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

Lenny Rachitsky: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 this

Nasreen Shengal: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 the light is actually this ability to create products that serve for both emotional need and functional need

Lenny Rachitsky: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

Nasreen Shengal:How can we build products where we can achieve the life code recently I booked an Uber I was waiting for the driver and suddenly the driver canceled for no specific reason but what happened 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 removed the stress and the friction

Lenny Rachitsky:Let's talk about how to actually approach this systematically

Nasreen Shengal:We need to satisfy three main pillars the very first one is

Lenny Rachitsky:The big elephant in the room when is this not worth your time companies like Workday SAP and Salesforce that did really well very undelightful

Nasreen Shengal:The hard truth is that

Lenny Rachitsky:Today my guest is Nasreen Shengal 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 products 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 Nesreen 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 B to B versus B to C 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 Lamey for suggesting topics 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 replicable N eight and Linear Superhuman Descript Whisper Flow Gamma Perplexity Warp Granola Magic Patterns Raycast Chepier D and Mobbin head on over to Lenny'sNewsletter.com and click product pass with that I bring you Nasreen Shankel today's episode is brought to you by DX the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers to thrive in the AI era organizations need to adapt quickly but many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like which tools are how are they being used what's actually driving value DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift with DX companies like Dropbox Booking.com Adyen and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity to learn more visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny that's getdx.com/lenny you fell in love with building products for a reason but sometimes the day to day reality is a little different than you imagine instead of dreaming up big ideas talking to customers and crafting a strategy you're drowning in spreadsheets and road map updates and you're spending your days basically putting out fires a better way is possible introducing Jira product discovery the new prioritization and road mapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian with Jira product discovery you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize confidently finally replacing those endless spreadsheets create and share custom product road maps with any stakeholder in seconds and it's all built on Jira where your engineering team's already working so true collaboration is finally possible great products are built by great teams not just engineers sales support leadership even Greg from finance anyone that you want can contribute ideas feedback and insights in Jira product discovery for free no catch and it's only $10 a month for you say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never ending alignment efforts the old way of doing product management is over rediscover what's possible with Jira product discovery try it for free at Atlassian.com/lenny that's Atlassian.com/lenny

Lenny Rachitsky:Nesreen thank you so much for being here welcome to the podcast

Nasreen Shengal:Hi Lenny thanks for having me

Lenny Rachitsky:It's my pleasure so you just published a book that is coming out or just came out a couple days ago from the time this podcast is coming out it's on a very polarizing topic product it's called product delight and the reason I think it's polarizing is I feel like there's two buckets of teams there's like the teams the product teams that are just like of course we need to make our product delightful and that's how we win that's how we differentiate it's so important 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 got to close some deals we don't have time for this we have fires constantly we got to rebuild our infrastructure we have no time for delightful stuff so my goal for this conversation is basically two parts one is help people understand why this is worth investing in very practically not just the warm and fuzzies of it and then two give them an actual framework and model for how to do this successfully and not waste time on stuff that's not useful how does that sound

Nasreen Shengal:Sounds like a great goal and let's share this goal together today

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay this is our mutual goal we have aligned KPIs okay so let me let me start with just this broad question and let's just see where this goes what is your best pitch for why a product team with limited resources constant fires lots of priorities should spend time on delight and delightful features

Nasreen Shengal:Every time I talk about delight whether in a conference or a workshop I always start with this very simple question what is your favorite product I mean what I love about it is the range and the variety of answer I usually get like some people would choose products for the productivity it get and other may choose product because they feel joy or comfort with it without even knowing how to explain that and that's even more exciting because we connect with products at different levels we might connect with products for the functionality part or we might connect with product because it fulfill a certain emotional link that we were not even aware of and so the best product deeply emotionally connect with users and that's the essence of delight so delight is actually this ability to create products that serve for both emotional need and functional need and the hard truth is that even functioning product very well functioning product may tend or still experience some trouble or issue getting tractions and growth and the success that is hoped for if they do not allow users to feel certain emotions so let's take spotify for example like users do have plenty of options to stream music but features like wrapped or mood based recommendation or like the discover weekly allow users to be seen and heard and even connected so that's why the light is not about sprinkling joy on top of utility it's about creating an experience where emotion is completely on the heart of the experience so let's be clear delight is not a luxury nowadays and more nowadays because the market is so crowded it's even a differentiator it's a strategy that we can adopt in order to grow our business gain in loyalty in word-of-mouth in growth and even in revenue

Lenny Rachitsky:I think about it as you talk to it I've had some feelings recently like this actually I never checked Instagram anymore and my wife I was talking to my wife about it because she checks it often and I was just like I just don't feel good when I open it it doesn't feel nice and so I just don't ever go there and so she sends me all these DMs and things in there I'm just like I didn't nothing you send me on Instagram I will even see and that actually is a recent example of just like yeah the feeling of the product makes me not use it anymore so I know exactly what you mean also think about linear is like the whole thing initially was we're just going to make the most amazing basically task management system and on the surface you'd be like that is not gonna work there's like Jira and Asana and Monday and all these guys you're not gonna win just making it awesome they are winning they're doing super well because they are so thoughtful about every part of the experience and you could say it's very delightful so I totally hear what you're saying when you talk about delightful features adding a delightful feature just like what is just what's a good way to understand what's a delightful feature making it delightful

Nasreen Shengal:So when we create products it's really important that the solution that we're building is solving for both needs and I really highlight the fact that there are functional needs like for example you wanna book a flight wanna listen to music and it should also solve for the emotional needs which could be I wanna feel less lonely I wanna feel comfort I wanna feel secure and the best product are those that create and craft solutions that blend the two so if you can blend the two dimensions like the functional side and the emotional side within the same solutions then you are creating what we call emotional connection and by the way emotional connection is not a new topic I mean you've probably heard that very much in the design area and the marketing area as well I mean you agree with me the best design is the emotional design the best marketing is the marketing like an emotional marketing I mean we see the best ads coming from those emotional ads but the reality is that and even before I start writing the book I realized that it's not that much spoken about in business and in products I mean that by itself create a gap because you have designers talking about emotion marketers talking about emotion and then in the middle business are like what are you talking about we need to ship features we need to ship functionality so we cannot achieve that so much needed goal so in product I call it delight you might ask why delight because every time I talk to a founder or a CPU or any product leader they all start by saying we need to delight our users I mean this sentence by itself is very much repeated the truth is that they don't know how to delight I mean we agree that we should delight but we don't necessarily know how to delight so I started from this concept and I tried to come up with a concrete of course framework but also an actual way to put that into practice and in order to get even deeper into the definition I want to highlight that there are two definitions for the light I promise I'm not going to spend too much time on the theory but the first definition is the theoretic definition so delight is an emotion and there's a professor called professor przyk who actually created what we call the wheel of emotion and he actually conceptualized the light as a combination of two emotions could you guess what are these two emotions

Lenny Rachitsky:The combination well I've seen your stuff so I think I know what you're gonna say there's gonna be exceeding expectations is a part of it and then I forget the other piece but I think that's an important so

Nasreen Shengal:So the light is an emotion and it's a combination of two emotions

