We, as product managers, put in a lot of effort in terms doing market research, competitive reviews or taking user feedback to come up with the best version of our product for our customers. But, it is also true that everybody does these things and probably that’s the reason why 80% of most of the products look exactly similar to the competition (some sort of Nash equilibrium equivalent of the Product management world). For e.g. – majority of the apps in the ecommerce industry look similar. And in such a scenario, how can we expect loyalty from our customers? How can we expect them to be our brand ambassadors in their local circle of influence? The answer lies in “Product Delight”.

What is Product Delight?

“Product Delight” sits under the larger umbrella of “Customer Delight”. Customer delight can be achieved through various ways – Product, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service etc. Product Delight specificially, are those “wow” moments in your product where you deliver an experience which is beyond what the customer would have ever imagined. It creates an instant positive connection between your product and your customer which leaves them drooling over your product.

It’s like a sucker punch of awesomeness.

Some examples of “Product Delight”

Amazon’s “Buy Now with 1 click”

This was a game changer in its “prime” (pun intended). At that time, users were perfectly fine with entering their billing and payment info on each transaction. No one really asked for any improvement. But still, Amazon was able to innovate and bring delight into their product and thereby simplify the user experience.

Netflix’s “Autoplay next episode”

Netflix made binge-watching mainstream. They intoduced this small yet highly impactful feature of auto playing the next episode. Users now were able to stream through tens of hours of content without even pressing a single button.

Gmail’s “Alert pop up on missing attachments”

We all have, at some point of time, made that mistake of missing out on attaching a file in email. Then we have to embarrassingly send that follow up mail with the attachment and apologise for our stupidity. Not anymore. In Gmail, if you send out a mail saying something on the lines of “find attached” and don’t attach anything, then you get an alert pop up reminding you of the same when you hit send.

Chrome’s “T-rex game”

This is probably “the” best example of Product Delight. No one really blamed Google or Chrome when their internet was down. But Google innovated and they were able to delight their users even when the user was not able to access their core service. We now had a fun little game to play while our internet connectivity resumed. Genius.

Gesture controls in smartphones

This one is going to be uncredited as there is no clear record of which OEM first came up with gesture controls. But, gesture controls are an absolute delight when using the smartphone. For e.g. – Recently, I was happily surprised to find out that you can now swipe down on any part of the home screen to open the notification shade. No more reaching out to the very top of the screen for accessing the notification shade.

How to achieve Product Delight?

Product delight is not something that your users will tell you or something that sales team will ask you for. Because simply, no one has ever heard of or thought of it yet. On this journey to find product delight, your only ally apart from your own skills as a product manager, is going to be “data”. Unlike most of the product management problems where the standard answer is “there is no fixed process/formula for doing this”, there is actually a certain process that you can follow to figure out the delight areas in your product.

1. Be the user

Make sure you religiously spend at least 1 hour per day on your product as a user. No fancy gimmicks of stakeholder feedback or competitive review. Just “you” and “your product” – no distractions, no meetings.

2. Focus on the “happy path”

During this time, don’t focus on the bugs or UI issues. Rather, focus on the happy path, the user journey/flow that you think is working perfectly fine. Do “repeated” end to end transactions as a user. Here “transaction” doesn’t necessarily mean a commercial transaction, it’s whatever your product’s core offering is. For e.g. – In Netflix’s case it means search and discovery or watching some content.

3. Identify the “tch moments” or “delight candidates”

The idea here is that, in every product there are small areas of discomfort which probably are not significant enough for our brain to register them as a complaint and thus we never notice them. But if we were to get rid of them, it will bring in some subconscious element of delight. We call then “tch moments”.

Now, as most of the users probably do at max a couple of back to back “transactions”, they never notice such issues. But, if you were to do repeated transactions back to back, there is a possibility that those small insignificant areas of discomfort would add up to an annoying “tch” or “aargh” moment (or whatever way you express discomfort). These are also your “delight candidates”. Take a note of these moments.

Now, be aware that these moments are not easy to identify and it may take you weeks (or even months) to identify your first “delight candidate”. There are no shortcuts.

4. Use “data” to verify your hypothesis

Now you have one/many “delight candidates”. But, you must consider the fact that these candidates were identified on the basis of just one user’s feedback i.e. “You”. There is a reason we are calling them “candidates”. Use data to prove your hypothesis that “these moments did caused slight discomfort to users in general”. Probably some of the metrics you can explore are “user churn at that point in the transaction”, “time taken to complete the transaction” or some other relevant metric depending upon the way you defined “transaction”. You know your product better.

Note – Data can be easily manipulated to accept/reject almost any hypothesis. Be honest to yourself while doing this step. Don’t be biased or in a hurry to accept/reject any of the candidates.

5. Identify the “Product Delight”

Now that you have data’s blessings that these candidates are indeed a customer pain point of certain degree, all you gotta do is figure out a solution aka “Product Delight”. This is probably the easiest step. In this step, you can take others’ help as well if you want. It’s not a solo mission anymore. In fact, the more brains you have working on the solution, the better.

6. Monitor and measure

After you have deployed your “Product Delight”, make sure you monitor and measure it through data or user feedback – direct or indirect (social media). This will help you get confidence (and probably some internal approval/validation) that these changes did created a positive impact on your product. This will help you take better decisions in future “Product Delight” exploration.