Nesrine Changuel
Former delight PM at Google (Chrome, Meet), ex-Spotify and Skype; author of Product Delight; coach to founders and CPOs
Where to hear and read about Nesrine Changuel1 episode or test
Nesrine Changuel is a former delight PM at Google who led products at Skype, Spotify, Chrome and Google Meet, and wrote Product Delight. The thing most worth learning from her is to build features that meet an emotional need and a functional need together, and to test them with a repeatable model rather than adding confetti.
Delight is not about sprinkling joy on top of utility. It's about creating an experience where emotion is completely at the heart of the experience.
A 4-step framework for building delightful products | Nesrine Changuel (Spotify, Google, Skype)
Nesrine Changuel: the story and the lessons
1Nesrine Changuel's path to product delight
Changuel led products at Skype, Spotify, Google Chrome and Google Meet. At Google she moved from regular PM to delight PM, where whole teams work on delight for Chrome and Meet. She built her delight model from that experience.
She notes most companies can't afford dedicated delight teams. So the model has four simple steps that fit existing ways of working, with no delight PM and no change to strategy.
She picked delight knowing it solves a problem few people see. A fellow author told her that solving an unknown problem is harder than solving a known one. She chose the unknown one, convinced delight is what helps a product win and stand out.
Her motto is to shoot for the stars. She applied to Stanford first, then got into UCLA's exchange program.
Her Google interview answer was a stroller that eased a fear. She named the Yoyo stroller as a favorite product because it was affordable and could go on a plane, which eased her fear of flying with small kids. The answer got her the job.
It shows her lens: a product wins by meeting an emotional need alongside the functional one.
2The Changuel delight model
Changuel defines delight as one feature serving emotional and functional needs. A functional need is booking a flight or finding music. An emotional need is feeling secure, less lonely or seen. Products that only function can still fail to grow if users feel nothing.
She ties delight to joy plus surprise, and says the gap is that design and marketing talk about emotion while business talks only about shipping functionality.
She segments users by why they use the product. Step 1 adds motivation to demographic and behavioral segments. Spotify users want a track, inspiration, less loneliness or productivity. Emotional motivators split into personal (how I want to feel) and social (how I want others to see me).
Sharing Wrapped is a social motivator, since people want to look cool. Step 2 turns each motivator into an opportunity to solve.
She sorts every solution on a delight grid: low, surface or deep. Functional only is low delight, emotional only is surface delight, and both is deep delight. Deep delight is the most powerful, so look for it first.
Chrome inactive tabs and Spotify Discover Weekly are deep delight. Wrapped and Apple Watch birthday balloons are surface delight.
She validates ideas on impact, feasibility, familiarity and inclusion. The step 4 checklist covers user impact, business impact, feasibility, familiarity and inclusion, plus a plan to keep the surprise alive. Inclusion is the check most often missed.
"the light is not an excuse to just add like a aesthetic and and fun part in the product."
Changuel tests every decision against three pillars: friction, anticipation, expectations. Uber refunded a cancelled trip in two clicks when she expected to write an essay. Revolut sold her husband a 7 euro eSIM in Singapore. Edge offered him a 15% coupon on a roughly 120 euro coffee machine.
Not every pillar has to appear in every feature. The teams should ask each time how to reduce friction, anticipate needs and exceed expectations.
She allows confetti only when it carries real value. Airbnb's Superhost confetti every three months works because it recognizes the host's effort. A phone that drops snowflakes when shaken has no reason to exist.
"if it doesn't bring any value, then don't do it."
She treats B2B as business to human and asks how a person would do it. Leaders at GitHub, Atlassian and Snowflake all value emotional connection. Google Meet benchmarked itself against an in-person conversation, not Zoom or Teams. Dyson compared its robot vacuum to a hired cleaner and added room recommendations.
Buffer emailed the roughly 2% of users inactive for months and offered refunds, trading revenue for trust.
3How Changuel gets delight onto the roadmap and keeps it there
She recommends a 50-40-10 roadmap split. Give 50% to low delight, 40% to deep delight and 10% to surface delight, about two surface features a year. Half the work is functional because a product has to function.
Spotify's mix was search improvements (low delight) with video podcasts and Canvas looping clips (surface delight). "we need to move away from the light versus functionality into the light in functionality."
She wins skeptical leaders by aligning with their goals, not arguing. Ask what the leader values most, then show how delight serves it. A founder helping musicians find curators learned his users did not feel proud to use the product, because they felt small needing help.
Two weeks later he made user pride his strategy to drive word of mouth. The startup kept growing and is now available in the US. She adds you can skip the word delight and talk about friction and expectations.