Lenny Rachitsky:Mhmm

Nasreen Shengal:These two emotions are joy and surprise

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay there we go I started I started right at that second I'll take it okay joy surprise

Nasreen Shengal:Just try to feel it now like imagine yourself in a moment or a situation where you are experiencing at the same time joy and surprise in that case you are delighted so that's the theory behind delight now let's go to the practical side the practical side how can we put delight into practice how can we build products where we can achieve this delight goal and in order to do that we need to satisfy three main pillars the very first one is like removing friction the second one is anticipating need and the third one is exceeding expectation I'm gonna explain these one by one maybe through examples so that people can get exactly what I talk about so the first one I said by removing friction it's really important when you're building product to identify what we call these valet moment these moments where the emotion is at the bottom and maybe the user is experiencing some anxiety some stress and how can we leverage the experience so we can reduce this valet moment the best example I could share with you is actually something that did happen to me recently I was actually about to take a train from Paris to London so I booked an Uber and Uber assigned me a driver I was waiting for the driver and suddenly the driver canceled for no specific reason and I was so stressed I really had to catch my train I was late already so I jumped into the first taxi that just passed in front of my building and I forgot about my Uber application what happened is that actually when your driver cancel Uber do their best in order to assign you a new driver of course and I didn't pay attention to that so the driver came to my place he waited for me and then I ended up being charged for the waiting time charged for the trip that I didn't took and I was so angry when I realized that on my app so I was psychologically prepared that I need to write an entire essay about what happened and how I want and I need to be refunded but what happened is that when I get to the app there have been only two clicks to get refunded it's like select the trip you want to be refunded and bingo your money is back wow I mean I've been into these moments where the emotion was supposed to be low and suddenly the solution that they provided is something that completely removed the stress and the friction and of course now I can take more trips without the stress that may come out of that so that's removing friction

Lenny Rachitsky:That's a really good example just to double down on how awesome this is just making it easy to do something that you expect to be really hard is delightful like canceling a subscription unsubscribing from something awesome example okay keep going

Nasreen Shengal:So the second pillar is about anticipating needs meaning that remember in delight you have surprise and if you have to wait for your users to tell you exactly what they need from you then you are just honoring their need you're not exceeding or you're not even anticipating what you wanna offer them so another example probably is actually my husband for many many years he's trying to convince me to move to revolut revolut app that banking app and honestly I was comfortable enough with my traditional banking app and I didn't want to add more check and etcetera so I did resist not getting into the temptation of trying but that was until one specific moment actually a couple of months ago we went on a family trip to Singapore and when we landed there we actually realized that our French operator do not allow us to have international calls for free meaning that we had to pay extreme high fees for roaming and for data so what are the choices either you have to buy a local ecm or you need to accept these fees which are very high and that was the moment when I looked at my husband he opened his riverlute app he went to a tab called esim buy esim €7 is done it's like how the hell did revolut thought about putting an esim for a bank app I mean it's really insane but then when you think about it like most of revolut users are international or expats so they travel a lot and in that case they anticipated the need that people will travel and they will probably need at certain destination that kind of feature so that's the anticipating need part creating surprise by giving them something before even people ask you for and by the way rahul voora I mean the CEO of superhuman who've been on the show by the way and I loved his show he said something very similar he said like in order for a product to be loved you need to set the bar higher than your users themselves like that's about exceeding expectations and now we're getting to the third pillar which is exceeding expectations so once you anticipated their need it's really important to exceed expectations which means that okay how can I surprise them by giving them more than they ask and here again I have an example maybe that everyone is familiar with I mean I use chrome I love chrome but my husband is a Microsoft corporate user like heavy Microsoft user and he uses like edge all the time I mean the other day I've seen him doing something that really surprised me like he was about to buy a coffee machine and he went through the entire journey he put the coffee machine on for payment he was about to pay and suddenly actually edge suggested him for a complete auto fill feature a coupon like he was about to pay something like €120 and suddenly you get 15% discount because edge found out that there is a coupon you can apply and you just get 15% discount that's for me exceeding expectation because I was not even asking for a coupon I was about to pay the €120 anyway so that also by itself creates a kind of surprise so these are the three pillar we need to play with them we don't have to do them all at the same time but every time we bring the product we need to think about how can we reduce friction how can we anticipate our users' need and how can we create that exceed expectation part of the products and I really wanted to make this clear because sometimes people think about the light as the confetti I mean the other day I was giving a workshop and someone showed me like hey if you shake the phone you have snowflake falling yes yeah I mean why not but that's not the light I talk about it has to come with a value it has to come with a concrete reason and I call this like the confetti effect like people think about confetti as a way of delighting their users but if it doesn't bring any value then don't do it and by the way I'm not here to say don't do confetti I mean why not confetti could come with value and could bring some joy and the best example is on airbnb maybe the one that you're most familiar with like I'm an airbnb user both as a host but also as a guest and as a host I have a goal which is to make sure that I always keep my super host badge like I love badge and of course it allows me to provide the best experience for my guests and you know how it works like every three months airbnb recess whether you wanna you can remain a super host or not but you know what happened like every three months if you're renewed as a super host and when you open the app the app turns into confetti like just to celebrate that moment with you and that kind of moment is like why not because I feel like airbnb is recognizing my effort and celebrating that small moment with me so it's about making sure you understand the value of your users and making sure that you're providing a solution that just brings them joy and surprise

Lenny Rachitsky:The superhost example is actually really interesting because I built the superhost program that was one of my projects at Airbnb me and my team and interestingly it came from not from like here's a metric we need to move let's build superhost it instead came from this guy chip connolly who was just on the podcast who was a longtime hotelier and he's just like you need a way to differentiate status and levels of quality and this is one way to do it and there's a lot of actually fear on the product team that this is going to tank search conversion people will be distracted by this thing interestingly it made hosts really happy like you just like I wanna be super host I don't know why but I wanna be a super host it didn't actually move any metrics which is interesting may might have changed over the years but it was an interesting interesting contrarian project that feels like how could you not have it but it didn't really move any metrics which always surprised us but maybe it did later anyway I really love this very simple way of thinking about delight and I think I think you're almost underselling what this framework is helping people with which is just how to build great product experiences so there's this joy plus surprise piece which is just the emotional component you'll feel delighted if you're there's joy and surprise and then this three piece more I don't know even practical way of thinking about it removing friction anticipating needs exceeding expectations like is how to build great experiences and part of that is being delighted by it part of it is just this is a great experience I think a big elephant in the room with this question is b to b versus b to c and just like when is this not worth your time I imagine companies like workday and sap and servicenow and all these salesforce that did really well very undelightful the way I think about this is when it's like a greenfield market and there's nothing amazing yet you don't need to make it as great of an experience as long as it's solving a real big pain point but as the market gets more competitive linear is a good example here the way you can stand out is make it a much better experience it much more delightful thoughts

