you're going to identify one new maybe functional or emotion motivators and it's going to remain there as a reference so you can go and check every time you're building a feature. Okay, so that was the first step and I told you earlier it's the fundamental step that you should absolutely not skip because our next step is going to be to feed and use actually these motivators to craft product opportunities. So I guess most of our audience here are probably familiar with a framework called double diamond framework. So the double diamond framework is as simple as you have an opportunity space or maybe sometimes called problem space and a solution space. I actually allowed myself to tweak the framework a little bit because I truly believe that the opportunity should not come from problem only but should probably come from the motivators. If you make the job to identify what motivate your customers both from a functional and emotion perspective then you can explore opportunity. Not every feature in our products are solving for a problem. They are just sometime honoring for an opportunity or honoring for a need. And so here for example an example from Google meet when I worked as a product leader at Google meet by the way for those who don't know more or less the context how I worked in Google meet I actually joined Google meet exactly when pandemic hit the world so what a fun time from a scale perspective from a challenge perspective from a behavior was completely new and of course what I did at that time I spent almost the first two to three months exploring not only the problem at that time but exploring the emotional impact of this new behavior of moving from office meeting to 100% remote meeting. And so we interviewed a lot of customers. We came up with different moderators and demotivators as well. People talking about boredom, people talking about fatigue, people talking about low interaction or feeling unseen. So we gathered these insights and we created an opportunity that would look like how might we improve the meeting experience for participant in prolonged online meeting in order to maintain their engagement and reduce their sense of boredom. So as you can see here there's no solution crafted at all. We are just writing an opportunity that we can hand over to the engineers and they can start brainstorming coming up for appropriate solution for them. I'm now stepping into the step number three which is identifying and categorizing solutions. Because if you create a great opportunity that list the motivators and empathize the emotional and the functional aspect, then you can trust your team to come up with as many solutions as they can. And so they might go to the board, they might brainstorm or brainwrite or whatever technique they use and they will come up with plenty of ideas. Here's the challenge now. How do you know among these ideas which one is going to be delightful? have the impact of this emotional connection we're talking about so far? And that's why I created another tool that I'm calling the delight grade. I'm going to walk you through this delight grade. It's very simple and it's actually a tool that will just list the emotional motivators and the functional motivators. So as you can see it's a table or think about it as a maybe a matrix and on the horizontal side you see the list of emotion motivators that you already listed or identified and then you have a functional motivators on the vertical side. By the way this is just an example. You may end up having n by m or 8 by 10 or 15 by 20 depending on the number of motivators you will identify in each areas. Why is that important? Okay, you're going to take your postit or your ideas and you're going to place them in the grid based on what motivator that solution is solving for. So let's take for example the orange idea. It's actually solving only for functional motivators. It is not solving for any of the emotional moderators on the other side. Why do we do that? Actually, we do that because it's going to help you categorize your solutions into three key categories. These categories are if you're only solving for functional moderators and absolutely not any of the emotion moderators then you belong to a category that I call low delight. So these are features that are just there to make the product work and it's just solving a problem. Now if your ideas is only solving for an emotional motivators and there's absolutely no functional motivators associated to that then it's belonging to surface delight. Like I have an Apple watch. The other day it

was my birthday. I had a notification with balloons saying happy birthday. Is that functional? Definitely not. Is that emotional? Absolutely yes. That's an example of surface delight. Now if it happens that you're coming up with ideas that are solving for both, meaning that for functional motivators and emotion motivator at the same time, then you're sitting on that category that is called deep delight. So deep the lights happen when the feature is actually solving for a functional need but it's done in a way that is also connected to what people are looking for from an emotional perspective. Let's do again let's go back to the Spotify case study again and we can use three key features that most people are familiar with and also get chance to work on these features myself. So we will try to categorize them using the delight grid. So these three features are let's think about search by lyrics. Maybe you've noticed that at Spotify if random words from a song and not the exact title, you can put those random word and Spotify can search for the song related to these random words. It's called search by lyrics. The second feature is the most famous one. Everyone is copying it. It's wrapped. Spotify wrapped which is the end of year retrospective. You get to see how cool you are at the end. And the third feature I want to use for this case study is discover weekly which is the personalized weekly playlist crafted for your taste and your preferences. How can we place this in the delight grade? So what I did here is actually I brought these functional motivators and the emotional motivators that I exposed to you in the first step of the framework. Now a feature like search by lyrics is very much related to the functional moderator which