How to prioritise for customer delight
Noriako Kano
All product managers know: not all features are created equal.
The problem is, it’s hard to tell which add value, which take it away and which are just utterly pointless wastes of time and money.
You can always ask the audience, but often you find users of a product just want more features. And more does not always equal better.
Thankfully, there is an awesome model to help you figure all this out, and take away a lot of the guesswork.
It’s called the Kano model, and was created in 1984 by Noriako Kano, a Japanese lecturer and consultant.
Through this lens you can discern whether a feature is a:
- Basic: these are your must-have features, like the wheels on a car. Users will be pissed if you don’t include them, but it’s not worth making them awesome because they can’t create much satisfaction and don’t differentiate your product.
- Performance: these are the competitive features, like mobile phone battery life. Improving them drives satisfaction, but they can be a resource-drain as competitors invest in a race to be the best. They don’t drive differentiation.
- Delighter: these are those unexpected moments of joy. They drive high levels of satisfaction and can create product differentiation and brand loyalty.
There are also features that straight up annoy people (dissatisfaction) and those that investing more has the opposite effect to what you’re looking for (reversal). Best avoid these two.
When creating an MVP, you will find that you only really need the basic features.
Yet the beauty of the model is that you can often figure out what the best 'bang per buck' of each feature is (ie. the effort for your team to build it compared to the increase in satisfaction it can create).
You might just find that a really easy to implement delighter can help early adopters fall in love with your product.
A couple of examples of cheap to implement delighters are cookies upon check-in at Doubletree Hilton, and the daisy you get in the car when you buy a Beetle.
Cheap and easy, but lead to a huge increase in satisfaction. So why not do it?
The beauty of this model is that it also shows the enormous value in keeping in features that might seem a bit whimsical or low-priority.
It can move your product from Minimum Viable Product to a Minimum Loveable Product.
The lesson being: delight your customers, early and often. Doing so creates loyalty, differentiation and makes business sense to boot.
For step-by-step instructions on how to implement the Kano model, I recommend this blog from Folding Burritos.
This is part of a daily blogging expedition I’ve begun. Please do follow along on Medium or Twitter.
Any and all feedback is more than welcome!