Nasreen Shengal:Yeah thanks for bringing this b2b versus b2c thing because it comes a lot and every time I talk about delight people might connect that to the b2c world and honestly for me as long as there are human using the product at the end of the day then they need their emotion to be honored so for example when I actually started this project of the light I realized that most of my career has been mostly close to the b2c work yes like I've been working for Skype Spotify Google Meet Google Chrome so I quickly realized that I needed to interview people from the b2b space so that I get the sense of what's the light in their space so I interviewed people from like GitHub or Atlassian or Snowflake I mean I really wanted to get a variety of industry and type of industries and what I realized which probably not a surprise is that they do value emotional connection in a way or another I mean it's not something new they just do it in a different way so for example for Dropbox they do have a product principle called cupcake for Snowflake they have something called superhero I mean the names could vary but the meaning is exactly the same I mean it's all about bringing joy to the customers so I came up with this concept of b2h which is business to human for me it's really important to take into consideration human emotion while building the product whether in a b2b space or a b2c space and by the way exactly as you said since people are so much exposed to b2c examples I mean the expectations are getting higher and we are expecting also from b2b products to become more human and to feel more human so actually when I wrote this book I defined what I call humanization as a type of delighter I mean I listed a couple of delighters and humanization is one of them and I even said it's my favorite it's about asking the following question if my product was a human how would the experience would be better just think about it that way so for example when I worked for Google Meet and I actually joined Google Meet right when pandemic happened like 2020 and we had of course to work on those challenges of like how people are taking these new ways of working from home so instead of comparing Google Meet to Zoom or Teams or whatever other video conferencing tool do you know what did we compare Google Meet to that's the best do you think

Lenny Rachitsky:Just like an actual conversation

Nasreen Shengal:Exactly. I mean the bar that we're setting ourselves, like comparing Google Meet to how this experience of meeting could be better if we were all having this conversation in a row, because if you get this as a goal you set a higher bar of expectation and you start to think in a human way. And by the way, there is another example that really stuck to me which when I was preparing for this project I spoke with a head of product from Dyson and he said a very similar thing. Actually, when I spoke with Andy he said we don't compare our Dyson vacuum cleaner to other vacuum cleaners. We compare them to what if I hire a real person and how would that real person be better than the robot that we are building. Actually, you hire a certain person to clean your house, you probably tell that person to start with a certain room or to clean in a certain way which the robot was not ready at that time. So they added recommendation into their robot to get closer to what a real human-like space could happen. So that's the concept of humanization. It's all about making sure that your product or it's actually about reminding users that there are real humans behind the product and we wanna achieve that.

Lenny Rachitsky:If you wanna see a really delightful human-like vacuum cleaner, the The Matic, I don't know if you've seen The Matic. I just got one and that is a pure delight. They nailed it. They didn't need to read your book, they nailed it. Coming back to this B2B piece, I think it's an important piece to just make sure we help people see. Do you feel like what I said is true that if it's like a new market without a ton of competition and you're solving a big pain point, they're like this is a hair on fire problem, I just need a CRM that works or I need a customer service thing for C Servicenow, there's less need to get this right to exceed expectations, to anticipate needs if you're just like solving the problem they have and there's nothing else, that's probably gonna be okay.

Nasreen Shengal:Honestly, maybe the product will work and of course it has to work, but the problem is that if you do not integrate that part into the way how you're building the solution, you're probably just building a product but not their product that will stand out. I mean if there is another competitor who's addressing the emotional needs then the other product will win. I mean that's how the market is today. So of course you will make a product that works but do you want it to just work or do you want it to stand out? And by the way, since we're talking about this B2B and B2C space, just a couple of days ago I was pinging in a post, LinkedIn post that I really loved so I'm sharing it here. Actually was from a product leader from Buffer and actually he said something really interesting. He actually said that we realized that about 2% of our users who are not using Buffer, they are clearly inactive. They are not using our product for many months. So we decided to send them an email and say hey, we noticed that you're not using our product. Are we gonna refund you? Meaning that we're gonna lose money, yes, but it's about trust and integrity. So this is a B2B space, this is about creating trust, this is about creating this connection and the reaction is really funny because you might remind people to resign or close your contract with a certain product but that even creates a deeper connection that might even drive you to not cancel at all. Like okay, you're inviting me to cancel but thanks so much for your honesty so I'm gonna remain. I mean this kind of thing build trust over time and build emotional connection over time so it might not as you said like create like a big impact on metrics but over time as you're building personality or building a brand for your product it will definitely have impact over time.

Lenny Rachitsky:Slack I think is a good example of that. Remember using Slack for the first time, the little delightful animations and these little funny quotes and they ended up being a $30,000,000,000 company. It feels like what I'm hearing is just like the more competition there is, the more you need to stand out, the more this is something you need to get right because if there's a problem you're solving no one else is, you don't, the experience doesn't have to be incredible like Revolut, another example. There's a lot of banking products but the way they stood out incredible experience, a lot of delight. Okay, let's get to how to actually do this. We've been so far we're just like here's why it's worth thinking about and doing. Now let's talk about how to actually approach this. You have a really simple and clear way of approaching this so you're not spending time in the wrong stuff and not just investing in confetti. It's called the delight model. Talk about that.

Nasreen Shengal:Yes, so the things that we did not really spoke about is the fact that over my product career I've been like a regular PM but during my time at Google I've been the delight PM. So there is even an entire product team who actually work on making sure that the product is delightful. I mean we do have such a thing for Chrome, we have that for Google Meet. I mean that's a real thing. And of course I understand that not every company could allow themselves having the luxury of having a delight PM. So that's why I came with this concept of how can I make this actionable and I created the delight model. It's very simple and by the way what I want to really highlight here is that you do not have to change any ways of working or any strategic steps that you're already taking in your company. So what is the delight model? It happens in four steps. So we're gonna work then one by one. And the very first step is about identifying users' motivators. What I mean is that actually users are using products for completely different reasons and that's the very first thing that you need to get aware of. I mean we do segmentation, that's usually something that most of product people do but we usually segment based on demographic or behavioral meaning that who they are or what do they really do with the product. And the third type of segmentation that I believe is very powerful is the motivational segmentations which means that you need to segment your users based on why do they use the products. Like for example, like when I worked at Spotify we know that there are people who use Spotify to search for a specific track or there are people who use Spotify because they wanna get inspired and others will listen to Spotify because they wanna feel less lonely, productive or they want to feel connected. I mean these are motivators and the very first step of the model is to make sure that we have a list of what we call like functional motivators and the emotional motivators. I'm pretty sure most of the listeners are familiar with the functional motivators but the emotional motivators is an extremely important part of the process because we're gonna use it later. That's the first step.

Lenny Rachitsky:So just to be clear, so functional motivators are like I need to find a song, I need to get inspired, I need to find something for my kid to listen to. What are some examples of emotional motivators?

Nasreen Shengal:So emotional motivator for the Spotify example could be I wanna feel less lonely or I want to change my mood. That's something that sometime you go to Spotify without specific thing in your head to listen to but the need is to change your mood or to feel nostalgic or something like that. I mean these could be example. For example, in the case of Uber I know that they have been working heavily on allowing users to feel secure and they build a lot of feature for security reasons.

Lenny Rachitsky:That's interesting. It's like a nuanced version of jobs to be done. There's the functional jobs to be done and then there's how you wanna feel. Yeah, super interesting. Okay, great.

