Think of your favourite product. Is it there because it works – or because of how it makes you feel?
That was the question Nesrine Changuel asked the room when she opened Agile Tour Vienna 2026. A conference full of agile and tech people usually talks about productivity, functionality and speed. Nesrine, who built products at Skype, Spotify, Google Meet and Google Chrome and wrote the book Product Delight, talked about emotion instead. Her reason: „With AI, building is becoming extremely easy. So what will differentiate you is this concept of emotion that you’re going to put in your products.“
Product Delight Workshop with
Nesrine Changuel, 10 December 2026 in Vienna
one day applying the Delight Model to your own product.
Nesrine started with a story. Her Uber stopped at a petrol station on the way home from the airport, and while she waited, the app sent a short message: your vehicle has been stationary for a while, are you OK? A small thing. But in moments like that, she said, „we don’t see features … we start to see the human behind the product.“
People choose products for different reasons. Some because they work well, some because of how they feel. The products we remember blend both: they serve a functional need and they make us feel something good.
Delight is an emotion: joy and surprise at the same moment. But not every product is built for joy. Some users want to feel safe, in control, proud or reassured. Finding out which emotions your users are looking for is part of the product work.
It also pays. Nesrine pointed to research by Capgemini, Deloitte and Harvard Business Review: emotionally connected customers stay longer, buy more and recommend a product more often – compared with customers who are merely satisfied. „I haven’t seen any other component that could double retention, revenue and referral at the same time.“
And it is not reserved for big tech. When someone told her that only companies like Spotify and Google can afford to aim for delight, her answer was clear: „We are Spotify and Skype and Google because we invest in emotional connection. It’s not the other way around.“
Beyond demographic and behavioural segmentation, ask why people use your product – functionally ("I want to listen to music") and emotionally ("I want to feel connected"). Users are often not even aware of these, so ask them directly how they felt the last time they used it.
Nesrine uses "How might we" statements that name the action, the user and both motivators. At Google Meet: how might we improve the meeting experience for people in back-to-back calls, to keep them engaged and reduce boredom? One answer was emoji reactions.
Place each idea against the functional and emotional motivators it serves. Functional only is low delight, emotional only is surface delight, both is deep delight. Her rule of thumb for a roadmap: 50% low, 40% deep, 10% surface delight.
Nesrine's Delight Score asks users three questions along the pillars: does it solve a real need, does it anticipate what I need, does it give me more than I expected?
This is exactly what the workshop on 10 December is for: one day applying the four steps to your own product, together with Nesrine. Join the workshop
In the Q&A, someone asked how the Delight Model relates to the Kano model. Nesrine uses Kano a lot, but warned against one mistake: using it to prioritise. „If you use it as a prioritization tool, you will end up only building must have“ – and never get to the delighters. Kano sorts features you already have. The Delight Model starts earlier, with the motivators, and leads from there to opportunities, ideas and a balanced roadmap.
The last question came from a consultant: how do you convince clients that this matters? Nesrine’s advice was to speak their language. Don’t promise that users will feel happy. Talk about retention, revenue and referral – the three metrics that belong on their KPI dashboards.
If you want to bring this into your own product: on 10 December 2026 Nesrine runs a one-day workshop at TechTalk in Vienna. You find the functional and emotional motivators of your users, turn them into product opportunities, design solutions that solve real needs and create delight, and prioritise ideas by impact and business value – with the Delight Grid and plenty of group work. For product leaders, product managers, UX designers and engineers.
The slides from the talk are available on the Agile Tour Vienna website.