E304 | Why Product Delight Is No Longer Optional | Nesrine Changuel (Skype, Google, Spotify)

Today on the show, we have Dr. Nesrine Changuel, founder of Product Excellence and Product Management Career Lab Director at ESSEC Business School. Prior to Product Excellence, Nesrine held senior product roles at Google, Spotify, and Microsoft. In this episode, we dig into why the technical barrier to building products has dropped so dramatically that functional quality alone can no longer differentiate — and what that means for teams that haven't yet learned to design for emotion. We explore the concept of product delight, what it actually means beyond confetti and Easter eggs, and how Nesrine's Delight Model Framework gives teams a step-by-step path to building emotional connection into any product — B2C or B2B. We discuss the real difference between discovery and delivery, why Nesrine spent her first 18 months as a PM doing the wrong job, and what shifted when she stopped babysitting engineers and started owning the why. Finally, we get into the AI feature psychosis sweeping the market right now — why shipping velocity without emotional intentionality produces Frankenstein products, and why the companies that were great before AI will be great after it, for the same reasons they always were.As always, I’d love to hear from you. You can email me directly at [email protected], and don’t forget to follow us on X.