Nasreen Shengal:And even when we talk about emotional motivators we have the personal emotional motivators and the social emotional motivators. The personal emotional motivators is how users want to feel while using the product. That's exactly it. The social emotional motivators is how users want others to feel about them while using the product. I mean think about Wrapped for example. A lot of people share their Wrapped because they want to share how cool they are and in order to be perceived cool and to feel connected. I mean these are different areas of emotional connection. So this is the first step identifying emotional motivators also as well as functional motivators. Now the second step is to convert those motivators. I mean as soon as you have this list how can I convert this into an opportunity or product opportunity. So you have the basis. I mean the hardest job is to identify these motivators and then you can identify product opportunities related to that. And by the way we see the shift that we are not too much talking about product space but rather opportunity space because solutions are not only about solving problems but also about honoring needs and making sure that we are solving for those needs. So we can use things like how might we or whatever. By the way I'm not very religious or strict about whatever framework could be used here. It's all about starting from these motivators and define them and put them in the strategy as opportunities to be solved. So this is second step. The third step where we get to a more concrete things here is to try to identify solutions but that solve for those motivators. So remember we actually identified functional motivators and emotional motivators and I defined what I call the delight grade. So the delight grade is a matrix where we place functional motivators and emotional motivators and then you will select among all of the identified solutions and you place them in the grid based on what motivators is this solution solving for. I mean is it solving for one particular functional motivator? Is it solving for one particular emotional motivator or both? Why are we doing this? Because we are categorizing features into three types. There's the surface delight when a feature is only solving for an emotional motivator. I mean think about Wrapped, we used Wrapped a couple of times here but Wrapped has nothing functional into it. It's all about allowing people to feel cool and share that with their friends. That's surface delight. Yeah, another example of surface delight, the other day I was using my Apple Watch and it was my birthday so on my birthday I had this balloon. I don't know if you experienced it like it's saying happy birthday in the screen. I mean why not? This is all about creating this emotional connection on the emotional level only. The second type of delight is what I call low delight. It's when the feature is only solving for one of those functional motivators. And of course the third type is the most powerful for me is the deep delight. Actually this happens when you have a feature where you are at the same time solving for a functional need and also solving for an emotional need. For example, in the case of Spotify Discover Weekly or Spotify Jam could be a good example of deep delight where we actually can of course learn or get inspired with a new music but in a personalized way so it allows us to feel heard and seen and understood by the app. And that's the third step which is about identifying solutions and make sure that they are delightful and categorize them here. The fourth step which is the last step of the model is validating because how can we make sure that we are not just creating only surface delight or we are just doing it in the wrong way. So I created something that I call the delight checklist. It's actually just a checklist that anyone can go through to make sure that the feature that we're building is making user impact, is making business impact because delight is not an excuse to just add aesthetic and fun part in the product. It really has to be aligned with the business but also there are other couple of things like feasibility, familiarity. A very important part for me is inclusion. Inclusion really has to be taken into consideration here because when we talk about emotion what makes me happy is not necessarily what make you happy right? I mean even myself I might be happy with something that is not necessarily what's gonna make me happy tomorrow. So inclusion is really important when we talk about delight because we've seen a lot of example where it's done wrong and I can share some example here as well. So the example that comes to my mind is actually something that happened last year here in Paris or in France in general. It was Deliveroo, you know this company that deliver and actually it was Mother's Day and on Mother's Day they came up with the idea of sending notification to Deliveroo users and the notification look exactly as a missed call from your mom. I mean if you look at it from the screen it says like missed call from your mom you click on it you get like hey it's Mother's Day oh think about your mother.

Lenny Rachitsky:That's clever, that's clever.

Nasreen Shengal:It was supposed to be delightful. The problem is that this feature had the worst press ever in France. Like people really started to complain about it because yes the intention was positive, yes it was joyful for some people but not everyone has the luxury of enjoying such notification. For some it means joy, for others it means grief or sorrow or whatever. So it was not inclusive enough. So that's why I'm highlighting the inclusion part for delight because it might be undertaken some time.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay incredible and that was a really good example of why you have this checklist at the end of making sure this is actually not gonna upset people. Well, accidentally this episode is brought to you by Lucidlink, the storage collaboration platform. You've built a great product but how you show it through video design and storytelling is what brings it to life. If your team works with large media files, videos, design assets, layered project files, you know how painful it can be to stay organized across locations. Files live in different places. You're constantly asking is this the latest version. Creative work slows down while people wait for files transfer. Lucidlink fixes this. It gives your team a shared space in the cloud that works like a local drive. Files are instantly accessible from anywhere. No downloading, no syncing and always up to date. That means producers, editors, designers and marketers can open massive files in their native apps, work directly from the cloud and stay aligned wherever they are. Teams at Adobe, Shopify and top creative agencies use Lucidlink to keep their content engine running fast and smooth. Try it for free at lucidlink.com/lenny that's lucidlink.com/lenny. So let me just mirror back these four steps and then I'm curious if there's another example of something you built that followed this model that had a really good impact but let me let me share. So basically what this is is to help you figure out what is worth investing in under this umbrella of delight which hopefully now you're convinced is worth your time especially if you're trying to stand out amongst a bunch of competitors. So step one is identify user motivators like what are people what are the jobs to be done both very tang practically functionally you call them functional needs and then also emotional needs are people trying to feel happy sad what are within that bucket. Actually I'm gonna take a quick tangent when you think about emotional needs what's like the taxonomy of them I know there's a lot of emotions anger sat like what are the most common emotional needs in your experience to think about when you're like okay here's when here's how to think about what the options might be.

Nasreen Shengal:It depends on the area but for some product it could be security. For other it might be I wanna feel a better version of myself. Like for example when I spoke with some leaders from Miro they might consider this as an emotional need like they are using the product of course for the functionality that is allowing them to achieve but also to showcase that they are better facilitator or they are a better leader or just feel a better version of themselves. This could be a potential emotional motivator. So it can range depending on the type of the product or the industry but actually emotions could be like we can use for example the wheel of emotion as a basis where we can select from it but not all emotion could apply to all type of products. It has to be specific.

Lenny Rachitsky:Cool that's a really good example of feeling security. It feels like that's something that more and more people want. All these AI companions like they're gonna have all kinds of emotional needs. So identify user motivators functional and emotional, turn those motivators into delightful product opportunities, figure out where you have opportunities to achieve that sort of delight, identify potential solutions like actually ideate on solutions and then validate the ideas through this checklist which you have in your book. Are there a few you wanna share there just like here's checklist of stuff you wanna think through?

