Stop “delighting” your customers
Not all features are equal. Use the Kano Model to stop wasting money on “table stakes” and focus on what actually drives growth.
Most product roadmaps are just lists of features customers asked for. This is how you build a bloated, average product.
The Kano Model proves that features fall into three buckets:
Must-Haves: If missing, they hate you. If present, they feel nothing (e.g., a hotel having hot water).
Performance: More is better (e.g., battery life).
Delighters: Unexpected magic.
You are likely spending 80% of your budget polishing “Must-Haves” that are already good enough. Stop it. You get zero credit for making hot water hotter.
The Prompt
Act as a Product Strategy Consultant (Kano Model framework).
Here are the top 5 initiatives on our roadmap: [Paste List].
1. The Classification: Categorise each into:
- Must-Have (Threshold).
- Performance (Linear).
- Delighter (Exciter).
2. The Audit: Are we over-investing in a "Must-Have" that is already at market parity? (If yes, mark it for a budget cut).
3. The Gap: Do we have at least one "Delighter" that differentiates us from [Competitor], or are we just playing catch-up?
The Executive Upgrade: Subscribers Only
Feature Creep” & “The Bloat.
Engineers and Designers love to perfect things. They will spend 3 months optimising a “Settings” page that 1% of users visit.
As an executive, your job is to be the Editor.
You must ruthlessly cut “Gold Plating” (perfecting the irrelevant) to fund the “Magic” (the features that sell the product).
Here are the two Governance Protocols to clean up the product.
Follow-Up Prompt 1: The “Zombie Feature” Hunt
(Use this to simplify your offering)
Act as a Usage Analyst.
We have a feature/service called: [Name].
Maintenance cost: [High/Low].
Usage rate: [Low/High].
1. The Test: If we deleted this feature tomorrow, would customers *leave*, or would they just complain for a week and move on?
2. The Pivot: Can we stop maintaining this and replace it with a 3rd party integration?
3. The Kill: Draft the email to customers explaining why we are sunsetting this feature to focus on [Higher Value Feature].
Follow-Up Prompt 2: The “Cheap Magic” Brainstorm
(Delighters don’t have to be expensive)
Act as a Customer Experience Designer.
We want to add a "Delighter" to our [Onboarding/Unboxing/Service] process.
Constraint: It must cost us <$1 per customer but feel like $50 of value to them.
Brainstorm 5 ideas based on:
1. Unexpected Personalisation (e.g., Hand-written note, video message).
2. Radical Transparency (e.g., Showing them the backend process).
3. Speed (e.g., Delivering in 1 hour instead of 24).