is searching for an audio content and it's not necessarily related to any of the emotional motivators. So it belongs to low delight category. Now if you think from rap perspective and this is funny by the way because wrapped is purely emotional. It doesn't come with any function. And it's funny because I gave this presentation at Spotify a couple of months ago and I was a bit concerned about getting them to challenge this positioning. And we ended up having a consensus that it's definitely a surface delight feature. And a feature like discover weekly is something that of course allows you to discover new content. So that's the functionality part, but it's done in a self-expressed way. It's so personalized that it end up being becoming in a deep delight. example. I want you now not to get me wrong. I'm not saying because it's low that it's not important. The very best road map I've seen and I've been fighting on getting the best road map to get a bouquet of the three type of delight. Like the best road map is going to have a bit of low delight, a bit of surface delight, and a bit of deep delight. And if you work toward getting a kota or a percentage of these three types, you're going to get a personality, brand, and you're going to create that emotional connection that you're looking for. Now, if you ask me what's the percentage or what's the distribution, I came up with a rule that I'm calling the 50 4010 rule or maybe think about it as a recommendation. A rule is a bit like too strict. So this means that your road map or maybe your backlog should look like ideally 50% would be for low delight. I know it's surprising. She's here to talk about delight and now she's saying 50% for low delight. But of course your product has to function. That's the if it's not working there is no point for adding any emotional feature at all. And the second percentage would be 40% ideally for deep delight. And deep the light here remember there is a functional element into it. We are solving for a functional need but we're doing it and crafting it and designing it in a way that is aligned with the emotional needs of our customers. And why not the 10% for surface delight? Come on it's only 10%. It's very much toward building a personality and perception. It's about this referral that we're looking for. So this is the ideal distribution. And I also want to highlight something. If you make the math, it's actually 90% of functionality. I'm not bringing any big change. I'm just highlighting that you need change the mindset in order to when you're creating a feature, think about is there any way to enhance the feature in a way that it aligns with one or two of the emotional motivators. Okay, now we're getting to the last step, which is validating solutions. The reason why I came up with this last step is because when we're dealing with emotions, there are a bit of risks. There are some related risks and we want to make sure that we're doing it right and we want to achieve the positive delight, not the negative one. By the way, the negative delight is disappointment. The opposite of delight is disappointment. And we don't want to get into disappointment here. So, I created again another tool that I'm calling the excellence checklist or the light excellence

checklist. This is entirely listed in the book, but I will also be happy to share the list and the template with you toward the end of the presentation. I was thinking what could be the related risk for delight. For example, I want to highlight that delight is not an excuse to add confetti and completely forget about the business impact and the user impact. So, you want to make sure every delightful feature is aligned with your user impact, with your business impact. It's coming from real data and insights. It is familiar. It doesn't bring like unfamiliarity. It's also inclusive because inclusiveness is extremely important. What makes you happy is not necessarily what makes me happy. So make sure that you're inclusive. It doesn't bring any distraction. It also continues to reduce any risk of habituation. And then of course it's measurable. With that, we're getting closer to the end of this presentation, but I want to highlight something extremely important here. I've been talking to you about what is the light, why it matters, how to get it into your product, but it's really hard to get it right if it's not part of the culture. When I worked at Spotify or Skype or Google, we had pillars. We had a strategy deck that describe how much we care about the light. We had leaders who push for a percentage of the light in our road map. We had it part of our routine. We had some delight opportunity events that we think and innovate in a delightful way. For example, at Spotify, we had special hack days just encourage us to think from an emotional perspective. So now I'm inspired by that kind of events and I'm advocating for having delight days in your organization which could be ceremonies where we all think and talk delight to achieve that emotional connection. Okay, I'm getting to the end of the presentation, but I have few resources that I want to share with you that might end up being useful for you. Of course, I published product delight actually get published six months ago. So, it's a baby. It's a crawling baby. So, I'm happy to get product delight to the word and it get a lot of success among the product community. People are loving to get a book that is not talking about AI nowadays, but more about the emotional aspects. Feel free to reach out if you're interested in any copy. And also I actually collaborated with Miro to bring to life a mirror verse specifically dedicated for product delight template. So now product delight has its own mirror template that you can access as well. I can share the link for that. The other thing that I just kicked off which I'm extremely excited about is I actually started a Maven course which is actually a threew weeks course where we dig deep into product delight but not on a case study perspective. It's actually a course that I teach where we apply product delight to your own products. So it's very actionable and it happened over three weeks. Excited also to share a 25% discount code which is just early course. So feel free to use this code if you want to subscribe to the course