Nasreen Shengal:Yeah so we spoke about inclusion as a really important one in the delight checklist another area could be familiarity as well because of course we love innovation but we want to make sure that we are not surprising too much I mean we think that we love surprise but we don't want to be very much surprised and I have a maybe interesting story to share here which is something that actually created the success of Discover Weekly so I'm not sure if you know about that but I'm gonna go ahead and share it

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah let's do it use Discover Weekly all the time

Nasreen Shengal:So when Discover Weekly was first thought of or

Lenny Rachitsky:Like and this is Spotify by the way

Nasreen Shengal:Yes so Discover Weekly how it was created was the fact that it was supposed to be a complete discovery meaning that it was supposed to be complete new for the users so that's the idea behind it it was like the user is not supposed to find or listen tracks that has been listened to or liked before so it was shipped and when it was shipped of course we started to see big success in the metrics but you know what two weeks later people like the engineers realized that there's been a bug in the feature actually bug was that sometimes the algorithm was injecting some of the like it song so the playlist was not completely new to the users it had some familiar feature I would say so of course the engineers fixed the bug and you know what happened

Lenny Rachitsky:Metrics tags

Nasreen Shengal:All the metrics exactly like all the metrics all the success metrics of the feature was going down so they quickly realized that actually what users really liked in the Discover Weekly was not the fact that it was completely new but this familiarity that has been injected randomly in the app just made it even more better and even more appreciated by the users so they fixed the bug and now the Discover Weekly that you're enjoying is a buggy version if we can say so I mean that's why I added familiarity as an element that needs to be checked because we don't want to just inject complete new surprising feature to the user that might be shocking

Lenny Rachitsky:That's an amazing story that was your team that worked on that

Nasreen Shengal:Yeah I've been very close working with them because I've on been the transcoding part and we had to transcode these tracks for

Lenny Rachitsky:Them that's so funny how many other products are we missing out on by not making these mistakes by accident that makes so much sense just like people want a little bit of like oh yeah love that song

Nasreen Shengal:Oh let's go

Lenny Rachitsky:And then okay there's something new that is so funny okay so so these are the four steps and again what you're trying to do here I'll just go back to what makes something delightful is you remove friction make something that you expect to be hard really easy like canceling an Uber and getting a refund on Uber anticipating needs which I think was the esim example you gave in in the Revolut app and Revolut by the way very delightful experience from what I hear I've never used it myself being in the US and then exceeding expectations giving someone and and then yeah but giving them something you never expected and like wow what what was the example there again just to make that really concrete of anticipating of exceeding expectations

Nasreen Shengal:So for exceeding expectation we spoke about for example the shopping it's called like cashback feature

Lenny Rachitsky:Oh yeah the coupon code

Nasreen Shengal:Are plenty of them, yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah, that's amazing. Is that something Microsoft does or that's like an extension that your husband installed?

Nasreen Shengal:No, it's completely a part of the product. What even autofill, like it's autofill, you don't even mean same like a password and I know Chrome is working on it so it's coming if you're a Chrome user.

Lenny Rachitsky:Wow, what a weird thing. Like love it but it's funny that that happens like all these poor businesses are gonna lose out on all this revenue anyway we're have to get into that. Okay, is there an example like a broader example of something you worked on following this model that was really successful really impactful?

Nasreen Shengal:When I worked at Google particularly for Google Meet I told her like I've been a PM for delight so we had that mission that we really needed to delight our users and that's how I actually learned that it's actually a discipline it's not the buzzword it's something that we can really put in place. I do have two examples I can share with you one is from Google Meet and one from Google Chrome which one do you wanna listen to?

Lenny Rachitsky:Let's go with Chrome since we've chat about Meet but I wanna hear them both. Let's start with Chrome, I love Chrome.

Nasreen Shengal:Let's start with Chrome so when I worked for Chrome I had to work on the most challenging issue what do you think is

Lenny Rachitsky:Most challenging issue of Chrome?

Lenny Rachitsky:Memory management? No.

Nasreen Shengal:There is even worse tab worse management how people

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay.

Nasreen Shengal:No it is the hardest one because actually when I worked at tab management I realized that people are working with tabs for a complete different way it's like people are leaving tabs open as reminders or as to do

Lenny Rachitsky:Or just because

Nasreen Shengal:They forget about it

Lenny Rachitsky:Very guilty of that.

Nasreen Shengal:Yes and I had to work on the iOS part like the mobile parts and believe me like if you look at data you see so many people having so many tabs open I mean the numbers is just

Lenny Rachitsky:99 plus is all I ever see.

Nasreen Shengal:Yeah because we do not put three digits.

Lenny Rachitsky:Anyway yeah smart yeah.

Nasreen Shengal:The real number could be really high oh man and so we had to address this problem I mean from a functional perspective this is a problem I mean from a memory from a performance from a space I mean we don't want users to to have like 500 open tabs without even realising by the way that they have 500 open tabs so we had to work on that and how did we do that the way we did that is actually we interviewed a lot of users trying to ask them hey what if you navigate through your open tabs and let me know how you can find and open tabs that was for me a very important phase because that's how you realize that there is a relationship between people and their tabs and I really say relationship because for some people their tabs are really really important things I mean for them there's absolutely no choice for chrome to close tabs on their behalf like it's a really important thing so we had to understand that relationship first and then we asked some people to navigate us through how they can find a specific tab in their tag grades and a lot of people got a bit frustrated or they found that a bit hard or some of them had they found that there is a need to apologize not for the content of course of the tab they had but said something like hey I'm sorry I usually don't have that many tabs open and that's not the point the point is to see if you get frustrated from the experience itself or not so that phase by itself trying to understand not only the functional part but also that emotional part like the frustration part the ashamed part sometimes was really key in order to build a feature that can align with these values and these motivators or these emotional parts so what we built actually was a feature that exists today on iOS which is called inactive tabs so inactive tabs is that ability where you can actually this happened automatically where all tabs longer than twenty one day that was not touched actually or opened for more than twenty one day are placed in this folder called inactive tabs so the result is that you're getting a cleaner tab grid and people are feeling less stressed about the amount of tabs they have but also they keep that trust of chrome because they know that we did not close their tabs their tabs are actually there in that inactive tab group that was one of the features we built it was supposed to be functional only I mean we could just maybe compress the thumbnail or just do a performance way but also that's an example of deep delight where at the same time you're solving for a functional need and at the same time including the emotional dimension into it.

Lenny Rachitsky:That's a super cool example that's actually the reason I switched I started using Arc I don't know if you've used Arc before which is built on Chromium it's its own startup the browser company Josh Miller was on the podcast they delete they actually delete your tabs after some number of hour like days and once you get used to that it's actually great I'm like okay please go away and then you can save them if you want you can pin them I haven't used Chrome in probably long enough where I remember just the tabs deactivate like they just have to reload when you go back to their old it's cool that now they move to a different folder to kind of get them out of the way and clean up your whole thing very cool okay what's the Google Meet story.

Nasreen Shengal:So I told you when I joined Google Meet it was maybe one month before COVID hit Europe like the worst period you can join Google Meet because I mean the usage just gets skyrocketed like we all found ourselves moving from having meetings in rooms and clinics to a 100% remote so the very first couple of months and it was about three to four months I had to understand the impact or the emotional impact of this new behavior the fact that people are staying home and having these back to back what's the emotional impact of this new experience and of course what we did was to interview a lot of people and with the help of user researcher we collected a lot of information and when we try to synthesize these informations we actually realise that there are three main patterns like people are saying I'm feeling bored people are saying there is a low interaction and there was even a new term that was born during COVID time which is called the zoo fatigue you probably heard about.

Lenny Rachitsky:That that's funny that it was Zoom fatigue and not Google Meet fatigue.

Nasreen Shengal:I was really happy it was called.

Lenny Rachitsky:Zoom fatigue I was good point.

Nasreen Shengal:It's always better to put it on a competitor whether it's negative anyway.

Lenny Rachitsky:Bittersweet bittersweet.

