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

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
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 got to close some deals. We don't have time for this.

**Nesrine Changuel** (0:12)
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 both emotional need and functional need.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:26)
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.

**Nesrine Changuel** (0:32)
How can we build products where we can achieve the light goal? Recently, I booked an Uber. I was waiting for the driver and suddenly the driver cancelled for no specific reason. But what happened is that when I get to the app, there have 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** (0:54)
Let's talk about how to actually approach this systematically.

**Nesrine Changuel** (0:57)
We need to satisfy three main pillars. The very first one is…

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:02)
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.

**Nesrine Changuel** (1:10)
The hard truth is that…

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:13)
Today my guest is Nesrine Changuel. Nesrine was a long-time 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 Nesrine calls them, and ones that actually drive your KPIs and keep people coming back. In our conversation, we talk about why product teams with limited resources, lots of fires and priorities, should actually spend time on making their products more delightful. I found this part super interesting and surprising. We talk about what sorts of product teams and companies should invest in Delight, particularly B2B vs B2C, and then we dive into her specific four-step framework for discovering the highest ROI opportunities and prioritizing across them. Nesrine shares a bunch of really cool real-world examples from her time at Google Meet and Spotify and Chrome and also examples from Apple and a bunch of other companies she's looked at. A huge thank you to Matt LeMay for suggesting 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, Replit, Bolt, N8N, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisper Flow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chapier D and Mobbin. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Nesrine Changuel. 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 working? 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.
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