with that. This is the QR code if you want to access to the slides but also the template I promised you earlier. So feel free to access and get an email with all these templates if you want to use them as a first time. Thank you so much. I hope this was useful. I'm also very ready for your questions and the Q&A section. — Excellent. that was it kicked off so many great discussions in the chat. I'm not sure if you've been watching or not, but I love conversations like this that get people really talking about how this is applied in reality. Thank you for bringing some real stories and I think you're absolutely right. Those products were delightful because or those products were successful because they were delightful, not the other way around. So, uh causation versus correlation, but it's you can see how Spotify for example leads the market in innovating on delightful things. Yeah, brilliant. Toby says that the talk was delightful — and I agree. I want to dive right into the questions because we've actually got a handful coming through and I'm gonna start with one from Puja here because this one kicked off a discussion in the chat when you were showing the motivator grid, the emotional connection grid. They pointed out that motivators can be really subjective. Something that might invoke emotions in one person might not invoke emotions in others. So, how do we quantify this properly? How can we rank some emotions above others? Yes, I guess the answer for this question is quite straightforward. Maybe before I get to the question, I would answer how do we identify those motivators? Motivators, but them? And the obvious answer is you need to know your customers. You need to interact as much as you can with your customers in order to know them best so you can understand what do they value most, what do they care about, not only what are their challenges and what are their problems. The best analogy for that, bear with me, I know it's a bit weird to say that, but is to think about your best gift. Think about the best gift you received in your life. It doesn't have to be necessarily the most

expensive one or definitely not the random one, but it's actually that gift when you open it, you immediately think, "Wow, that person knows me. " Okay? And that person is definitely not your like that random person or it's not the company swag or whatever. It's because that person listened to you a couple of times and know exactly what you care about, what are your hobbies, what are your interests. So why are we building product like object and not like a personalized gift. So we need to build product that when people open the product they will get that feeling of wow that product is built for me. So back to the question, in order to identify the right motivators, you need to get as many interaction to the customers. And now you need to tweak the user interview a little bit. You need to show your customers that you actually not only care about their challenges, but you also care about what do they feel. So ask questions like, "Walk me through the way the last time you used the product and tell me about how you felt throughout the journey. " Every time there is an interaction, pay attention to asking them, hey, what does this make you feel? And if you show that you care, people will open up and start sharing their feeling because like it's really hard for users to share their feeling. But if you start and take the first step showing that you care about their emotion, things will start coming. Now, how would you quantify one versus another? That's also depending on how many times it comes up during the interview. If you're seeing at a specific step of the product journey, people are sharing a lot of emotional insights and you are identifying cues that means that it's definitely something worth investigating. So it's a matter of abundance how many time you're hearing about this emotional element versus others. But also you need to make sure that it's inclusive. I know we didn't really dig deep into the inclusiveness part, but if you want to build something that make people happy, for example, make sure that there's not even a 1% of your customers are feeling unhappy. I know it's really hard, but maybe you remember Jenna and I, we spoke about this example of Delivero. I can maybe bring it up again. It's actually a marketing campaign that happened last year here in France where Delivero sent an SMS on Mother's Day. And on Mother's Day then the SMS looked exactly like a missed call from your mom. Like even the design looked exactly like a missed call. And when you click on it, you get like a hey, it's Mother's Day. Think about sending flower to your mom and we can do it for you. It sounds delightful. it probably delighted 90% or maybe I don't know the percentage of people but for many others they felt not the joy they felt the grief they felt the sorrow the awkwardness and it was one of the worst campaign by the way that even Delro had to apologize for that so think about is it hurting in any way anyone — yeah and you can see they didn't repeat that this year they've learned their lesson but you're absolutely right you've got to think about the impact of what you're doing with anything that you put out there whether it's tuned to delight or joy. Does it have the opposite effect? — Sure. — Um, and actually Dominic mentioned something when we're talking about the delight grid that understanding motivator should come from UX research activities, not gut feelings. He's saying that it feels I think he's right hitting the nail on the head when he said that it feels like a midiscocovery activity. And I'd say yeah, because it maps exactly to the middle of your flow in your framework. And things like this, it becomes a starting point for the conversation. These frameworks are not the answer end all be all. It's a place to begin the conversation then go, "Okay, if I assume the delighter is this, and you how do we figure that out? Here's where we're going to go talk to the users, and go find out more information so we can get this right. " I imagine you don't just walk in, do a meeting, and then you have everything mapped out, and it's good to go, and you ship the next thing. It's an ongoing conversation like discovery always is. — It is a continuous loop. So, I know in