Nasreen Shengal:So we had to work I mean in that case if you can see we did not really identify motivators we did identify demotivators because sometimes it's even easier actually sometimes it's easier to let you know what frustrates me or stress me than tell you what makes me happy so if identifying emotional motivators turns out to be complicated so you can try to identify those emotional demotivators and in that case we had to work on these three demotivators and come up with solutions that could help leverage that or at least reduce in one way or another so when we worked on Zoom fatigue we actually realized and we get help from a study that was published from Stanford by the way that one of the causes for the Zoom critique was the fact of seeing your self view it's not about seeing others it's the fact that you see yourself why I mean just imagine yourself walking on the street and someone is holding a mirror next to you I mean even if you avoid your brain will try always to check how you look so the fact that there was self view was a big risk and it was even listed as among the most significant risk of zone fatigue or causes of zone fatigue so we worked on minimizing self view it's as simple as you can minimize your self view meaning that you can still broadcast or share your video but you don't have to see yourself that's one example that we worked on the second one which was related to low interaction and boredom we try to understand how can we bring in a little bit more of joy but at the same time allow people to feel heard and seen and active and that's how we actually brought reaction emoji reaction that waving hand or thumb up because sometimes it feels invasive to unmute yourself and say I agree or like cut the speaker for saying yes I don't agree or something I mean these emojis can help you stay alive stay connected and present and somehow improve the interactivity part so these are the two features that we introduced back then.

Lenny Rachitsky:That is such a cool example I find myself using Google Meet all the time now instead of Zoom so great job Google Meet team I know Zoom was waiting for a long time and I feel like Google Meet's really turned it around good job let me ask a couple questions to keep digging into this question it feels like some CEOs founders leaders are like yes this is worth investing in let's definitely do it there's a lot that's just like no stop this like we got other stuff to do what's your best advice for trying to get buy in from SEO or just some kind of leader that shutting this kind of stuff down

Nasreen Shengal:The very first advice is to try not to convince I mean honestly if you try to convince it's a lost bottle I feel like we live in a world where there is a true there is a false if you come to your CEO and leader say like I heard Nisreen talk about the light we should absolutely do that it might seem like a threat for the organization for the ways of working because it's something new instead have you heard about this concept of perception versus perspective

Lenny Rachitsky:No I don't think so

Nasreen Shengal:So perception is our way of seeing things this is exactly how we understand things this is how we are convinced for example you listen to a podcast talking about the light then you have your own view about what this is about perspective though is the other view is the world's view how other perceive the light so it's very likely that others like leaders and CEO the reason why they're saying no is because their view is that the line is about this nice to have or the cherry on the top so instead of trying to convince them that's why I said don't even try to convince is to try to align and put yourself into the leader's and the CEO shoe and try what do they value most once you understand that try to see how can the light align or help achieve that goal and let me share an example with you because when I left Google and I started coaching founders and CPO I had one founder actually who has been running a startup for helping musicians and artists to find curators I mean that's the core value and mission of the startup and when we initiated the coaching side we actually started talking about strategy OKR I mean that's exactly what he had in mind he wanted to get help into creating product strategies and OKRs and over time as we started coaching we ended up talking about delight the reason is I actually asked him this very simple question I asked him do you think your users are proud to use your product are they proud enough to tell others artists and musicians to use your product and I think that was a really hard question for him because after reflection he said no they are not proud because they feel like they are little I mean they are getting our help so they are not able to get to curator by themselves so who's gonna tell others that they are little like artists and they are having help from us that was the beginning of the conversation and I think after two weeks he kept coming back saying hey Ms Green I think we need to shift our entire strategy discussion into how can we make our users proud of using the product we need to find ways to turn our product into like our users into proud users and so they can tell others tell other musicians they will play the word-of-mouth game and they will allow our product to succeed and that's exactly what we did by the way so in the beginning this founder was completely opposite to the fact that we introduced delight into the product but as soon as he realized that the fact that he invests into allowing their users to feel proud is so important for the growth and the word-of-mouth and the success of the business that became the number one strategy and by the way they've been growing they are now available in the US so things are going super well for them but just to show that the fact that you're saying no does not necessarily mean that it's the wrong thing it's just it's not aligned enough you need to find a way to align them with what they value

Lenny Rachitsky:That's awesome advice it's good advice for just any thing you're trying to get buy in from is understand their goals connect what you're proposing to what they wanna achieve and it's almost like don't even use the word delight just like think about okay here's what they believe we need to do how might removing friction and anticipating needs and exceeding expectations get us there

Nasreen Shengal:Yep

Lenny Rachitsky:And then later be like it's delight I'm just kidding okay that was an awesome example so along those lines just when you have all these ideas we talked about this a bit but just like you have a bunch of ideas bunch of ways to do add delight make it a better experience what's your advice for prioritizing amongst all of the ways that you can remove friction anticipate needs exceed expectations how do you pick the things that are actually worth investing in

Nasreen Shengal:The very first thing that I really wanna highlight here is that we need to shift from the mindset that tells us balancing or like a how can I balance between delight and functionality because we need to move away from delight versus functionality into delight in functionality so that's the biggest move that I really wanna share here because we should really get away from idea that should I prioritize delight or should I prioritize functionality and remember like deep delight is that concept of trying to solve problems and create solutions in a way that emotion is taken into consideration into that and by the way I created this model called fifty forty ten and fifty forty ten is actually a guidance or a recommendation so that if you have done your delight grade and you categorized your solutions or your road map or your backlog into low delight surface delight and deep delight fifty forty 10 will tell you that 50% of your features should be for low delight yes 50% should be for functionality only because like a product has to function I'm not saying that you should only work on the light 40% for deep delight where actually functionality is there it's just that we are building it a little bit different so that people will feel valued and only 10% for surface delight I mean you can bring a little bit of surface delight throughout the year maybe two features a year that will just bring that joy that people will create of course the brand and the personality that we are working on and when I worked at Spotify for example we had some times where we of course blended all that into the same roadmap like for example we had a time where we were working on improving search because at some time maybe you don't remember that but at some point of time search was not functioning that well so that was improved and that's of course functionality only and also we work on introducing video podcast on Spotify and we worked on canvas so canvas are these small video looping video the small clip when you open Spotify and you have like a small clip

Lenny Rachitsky:My showing son is addicted to that he likes to play music and then he found this thing that is like TikTok for Spotify where he's just listening to the music and these little clips I'm like how do I feel I don't want him to be watching that it's like little iPad almost but it is delightful for my dogs

Nasreen Shengal:So for me the success comes from the blending or the balancing how can you create a roadmap where you have a bouquet of deep delight surface and low delight altogether

Lenny Rachitsky:These are awesome examples say someone listening is super bought in how do we do this at our company and then say they're a manager say they're like a manager PMs even just a PM is there something more they can do to create kind of this culture of delight being important