She plans for habituation, because surprise fades with repetition. Google Meet kept renewing backgrounds: blur, static images, video, immersive, then AI generated. Revolut surprises her almost every time she uses it, not just once.
Snapchat tried to out-innovate rivals with new lenses and maps, which she calls hard to sustain.
She makes delight a standing pillar backed by rituals. Google kept a product pillar called delight for a long time. Spotify ran quarterly squad health checks, monthly hack days and a year-end hack week, because leaders were religious about them.
She now runs delight days with companies. At Migros, Switzerland's largest supermarket chain, teams brainstormed, demoed, and the winning feature was picked for implementation.
Changuel says delight work also motivates the people who build it. A Doctolib product director saw every PM energized in a delight workshop, because PMs see users react and love the product.
She aims for a Venn diagram of work that is fun to build, meets a functional need and delights users. Upgrades and migrations still need doing.
4Delight cases Changuel worked on or studied
Chrome tab research found shame, so inactive tabs move aside instead of closing. She had people navigate their tab grids and saw frustration, with some apologizing for the count. Tabs untouched for 21 days on iOS go to an inactive folder, so the grid is cleaner and nothing is closed.
The team could have just compressed thumbnails. Users trust Chrome because it never closes their tabs, so the feature lowers stress and keeps that trust.
At Google Meet she mapped what drained people, not what pleased them. She joined a month before COVID hit Europe and spent three to four months on the emotional effect of remote work. Interviews surfaced boredom, low interaction and Zoom fatigue.
A Stanford study named self view as a main cause of Zoom fatigue, so Meet let users minimize it while still broadcasting. Reaction emojis let people feel heard without unmuting. "it's easier to let you know what frustrates me or stress me than tell you what makes me happy."
A bug showed her that surprise needs a familiar anchor. Discover Weekly was meant to be all new songs, but two weeks after launch engineers found it sometimes inserted songs users already knew. Fixing it dropped all of the feature's success metrics, so familiarity was restored.
Today's Discover Weekly is the "buggy" version. She worked close to the team, transcoding tracks for them.
She uses Deliveroo and Apple to show what skipping inclusion costs. Deliveroo's Mother's Day notification looked like a missed call from your mom. It got the worst press in France because it hurt grieving users. Apple's gesture reactions set off fireworks on a therapy call and could only be disabled in Mac system settings.
"For some, it means joy. For others, it means grief or sorrow or whatever." Delight must be conscious and fit all situations.
A 4-step framework for building delightful products | Nesrine Changuel (Spotify, Google, Skype)
Delight means serving emotional and functional needs in the same feature, and Nesrine Changuel lays out a 4-step model, a delight grid and a 50-40-10 roadmap rule to do it without wasting time on confetti. Real examples from Chrome inactive tabs, Google Meet's self-view minimizing and Spotify's Discover Weekly bug show how emotional insight turned into features that moved users.
Changuel led products at Skype, Spotify, Google Chrome and Google Meet. At Google she moved from regular PM to delight PM, where whole teams work on delight for Chrome and Meet. She built her delight model from that experience.
She notes most companies can't afford dedicated delight teams. So the model has four simple steps that fit existing ways of working, with no delight PM and no change to strategy.
She picked delight knowing it solves a problem few people see. A fellow author told her that solving an unknown problem is harder than solving a known one. She chose the unknown one, convinced delight is what helps a product win and stand out.
Her motto is to shoot for the stars. She applied to Stanford first, then got into UCLA's exchange program.
Her Google interview answer was a stroller that eased a fear. She named the Yoyo stroller as a favorite product because it was affordable and could go on a plane, which eased her fear of flying with small kids. The answer got her the job.
It shows her lens: a product wins by meeting an emotional need alongside the functional one.
Changuel defines delight as one feature serving emotional and functional needs. A functional need is booking a flight or finding music. An emotional need is feeling secure, less lonely or seen. Products that only function can still fail to grow if users feel nothing.
She ties delight to joy plus surprise, and says the gap is that design and marketing talk about emotion while business talks only about shipping functionality.
She segments users by why they use the product. Step 1 adds motivation to demographic and behavioral segments. Spotify users want a track, inspiration, less loneliness or productivity. Emotional motivators split into personal (how I want to feel) and social (how I want others to see me).
Sharing Wrapped is a social motivator, since people want to look cool. Step 2 turns each motivator into an opportunity to solve.
She sorts every solution on a delight grid: low, surface or deep. Functional only is low delight, emotional only is surface delight, and both is deep delight. Deep delight is the most powerful, so look for it first.
