Previously I talked about how to do a feature inventory with Kano to help onboard a Product Manager. Kano can help them feel acquainted with a product’s feature set and understand how customers engage with your product. You should also use Kano to take a look at customer feedback and upcoming plans. Classifying the planned features into the Kano emotional responses gives the same insights as the feature inventory, and also helps ground a product’s upcoming plans.
An important aspect of Kano when viewing future plans is that your customers’ emotional responses to features change over time. Features that were once Delighters will become Basic Needs as customers get habituated to such functionality and your competitors match you in the market. When looking at the roadmap, I like to first check that Basic Needs are met at the minimal level to reap the large returns on removing customer dissatisfaction. Basic Needs are “check the box” features, so as long as you check the box you’re good, and there’s little benefit to putting extra effort into making the “box’s check” fancy. I try to keep the MVP philosophy in mind to get the most value for the minimal effort when working with Basic Needs, as I’d much rather focus on Delighters. Delighters deserve the focus for several reasons:
- They age better – By building a Delighter today you can reap value from that feature for a while as it ages into a Basic Need. If you were to focus only on Basic Needs, your customers would lose interest in your functionality sooner as they age into Indifferent features. The longer lifecycle for Delighters gives you more time to focus on improving customer satisfaction even more.
- Competitive Advantages – Delighters give jet fuel to your marketing and sales team as they are often competitive advantages that can be touted in demos and marketing materials.
- Team Motivation – Delighters are often much more fun and enjoyable to create as they are innovative and rewarding to customers. They give your dev team a challenge and boost morale which in turn creates even more innovation.
Kano can thus be a crystal ball that predicts how your features will fare in the marketplace over time. By knowing your customer’s emotional response to your current and upcoming features, you can extrapolate how those features will age over time as the emotional responses change. Reviewing the product plans with a new PM will help them know what to be on the lookout for in customer discovery as well as where to look for Delighter opportunities when creating new features.