Nasreen Shengal:To start it's a mindset and I call this the delight culture I mean of course it's really important to talk about it so that we understand what it is but it has to be part of the culture of the organization I mean that's how I see it so for example at Google I've seen that during a long time we had a product pillar called delight and the fact that it was a permanent place in the strategy and we see it all the time that's actually a kind of reminder that we need to build features and create opportunities that map and align with that pillars I mean just the fact as a director having this as a pillar is a first step and the second thing is to make it part of the routine I mean the routine of your and the rituals of your company so here an example when I worked at Spotify we used to have something called a squad health check maybe you heard about that at some point I mean it's something about checking how good is the team is functioning and it was happening every quarter and actually the leaders used to be extremely religious about making sure that the team is actually doing it and the fact that they show that they care made it happen every quarter so the leaders actually if they are bought in as you said and they are convinced they have a big role to play into putting that in place by giving it a chance and again when I worked at Spotify we had something amazing called hack days I mean I've seen it at other company but it's never as good as at Spotify so we used to have hack days every month and we used to have hack week toward the end of the year and again the fact that it's happening on a regular basis make the thinking and the mindset completely adopted like the mindset of innovation and going completely out of box etcetera so now I'm advocating for delight days and I actually help organizations setting up delight days and I recently did this with a company called Migros it's actually the largest supermarket chain in Switzerland and we had hack days or like a delight days in that case where we actually of course spoke about delight and then we allowed all the teams to go crazy and innovate and think about delightful features it was very playful the team loves it and we ended the day by giving them the chance to demo and we select the best or the winning delight feature that the company will end up implementing so it's about putting it as a routine in a continuous way so that it become part of the culture not just a topic that is brought in once in a while

Lenny Rachitsky:That sounds so fun a delight day and again when people hear this word it could sound like the confetti example but it's you keep coming back to this point delight is not just that surface level low type of delight there's deep delight that solves anticipated needs exceed expectations or removes friction so deep delight is is still a type of delight but it's actually one that also happens to solve a functional need okay it's interesting so as you talk I've been thinking about like what are the fastest growing companies in the world the top product teams and it's interesting how delight they're so delightful and I don't think it's a coincidence so I think about cursor maybe the fastest maybe the second fastest growing company behind ChatGPT like speaking of exceeding expectations you just like click tab and it codes for you anticipating needs that's like the ultimate example of anticipating your need it's writing your code for you okay delight amazing lovable like it's called lovable

Nasreen Shengal:Yes

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing example ChatGPT. If you can imagine exceeding expectations of blowing your mind, incredible example of delight. I think about Linear as we're talking, just like they are winning in a very crowded space because they invested in making it much more delightful. I think about Suno if you know the music AI app where it just creates magical music for you just telling it what you want to hear. So there's so much here of just like yes, there's a lot of power to making especially in a crowded market in AI especially just make it's almost like table stakes now it needs to blow your mind for anyone to pay attention.

Nasreen Shengal:We just need to be careful because the surprise has an effect that vanish over time so there's this thing that is called habituation effect how can you make sure that you're not just surprising your user once when they use it the first time and then they become like your own use case so you mentioned like couple of example of course i do agree they are all delightful but one of the element that is part of the delight checklist is are you or do at least have a plan to maintain that delight or that surprise over time like for example when we introduced background replacing google meet we first introduced like a blur then we added static image then we allowed for video background then we added like a immersive background where it's like moving slowly as if it's very real and now they even have like ai generated background so it's about creating that surprise over time in a complete continuous way to avoid that habitation effect

Lenny Rachitsky:Such a good point makes me think about Snapchat who their only like strategy was just keep out innovating everybody else with new lenses and maps and all like that was their whole thing just do the newest thing keep doing it keep doing new stuff to keep people excited such a good example hard to do okay i know you also have a story about Apple reactions as an example of good or bad delight can you share that

Nasreen Shengal:It's actually a feature that very much know nowadays but maybe people don't know exactly what's wrong or what's good or what's bad about it so it actually happened a couple of years ago now that actually apple introduced updates into their operating systems and that update of course enabled the fact that if you use gesture you initiate fireworks or whatever any type of reaction

Lenny Rachitsky:I hate that shit.

Nasreen Shengal:Yes it's gesture reaction it happens actually during the time where i worked at google meet and the reason why i remember it very well is because we had a lot of complaints from our meet users saying hey what this feature is about i want to disable it and we're like you need to disable it on your operating system if you're using a mac and why it's not inclusive by the way i mean this is one of the examples i use for the non inclusiveness of a delightful feature because it did happen and that's a real story by the way being a person having a call with a therapist having a hurt finger and he was trying to show his finger to the therapist and what happened is like fireworks happening i mean what an appropriate time for fireworks and of course press i mean you want to avoid this bad press and that's why the light is great but do it in a conscious way and make sure that it's adapted for all situation and all cases

Lenny Rachitsky:Wow such a good example of the light gone wrong i had so many podcast episodes where the guest was like thumbs up and then just this thing shows up and i did stuff like what is going on here what is like no one told you it was turned on how do you even turn this thing off oh my god that's such a good example okay i've covered everything i was wanting to cover is there anything that we haven't covered anything else you wanted to share that you wanna share before we get to our very exciting lightning round

Nasreen Shengal:We spoke about some of the benefits of delight like driving loyalties and retentions and word-of-mouth and that's very much clear but there is one overlooked benefit that even myself i was not aware of and i want to share that with you because it's an interesting conversation i had a couple of months ago i was actually giving a delight workshop in one of the largest health tech company here in france it's called doctolippe and we had an amazing day we spoke about a lot of ideas of light but then toward the end of the day i was approached by the product director called suzanne and she actually told me something that stick i think it's worth mentioning here she actually said ms reen you spoke about a lot of benefits of delight but there's one benefit that did not mention at all and i was curious like what is it and she said like i've seen all the pms today super motivated excited like crazy the fact that pms are working on delight brings them very high level of motivation we're not talking about user motivation here but like the employee motivation and it's so real i mean of course we have some time to work on upgrades and migrations and non fun stuff but when you work on delightful features pms are super excited because they see a reaction of users they see the love of the users and they get even more happier and more productive and for me that's actually a real benefit that of course i was not mentioning during the day but i think it's something that all leaders can take into consideration because we want to make work life more exciting and more energetic

Lenny Rachitsky:That's a really good point like ideally you find a thing that you're very excited to build because it's so fun and drives functional needs and is just delightful makes people joyous and surprised that's the venn diagram we're shooting for amazing okay well with that we've reached our i've very exciting lightning got five questions for you are you ready

Nasreen Shengal:Oh I'm ready.

Lenny Rachitsky:What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

Nasreen Shengal:The first book is called Factfulness maybe you heard about it it comes from Ula Rosling and Hans Rosling and Anna Rosling the three are Swedish it's been a bestseller for years it's still a bestseller by the way New York Times and here's the story actually i have a story about this book i was living in Sweden back then i've been living in Sweden for about seven years by the way and it was 2019 and i had two kids three and two at the time and as every Scandinavian we've been dreaming about having a cargo bike so we started looking for a cargo bike and it happens that we found a cargo bike parked exactly on our building yard and so it had for sale sign so we contacted the owner it ended up to be the bike belongs to Ula Rosling which is actually the author of Factfulness and so by the way Ula used to be the data pm at Google because he sold his statistic software to Google at that time and the interesting part is actually it's a book that is about how can we drive our thinking more using facts than using bias and this book was recommended by Barack Obama and Bill Gates and everyone so the fun story is that i get to read this book before anyone else because it was released that day and i met that guy who's awesome so that's my first book

Lenny Rachitsky:Wow great story.

