A 4-step framework for building delightful products | Nesrine Changuel (Spotify, Google, Skype)

I feel like there's two buckets of teams. There's the product teams that are just like of course we need to make our product delightful, that's how we win. And then there's just a bunch of product teams that are like, What are you even talking about? We have features to ship, we gotta close some deals, we don't have time for the sometimes people think about the light as the confetti. If you shake the phone, you have snowflake falling, but that's not the light I talk about. Delight is actually this ability to create products that serve for both emotional need and functional need. I know exactly what you mean. I never check Instagram anymore. I just don't feel good when I open it. The feeling of the product makes me not use it anymore. How can we build products where we can achieve the light goal? Recently, I booked an Uber. I was waiting for the driver and suddenly the driver For no specific reason. But what happens is that when I get to the app, there've been only two clicks to get refunded. Bingo, your money is back. The emotion was supposed to be low, and suddenly the solution completely removes the stress and the friction. We need to satisfy Three main pillars. The very first one is a big elephant in the room. When is this not worth your time? Companies like Workday, SAP, and Salesforce that did really well. Very undelightful. The hard truth is that Today my guest is Nasreen Shingel. Nasreen was a longtime product leader at Skype, Spotify, Google Chrome, and Google Meet.

And through her experience building some of the most widely used consumer product in the world. She developed a really pragmatic framework for how to build delightful and retentive product experiences. A lot of product leaders talk about building great user experiences and making their products delightful. But I've never seen a concrete and repeatable approach to actually doing this. Especially one that helps you separate low impact confetti features, as Nestreen calls them, and ones that actually drive your KPIs and keep people coming back.

In our conversation, we talk about why product teams with limited resources, lots of fires, and priorities should actually spend time on making their products more delightful. I found this part super interesting and surprising. We talk about what sorts of product teams and companies should invest in Delight, particularly B2B versus B2C, and then we dive into her specific four-step framework for discovering the highest ROI opportunities and prioritizing across them. Nasreen shares a bunch of really cool real-world examples from her time at Google Meet and Spotify and Chrome, and also examples from Apple and a bunch of other companies she's looked at. A huge thank you to Matt Lemay for suggesting topic for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. That helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 15 incredible products. Including a year free of lovable Replit Bolt, N8 and Linear Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chap PRD, and Mobbin. Head on over to Lenny's newsletter dot com and click product pass.

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