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Everyone Can Ship a Good Product Now. That's the Problem.

Published 3 months ago • 2 min read

Episode #303

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Everyone can ship a good product now. That's the problem.

Hi Reader,

Chrome found out users were sitting on thousands of open tabs on mobile. The obvious fix was to close the old ones automatically, right? They didn’t.

The reason is more interesting than the fix.

When the team actually talked to users, they found out tabs weren’t clutter. They were to-do lists. Reminders. Things people might need someday. Some users felt anxious at the idea of tabs being closed.

Some felt ashamed of how many they had. So Chrome built an inactive tabs group instead. Tabs untouched for 21 days move out of the way. Still there. Just not in your face. Technical problem solved. Emotional problem solved.

Most teams would have just closed the tabs. Faster. Easier to justify. And completely wrong.

Nesrine Changuel ran tab management at Chrome and before that helped build products at Skype and Spotify. She calls this the difference between solving a technical problem and designing for how someone actually feels. They’re not the same thing.

Right now that distinction is everything. AI made it nearly free to ship a product that works. Functionality stopped being a competitive advantage about five minutes ago. The only thing left is how your product makes someone feel.

A water filter company made me feel this without a single product decision. Moved house. Called my existing supplier three times over three weeks. Nothing. Then crossing the road to pick up my son from school, a van stops to let me cross. Karma Waters. I called them on the spot and booked the install.

Nobody designed that moment. It wasn’t a product. It was a feeling. And it won the deal.

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​What to do with this?

  • Ask your team one question before the next roadmap review: what do we want users to feel? If nobody's answered that out loud yet, start there.
  • Pull your last three shipped features. Name the retention, revenue, or referral number that moved because of each one. If you can't, you shipped functionality, not delight.
  • In your next customer interview, drop "what do you want this feature to do." Ask "how do you feel when you use this" instead.

This week's episode

E304| Why Product Delights is No Longer Optional

Nesrine Changuel is the founder of Product Excellence and author of Product Delight, with a product career that took her through Skype, Spotify, Google Meet, and Google Chrome.

Here’s what stood out:

  1. The Chrome tabs case study, why the obvious fix would have been the wrong one — [00:06:39]
  2. The Uber COO story: a year’s AI budget gone in one quarter, with no proven ROI — [00:19:49]
  3. The early PM mistake that took Nesrine 18 months to fix — [00:23:09]
  4. The one question most product leaders have never asked themselves — [00:27:23]
  5. The User’s Hierarchy of Need, and why pleasurability just became the only layer worth fighting over — [00:30:22]
  6. Why delight is B2H, not just B2C, and what that means if you build for business — [00:38:10]

Listen / watch: YouTube · Apple · Spotify​

One question for you

If someone asked you right now what you want your customers to feel while using your product, would you have an answer?

Andrew

If you love the podcast and haven't already, please consider leaving us a review and feedback!

Andrew Michael

Host of Churn FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros to learn how the world's fastest-growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.

34 Kimonos, Apartment 102, Nicosia, 2006
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CHURN FM

by Andrew Michael

Churn.fm is the podcast for subscription economy pros to learn how the world's fastest-growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth. Each week we share the top tips and advice from our episodes in this newsletter.

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