Chrome inactive tabs and Spotify Discover Weekly are deep delight. Wrapped and Apple Watch birthday balloons are surface delight.
She validates ideas on impact, feasibility, familiarity and inclusion. The step 4 checklist covers user impact, business impact, feasibility, familiarity and inclusion, plus a plan to keep the surprise alive. Inclusion is the check most often missed.
"the light is not an excuse to just add like a aesthetic and and fun part in the product."
Changuel tests every decision against three pillars: friction, anticipation, expectations. Uber refunded a cancelled trip in two clicks when she expected to write an essay. Revolut sold her husband a 7 euro eSIM in Singapore. Edge offered him a 15% coupon on a roughly 120 euro coffee machine.
Not every pillar has to appear in every feature. The teams should ask each time how to reduce friction, anticipate needs and exceed expectations.
She allows confetti only when it carries real value. Airbnb's Superhost confetti every three months works because it recognizes the host's effort. A phone that drops snowflakes when shaken has no reason to exist.
"if it doesn't bring any value, then don't do it."
She treats B2B as business to human and asks how a person would do it. Leaders at GitHub, Atlassian and Snowflake all value emotional connection. Google Meet benchmarked itself against an in-person conversation, not Zoom or Teams. Dyson compared its robot vacuum to a hired cleaner and added room recommendations.
Buffer emailed the roughly 2% of users inactive for months and offered refunds, trading revenue for trust.
She recommends a 50-40-10 roadmap split. Give 50% to low delight, 40% to deep delight and 10% to surface delight, about two surface features a year. Half the work is functional because a product has to function.
Spotify's mix was search improvements (low delight) with video podcasts and Canvas looping clips (surface delight). "we need to move away from the light versus functionality into the light in functionality."
She wins skeptical leaders by aligning with their goals, not arguing. Ask what the leader values most, then show how delight serves it. A founder helping musicians find curators learned his users did not feel proud to use the product, because they felt small needing help.
Two weeks later he made user pride his strategy to drive word of mouth. The startup kept growing and is now available in the US. She adds you can skip the word delight and talk about friction and expectations.
She plans for habituation, because surprise fades with repetition. Google Meet kept renewing backgrounds: blur, static images, video, immersive, then AI generated. Revolut surprises her almost every time she uses it, not just once.
Snapchat tried to out-innovate rivals with new lenses and maps, which she calls hard to sustain.
She makes delight a standing pillar backed by rituals. Google kept a product pillar called delight for a long time. Spotify ran quarterly squad health checks, monthly hack days and a year-end hack week, because leaders were religious about them.
She now runs delight days with companies. At Migros, Switzerland's largest supermarket chain, teams brainstormed, demoed, and the winning feature was picked for implementation.
Changuel says delight work also motivates the people who build it. A Doctolib product director saw every PM energized in a delight workshop, because PMs see users react and love the product.
She aims for a Venn diagram of work that is fun to build, meets a functional need and delights users. Upgrades and migrations still need doing.
Chrome tab research found shame, so inactive tabs move aside instead of closing. She had people navigate their tab grids and saw frustration, with some apologizing for the count. Tabs untouched for 21 days on iOS go to an inactive folder, so the grid is cleaner and nothing is closed.
The team could have just compressed thumbnails. Users trust Chrome because it never closes their tabs, so the feature lowers stress and keeps that trust.
At Google Meet she mapped what drained people, not what pleased them. She joined a month before COVID hit Europe and spent three to four months on the emotional effect of remote work. Interviews surfaced boredom, low interaction and Zoom fatigue.
A Stanford study named self view as a main cause of Zoom fatigue, so Meet let users minimize it while still broadcasting. Reaction emojis let people feel heard without unmuting. "it's easier to let you know what frustrates me or stress me than tell you what makes me happy."
A bug showed her that surprise needs a familiar anchor. Discover Weekly was meant to be all new songs, but two weeks after launch engineers found it sometimes inserted songs users already knew. Fixing it dropped all of the feature's success metrics, so familiarity was restored.
Today's Discover Weekly is the "buggy" version. She worked close to the team, transcoding tracks for them.
She uses Deliveroo and Apple to show what skipping inclusion costs. Deliveroo's Mother's Day notification looked like a missed call from your mom. It got the worst press in France because it hurt grieving users. Apple's gesture reactions set off fireworks on a therapy call and could only be disabled in Mac system settings.
"For some, it means joy. For others, it means grief or sorrow or whatever." Delight must be conscious and fit all situations.