Nasreen Shengal:And the second book is actually very close to my heart it's called Strong Product Community by Petra Villa who's been on the show by the way and the reason why i recommend this book is because actually i started my career in research i've been a researcher after having my PhD for a long time and when i moved from research to product i noticed that there is a huge difference in the fact how researcher contribute to community versus product contributing to community and i quickly really quickly felt lonely when i became a pm because as a researcher you go to conferences you review each other's work and when you become a pm you have nobody really to review work or to collaborate closely with so for me it was really essential from day one to become a speaker or to contribute to some community whether inside the company or outside the company for example like Google i was initiating something like pm speaker siri where we invited people from the outside to share their insights and perspective so with that i actually get we invited Petra at that time and then she interviewed me and the interview was featured in the book so if someone want to stay sane and contribute and learn in a product community that's a great book i recommend

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome okay is there a favorite movie or tv show you recently watched that you really enjoyed

Nasreen Shengal:I have a tv show and a movie which one do you wanna listen to

Lenny Rachitsky:Let's do tv show first

Nasreen Shengal:Tv show okay so the tv show has nothing to do with business or product it's the equivalent of the American Greatest Baking by the way it's called Le Maillard Patissier and here is why I love it I mean of course I love baking did spoke about that but the reason why I love it is because the candidates are not professionals of course they are good bakers but they are not professional meaning that they make good cakes but they fail a lot of cakes as well and this failure is the most exciting part of the show it makes it relatable I mean I succeed as many as I fail and the fact that I can see these failures allow the show to be relatable and that's why for example I don't like shows like Top Chef or whatever where the candidates are super super professionals and by the way I mean I also participate a lot into cooking classes and I love doing that and I realized that most of the chefs during those classes talk about emotion and they talk about we need to feel when we taste and when we eat and maybe or just maybe that's why I'm talking about the light and emotional today with you

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay you said there's a movie too let's share that

Nasreen Shengal:The movie I have in mind is called Antouchable again it's a French movie but it was so successful that there've been a remake the remake is called The Upside maybe you've watched this movie so this is based on a real story and the reason why I love this movie I mean it's my favorite by far is because you go through all emotion throughout the entire movie I mean you go through joy through sorrow sadness all in the same period and you even laugh for complete and appropriate situations and there's one moment one particular element that made this movie very unforgettable and very special it's actually the soundtrack the soundtrack is something that is so special in the movie and goes so well with the movie that makes it completely unforgettable and so when I watched the remake I was completely disappointed because that soundtrack was not part of the movie so I was completely disappointed as I said and that's exactly what I call the anti delight so I was anti delighted at that time

Lenny Rachitsky:Under exceeded expectations

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay is there a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love

Nasreen Shengal:Yes

Nasreen Shengal:So we spoke about Revolut it turns out to be one of my favorite product these days because it's actually surprising me almost every time I mean this is one of these rare products that every time I use it there is a new surprise and they are really applying this concept of continuous surprise it's not just like one off and then they move to something else so I really like the fact that they are continuously surprising users but there is another one actually that I might probably share here where when I was interviewed for Google they asked me this question what's your favorite product and that was back like six or seven years ago and I I actually answered with a complete non tech products I actually said at that time the Yoyo stroller so the Yoyo stroller it was a surprise yes for the interviewer at the time but it turns out to be the most successful interview I had because the Yoyo stroller has something special that really served one of my very much need at the time it's a stroller that is completely foldable there was no one at that time but you can travel with it in a plane and at that time one of my biggest stress and fear was taking plane with small kids and how am I gonna manage those in lines and in queues and that stroller served exactly my emotional needs by allowing me to travel and take the stroller with me on the plane so just sharing this story because that was my answer for my Google interview

Lenny Rachitsky:It's a really good example of an emotional need of just like confidence this can work on a plane when I'm all stressed out with my baby I went with the Uppababy stroller for whatever it's worth it doesn't fold as well okay two more questions is there a life motto that you find yourself coming back to sharing with friends and family and worker and life

Nasreen Shengal:It might sound quiche but my life motto would be shoot for the star or even higher if you can and I've been really following this almost for my entire career I told you that I started my career in research and during my PhD I realized that most of my degree are coming from France so I really had to introduce some international element into it so I wanted to apply for an exchange program and when I applied do you know who did I apply first like who did I went straight with no Stanford like I applied for Stanford let's see how it goes I mean the guy answered and he said yes but you have to pay a lot of fees I mean that's the policy okay I didn't really manage to get that sponsored so I didn't also want to reduce the prestige of the university so I applied for UCLA and it did work I mean for me that was something that I really wanted from the beginning have something extra or not and I kept doing that throughout my career like I wanted to work for the best tech company and I worked for Google I wanted to be featured in the best podcast and I'm with you

Lenny Rachitsky:Nailed it

Nasreen Shengal:I just have one goal to go which used to be on one of the best stage and I'm working on being on a TEDx why not

Lenny Rachitsky:There we go no you need TED not TEDx the goal that's very the original okay I love this okay final question say someone's coming to Paris where you're based where do they get the best croissant

Nasreen Shengal:Actually the best croissants are not necessarily in the very fancy bakeries they are in those small bakeries that you find on the corners and you have to smell the butter

Lenny Rachitsky:Smell the butter

Nasreen Shengal:Yes from the outside if you don't get it it's not a good sign

Lenny Rachitsky:Wow so okay so if you can't smell butter standing outside of this bakery it's not where you wanna get your croissant wow I've never heard that tip okay I need to know what butter smells like but I think I can I think I get it

Nasreen Shengal:It smell like caramel with hazelnuts I mean it smells really good you need to train your your ability to taste that

Lenny Rachitsky:I love this answer this is like teach a person to fish kind of answer like you can find them if you just go smell Nasreen this was awesome it's everything I hoped it would be we covered a ton of ground let's tell people where to find your book called Product Delight how to make your product stand out with emotional connection where do they find it where do people find you and how can listeners be useful to you

Nasreen Shengal:Yeah so people can reach out on my website nesrimshangel.com they can of course reach out there is a contact form I'm happy to get their inquiry or question or whatever can also learn more about the book there is a website for it like productdelightbook.com I also started recently a newsletter where it's called Delight Tips where I actually share stories delightful stories that I find useful for people to get inspired with and something actually very recently started happening like as soon as I started talking about the light people started spontaneously to share their delightful stories like either personal or professional

Lenny Rachitsky:And

Nasreen Shengal:I love those so if anyone listening wanna share a delightful story I would love to listen to those and just wanna end with the fact that delight is a movement I mean when I started writing this book a friend author told me the following he actually said when we're writing about something it's either writing about a known problem we're giving a solution for a known problem or we are giving a solution for an unknown problem and the second is harder and I chose the second I mean I'm going with evangelizing but delight is an important thing that's what's gonna allow your product to win and stand out I know it's harder but I'm pretty sure that that's what will help us create a more delightful world so if they wanna have and implement a delight culture into their organization they can reach out and that's exactly what I love doing with organizations

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing what a cool place to be just people sharing all these delightful examples with you all day what a cool job Nasreen thank you so much for being here

Nasreen Shengal:Thank you Lenny

Lenny Rachitsky:Bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode