Product Agility

Nesrine Changuel: Delight vs Utility: Why Emotional Connection Wins in Product Design - Productized 2025 TalkInTen

• Ben Maynard, Tamás Kökény, Nesrine Changuel

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Productized in Lisbon is exceptional — an energising, thoughtful conference for product leaders. We're honoured to partner with Productized again and grateful to Bobcats Coding for making this Lisbon series possible.

In this Talk in Ten from the Product Agility Podcast recorded live at Productized Lisbon, Nasreen (author of Product Delight) joins us to explain why products people love combine functional utility with emotional connection. We dig into what 'delight' actually means, how to validate emotional design early, and why emotional bonds drive retention, revenue and referrals.

Key topics discussed

  • What separates products users love from those they tolerate — functional vs emotional motivators
  • How joy and surprise form the core of Product Delight
  • Examples (Spotify, Revolut, ChatGPT) that show emotional connection in action
  • How emotional connection increases tolerance for missing functionality
  • Metrics and research linking emotional connection to retention, revenue and referral


Guest bio:

Nesrine Changuel is the author of Product Delight, a product coach and trainer with 15 years building globally used products (Skype, Spotify, Google Meet, Chrome). She teaches Product Delight — a method focused on designing experiences that combine functional usefulness with emotional resonance.


Thank you to Bobcats Coding for sponsoring our Lisbon series. Visit bobcatscoding.com to download their AI Economics guidebook and learn how they're helping teams build better AI-enabled products.

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast where we explore the ever changing world of product leadership and org design, helping you navigate complexity and build better outcomes for your people and your customers. This week we're coming to you live from Lisbon for the third year in a row at the Productize Conference where I'm grabbing 10 minute conversations with product thinkers, leaders and innovators from around the world. These quick fire chats are all about what's shaping our industry right now, from AI and product strategy to the human side of building great products. Now a huge thank you goes out to Bobcatz Coding for making this Lisbon series possible. Bobcats is a Budapest and Lisbon based digital product studio specializing in AI engineering and end to end digital product development. They're also on a mission to educate the market, exploring a new topic every six months and this fall is no exception. Their latest AI Economics guidebook is out now and you can download it for free@bobcatscoding.com now here's your talking 10 Nesrin Shangel how lovely it is to be in your company once more and this time face to face, not like behind a screen or something. I actually get to see you again and Nesreen is a long term, I'm going to say it and get it right this time. Veteran of the podcast and it's just so nice to have you back after the amazingly successful launch of your book, your appearance on the second Best Product podcast. What's his name? Lanny or something? No, but honestly, congratulations, you've done. It's been amazing. It must been quite a roller coaster for you, but we'll go into that in a second. I am joined by my dear friend Tamash. Hello Tamash. Hey, co founder of Bobcatz and somebody you would have heard earlier on the podcast when I interviewed Jimmy Swake about Token Economy, which was a lovely conversation. I was just wondering whether Saloni, who's the co host for tomorrow, looking over the balcony, if she was going to start shouting at people to be quiet. As you know, we record these episodes live from conferences and it's lunchtime at the moment, so if you hear some background noise that isn't made up background noise, that's the actual sound of people enjoying themselves and eating. I'm not going to mention that you're eating in front of us, which is rather mean. So Nazareen, such a journey from the last time we spoke here to where we are today. But before we get into the first question, can you give our listeners a little bit of just a short insight into you and Then what it is you're talking about Productize this year. Yes. So thanks first for having the chat and I'm excited to see you face to face here at Productize. So I'm Nasreen, I'm the author of Product Delight. Product Delight book got launched in the world three weeks ago and I'm beside being an author, I'm also a product coach and trainer. I teach this method that I call Product Delight. And my experience has been in product for the last 15. I have 15 years of experience building product, let's say globally used and loved products from Skype, Spotify, Google, meet Google Chrome. And I actually carried and summarized my insights and my experience into what I love teaching today, Product Delight. And you came into my company where I work and you gave a talk and it was, it was loved. It really turned on a lot of light bulbs for people I think still spoken about today. So yeah, it's fantastic. I do urge people to buy the book and get any courses because it's not very rarely. I say this because I'm a bit grumpy when it comes to book because I think a lot of this retread a lot of common ground. But Nazreen, you brought something different, which is great. Now the question that I was going to ask is the one that I've got here in front of me which I quite liked and I think it's an interesting way to start because we have spoken about Product Delight a few times on the podcast. It's what is it that differentiates a product that people really love from one which they merely tolerate? Nice way of thinking because let's be honest with that and let's be transparent. We use product for different reasons. So we call these motivators. We might use certain product for some functional motivators. Let's say I want to book a flight, I want to send an SMS or I want to book a hotel. These are functional motivators. But but also sometimes we go to products for some emotional motivators and when they feel less lonely and when they feel connected. So it's really important as a product builder to realize that there are these two the emotional motivators and the emotional and the functional and the emotional motivators. So the product that stand out, the product that we love are those that craft experiences and solutions where these two words meet each other. So like when the solutions is designed and created in a way that it addresses the function motivators and the emotion motivator at the same time. I suppose there is a brain Chemistry thing there. Right. Because there's some things we know. We have a task we want to perform, so we want to make sure we're doing that task if we can, which is part of our brain. There's another part of our brain which is controlled for emotions. And if we can engage that as well. I suppose it's more of a whole brain response to the product that people are using. Yeah. Think about Spotify, for example. A lot of time I go to Spotify because I want to listen to a specific track or sometime also because I want to search for being inspired. I want to get inspired through some nice playlist. But it happens to me as well that I go to Spotify to feel less lonely, to put some vibe or to feel part of a certain vibe and being connected with a community. Community. So that's the thing. We fall in love with the product not only for the variety of catalog or tracks or podcasts, of course, but also for how these products make us feel while enjoying it. I had a question which I've just remembered. Do you find that people use a product which offers less functionality value because it gives them a higher emotional value? So functionally, you can look at two products and say, okay, that one, this one's clearly much more well equipped for the task, but I'm going to choose this one because it makes me feel better. Is that a trade off that people make? I've seen this, but what I've seen mostly is that let's say if you have an emotional connection with the product, you are much more willing to forgive a lack of functionality. So let's imagine that you have this, or you already built this emotional connection between you, the user and the product. Then the users are much more tolerant to be more patient to the lack of functionality in the product. Take ChatGPT for example. I mean, that's the most common used product nowadays. It's okay sometimes to get completely inaccurate results because it feels like a companion, it feels like a co writer, it feels like a co worker, and it's okay. I mean, you know that people are working on improving the accuracy of the answers. So yes, I think there is a connection between being more tolerant to lack of functionality and emotional connection. What product do you think does this the best right now, in your opinion? I mean, that's a very subjective question. I'm aware. But yeah, what do you think product does that does always the best. I can talk about Revolut as a great European product that managed to create emotional connection between users and the product itself. The Reason why is because I'm a Revolut user. But also I'm surprised every time I use my Revolut app. It's supposed to be a bank app, but if you go there, you realize that you can book hotel, you can have E sim when you're traveling. So there's this concept of surprising users going beyond expectation and anticipating their needs. Sometimes, of course, you might encounter things that could be better, but the fact that you are building slowly and safely this emotional connection, I don't see myself trying out another app, even if it's like cheaper or maybe better design or something like that. In early product development. So, early phase of a product, if you have an emotion in mind, how can you validate that it's really happening? And how can you experiment that it should happen? Maybe the thing that we need to precise and clarify here is that delight by itself is this combination of two emotions. It's about the combination of joy and surprise. So if you have to do something, it's mostly about trying to positively surprise your users. So how can we validate whether this surprise is positive or negative? In that sense, it's going to be disappointment. It's usually through adoption. It's about recurrence of usage. Like retention is a big driver of delight. And by the way, I recently discovered that there is an interesting research, maybe for research, by the way, by Deloitte McKinsey, Harvard Business Review, and they all actually studied the exact same thing. They studied the impact of emotional connection on product adoption. So different Personas, different areas. But they confirm that there is a huge correlation between emotional connection and the three business metrics of retention, revenue and referral. Meaning that if you have users who are emotionally connected, you can double your retention, your referral and your revenue. So that could be an indicator, of course. Is it because they feel like they're in a relationship? Yeah, I mean, it feels. Yeah, it just came to me. I know it has anything to say, but, like, we build strong emotional ties to inanimate objects and stuff, and we feel loyalty to them and we defend them, and there's a relationship that we build up with these nebulous things, these things that we don't quite understand. I find that very interesting. There's this famous quote that says, people don't care about being agreed with. They care about feeling seen and heard. And it's exactly the same thing for products. I mean, if you can create products that make users feel heard and seen and represented, there is definitely a bond that you create and something extra that you can compete heavily with. So that's why I see the light as a way to stand out or differentiate yourself. Because let's be honest, it's very easy to compete on the functional side if you're building functional features and tomorrow a competitor build the same thing for cheaper. It's really easy for users to move from a product to another, but investing in emotional connection takes time to build. It's sometimes expensive to build, but if you build it, you're giving yourself like a token that will make your users stick around and love your product. Perfect. And we'll end it there. Thank you so much for coming on. It's a nice moment for me because I've been on this journey as a spectator for the last couple of years and it's great for you in this situation. And I joked at the beginning about you being on Nelly's podcast, but phenomenally well done. I mean, what an achievement. So people do go and find that if you've never listened to any of these podcasts before, start now, find Nesreen's full length episode, give it a listen because I'm sure it's just wonderful. Thank you for making this time for us. And Tamash, thank you for coming along as always. We'll be back again with another talking 10 in the very foreseeable future.

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Ben Maynard

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