the framework it looks like a step by step, but in reality, we come back to the steps every time. That's why I said earlier it's a living document. Identifying motivators is something that you continuously add and adjust and refine and sometimes correct as well because you might get it wrong and it's something that you have to do on the way and also validating your hypothesis throughout these interviews. I want to share a quick story from my time at Google Chrome that might probably help answer this question. When I worked as a product leader at Google Chrome, I had to work on one of the biggest challenge for building a browser on mobile which is tab management. So we knew from data that a lot of our customers do have thousands of tabs open which is just insane. And from a functional perspective you I was probably contributing as well but I'm not here to blame anyone. That's what data is showing us. But at the same time I was like okay how can we solve that because from a functional perspective it's not ideal. I'm not talking about those who are having 15 or 20 tabs open. I'm

talking about thousands of tabs open. And from a memory perspective, from a space perspective, from a performance perspective, it's absolutely not acceptable. We could have jumped into solving the problem purely technically. I want to compress the thumbnail or compress whatever to make it take less spaces. But instead, we said, hold on. We're going to talk to the customers and try to understand why is that behavior happening or is there any relationship that happens between users and their tabs and we actually realize that there is a thing called relationship with a big R between users and their tabs like when we ask them is it okay if I close your tabs those that are two years old they would say don't even dare touching my tabs it's so important for them we also realized through throughout the interviews that having a lot of tabs for some users make them feel bad about themselves because they feel they are unorganized. You know that feeling when you get into your house and it's completely messy. So that's exactly the feeling they are experiencing. So they ended up not going to the tab grid at all. So they don't see the mess. So all these interviews ended up helping us a lot identifying the emotional needs and we ended up solving it in a complete different way compared to how we might have solved it from a pure technical perspective. Maybe for those who curious how we ended up solving it, we created an inactive tab section. So every tab that is more than 21 year old is actually stored in that section called inactive tabs. So for the users, it looks cleaner because you're only seeing tabs that are less than 20 days old. So there's this feeling of self-satisfaction. I know it's a fake feeling, but at least they are feeling better about themselves. — Yeah, absolutely. And abs the tab struggle is real. That's what Diermo says and I feel it as well. And really importantly, you picked out that relationship. You could have built something that just closed them automatically or something like that, but actually you found this perfect middle ground. Now, so you were at the forefront of these delightful products being built. Now, you're talking about the language that we're using behind it right now, which I think is super important because it gives us as product people this vocabulary to talk about what I think deep down we recognize is important, right? To have products that people love using, but we struggle to actually communicate the value of it and therefore prioritize it among other things. Back when this stuff was being built at Spotify, at Skype, at whatever, were you talking about things in this language or was the team using a different way of framing things and getting things across the line that way? — That's a great question because we didn't had at that time there was no such a thing called light model or whatever framework that I ended up creating. But there's a culture, there is a mindset. The mindset was there. So I was living into that mindset where people cared so much about creating a product that make people feel good about themsel. We wanted and I heard that a lot from our leaders from our directors as well. We want to create a product that people feel proud about using. It's not about the features that's in there. It's about the feeling and the quality of the experience while using the products. So it's that mindset is something that I heard a lot even from the Skype time. By the way, for those who remember the real Skype with the iconic blue and the iconic ringtone, we wanted to have — You can hear it now. I can hear it too. And it was very badly emotionally, negatively, emotionally impacted last year when it was shut down. Anyway, that's my personal story. But — yeah, — I was hearing that. The other thing is that we used to have as I said earlier something called like a product pillar called delight. For example, as a product leader at Google meet, we had a product pillar called the light. And it's just other than it is not just other than reminder that everything we're building is supposed to follow these pillars. And funny enough, Jenna, just to tell you that when I was interviewing some of the product leaders, I realized that other company are also adopting the light mindset but with other terms and other vocabulary. Like for example, when I spoke with someone from Dropbox, I realized that they have a product pillar called cupcake. And when he told me cupcake, I made a small smile as you're doing. And then he said that's exactly what it means because I said what does it mean a cupcake for a pillar? He said we want users to have that small smile while using the product. And another time I spoke with a product leader from Snowflake, which is extremely tech company. And Snowflake told me, "Hey, actually we have a pillar called superhero. " And I said, "What does it mean? " And then he said, "It means that we need to create a product that make people feel like they are superheroes. " I said, "Wow. " Okay. So, at the end of the day, it's not the vocabulary. It's not the terms. It's not the framework. It's after all that we are adopting that culture in a way that we're putting it in the front so that the collaborators and the employees think that way.

— Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like some of this was codified as well, like having it as a stated pillar, right? Having it as an underlying principle. I know the story about Spotify having speed as one of the underlying principles. And there's a whole was it a Netflix show or something like that? There's a documentary or — Oh, the playlist. It's a — The playlist. That's right. Yeah. Wasn't quite a documentary, but a dramatization of it is the Spotify story. And it talks about how it was really important that when you pressed play, it would play immediately. Right. Immediately. If you think back to when it was developed like 15 20 years ago, that was nuts, right? You couldn't do that. And so they did. So they codified that. It sounds like at was it Spotify or was it Google Meet that the light was the pillar, right? So this stuff is codified. It can make such a big difference for everyone being able to talk about it openly. — Yes. I said earlier that at Google meet I was literally the PM for Delight. And I know that not every company can have the luxury of hiring an entire product team working on delight. That's why I talk more about my experience from Spotify because I was the PM sitting on a complete backlog on fire where we have been competing between functional element and emotional element but we ended up actually we ended up creating that mix like one of the feature that my team developed at that time was the canvas feature when you open Spotify and instead of having an image of a album you have a mini clip the 5-second clip that and that was one of the feature that we added to the product because we believe that we need to offer for that selfidentity for the artist and we wanted to make the product more delightful and even if at that time we had so hard competition between features and specifically functional features but it's a matter of saying okay this time I'm going to prioritize this because otherwise my product is going to be too much functional. — Yeah, absolutely. And David's got a really good question here because he's pointed out that they've got a really long sales cycle and delight seems to be something that adds value in the long term. So you were talking about seeing a rise in retention, right? A 2x rise in retention and things like that. What strategies can they be using to show that this thing that's been done, this change is because of delight and not just other improvements or new features that were made? This is to answer any skeptical thinking from leadership who don't prioritize stuff like this. I completely agree with the fact that the light doesn't show impact immediately. And we live in a world that leaders want to see the impact right after a ship. We want to ship product and we want to see the impact immediately. If that's what you're caring mostly about, then probably you're going to struggle because we see for sure impact of the like, but it's more over time because you are creating a brand, you're creating a personality, you're creating trust as well and people will become ambassadors for you if you build for the light. The other day I was talking about the light and someone said, "Oh, actually every delightful feature is a story. Every time I'm experiencing a delightful feature, I would tell about it. I will speak about it. " If you want to see impact immediately, that's not extremely easy. However, I'm going to share something since we're talking about measurability, there are metrics that actually measure delight specifically for delight. And I'm not talking about NPS or maybe seesats. Those are the metrics that most people are familiar with. Actually, at Google, we created our in-house metric called hats. HAT stands for happiness tracking survey. So, H A TS and it's actually a survey in product that only measure the level of happiness. There's a framework that most people are familiar with called heart. Heart stands for happiness, adoption, engagement and success. But then the H is really hard. So what I've seen most company trying to use heart, they end up forgetting about the H. The reality is that at Google, we developed our own in-house metric to measure happiness. And this is how we measure the light. And the good news is that this metric is actually got published in a research paper. So it's completely public. People can use the same survey if they want. But at the end of the day, it's a matter do you want to measure or not? add this to your metric dashboard? Do you want to track this or not? The other day I was talking to GitHub and I realized that they have a in-house metric called DOF. And doof stands for delight usability, utility and market fit. And I realized that at the end if we care about the light and we can't find the right metric for it, we build it. — I mean gets changed. — Exactly. You don't have an excuse. — Yeah. Absolutely. And actually I would liken it to investments that are made in other parts of the business to meet the same end. So you see this with customer success. If the company is lacking customer success, then your retention is probably not great. You invest in customer success and that helps improve your retention. You see this in every SAS business, right? But you don't see an immediate improvement when somebody in customer success joins.

It's because they're building those relationships and it's allowing you to it's a lagging metric retention, right? So, it's allowing you to change the picture over time. And a company would have no problem saying, "Oh, yeah, of course we hire somebody. We don't expect immediate change. We expect it to change over the months to come. " The same thing can be said about delight within the product itself. I'm sure — let me be honest with you. This concept of emotional connection is not new. If you look at uh books, there are plenty of great amazing books in the design area like the emotional for design like emotional design or designing for emotion by Dan Norman or Aaron Walters. These are like pioneer in the area of design. also like the there've been recently a study showing that the best design materials are the emotional or the expressive design materials and also from a marketing perspective this area is very well covered as well like the best marketing campaign are the emotional marketing campaign those think from a Coca-Cola or McDonald they are not selling product they are selling the emotion behind it the problem is that for years business engineers product managers are not emborded towards this vocabulary and these goals. So we end up having marketers pushing for emotions, designers pushing for emotion and you have the business and the product and the engineers just doesn't care at all. So we lose the goal and we also don't speak the same language because we are not caring about the same thing. So one of the mission I came up with by writing product delight is okay maybe we can put all at the same level. Maybe we can allow people to speak the same language so we can achieve it in a better way. — Yeah. Amazing. And Jason asked a really good question here is how do you deal with the degradation of delight over time? So I'm sure you're familiar with things like the Cano model where things that were delighters become basic expectations and then eventually they become basic expectations over time. The world is changing fast, users change their expectations quickly. How can you continue to delight users which of course is surprise and joy when you know the surprise factor disappears, right? People just get used to it and the delight is just expected now. So this phenomenon is called habituation which means like you get so much exposure to the supposed to be surprising feature that it end up to be like a normal and must have and to answer the question there's no secret that the best answer is it's through continuity or continuation you just adding the light every now and then you will have to face this as a challenge. However, if you adopt this as a mindset at every feature you're building and asking the following question like how can I enhance the question in the feature in a way that I can make it delightful then you will be continuously innovating throughout the light and to give an example when I worked at Google meet the very first feature by the way that my team shipped was a background replace so there was a need to protect people's privacy working from home so we first shipped background replace as an image but then we of First that was a huge surprise and a positive delight for among our customers but it became quickly as a mustave. So after a few months we added video background so you can change your background with a video and after a few months we realized that we needed to innovate again. So we introduced immersive background where of course it feels like you're having a shim or snow or you can also hold accessories or something like that. So that's another iteration and now you can even have an AI personalized generated like a background. So it's all about continuously innovating and continuously bringing delight and not adding it from time to time when you have space or capacity for it. — Yeah, absolutely. And not just slapping it on at the end as well. Delight needs to be designed in from the very get-go. Right from the beginning of the user journey and discovery process. — Yes. — This has been incredibly enlightening. You've given us the vocabulary to talk about what I think is really important for the success of our products and it's going to allow us to make the case for bringing this stuff up and getting it into our backlogs and onto our road maps. So Narin, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. I am going to just flip to my screen here now as we sign off to point out that we're going to be back here same time, same place. It's going to be April se April 7th. It's a Tuesday. We're going to be talking about how the product management or how product management works in a broken incentivization system. We're going to be diving really deep into some of the things that are stopping us from being able to achieve our goals. And it goes deep down into how companies are run and how people are incentivized. Yeah, Dominic, you say it's going to be heady. It's going to be a good one. So, be there, bring your questions, and we look forward to seeing you back there. In the meantime, huge thank you to Nazarine. You've been brilliant. Thank you so much for bringing your presentation, bringing your stories and your experience. Thank you everybody for bringing your questions and your chat. This has been great. Once again, if anybody wants to give PropPad a go, jump into the sandbox

or hit up propad. com/demo and we'll show you around ourselves. In the meantime, thank you so much once again and we will see you all again here soon. — Thank you. — All right. Bye everybody. Bye for now. Thank you.