Using the Kano Model to prioritize product development "Product people - Product managers, product designers, UX designers, UX researchers, Business analysts, developers, makers & entrepreneurs 4 May 2022 False Customer Satisfaction, Kano model, Prioritisation, Mind the Product Mind the Product Ltd 834 Noriaki Kano Product Management 3.336
· 4 minute read

Using the Kano Model to prioritize product development

I was first introduced to the Kano model in a talk by the brilliant Jared Spool, and it immediately struck a chord with me. Here is a beautifully simple model to distinguish between basic and differentiating features.

The model was developed by Noriaka Kano in the 1970s and 1980s while studying quality control and customer satisfaction. It challenges the conventional belief that improving every aspect of your product or service leads to increased customer satisfaction, asserting that improving certain aspects only serves to maintain basic expectations, whereas improving other aspects can delight customers with less effort.

The Kano model is a simple two-axis grid, comparing product investment with customer satisfaction. The power of the Kano model comes in mapping your different features against this simple grid.

The Kano model

Basic Features
Basic features that a user expects to be there and work will never score highly on satisfaction, but can take inordinate amounts of effort to build and maintain.

A great example Jared used was the hot water in a hotel. Modern hotels spend a fortune ensuring that every room has hot water instantly available, night and day. The boiler in the basement is going all night and day and there are recirculating heat pumps on every floor to circulate water throughout the pipes to keep it hot. Now, no customer is going to rave on Twitter or TripAdvisor about how good the hot water in their hotel was, but if it wasn’t there, or it wasn’t hot enough, or took too long to get hot, you bet there would be a complaint, and a loud one.

No matter how much effort you put into this feature you will only ever be able to meet basic expectations. Investment in this area is all about downside protection. This doesn’t make them any less important, but it becomes crucial to understand at what point you’ve met the users’ expectations and to stop there. Any further development is a wasted effort.

One challenge with basic expectations is that a user will never tell you about them. If you sat someone down and asked them to design their perfect hotel they’d probably talk about comfortable beds, a nice TV, maybe the view, etc. They would never think to mention that they’d expect to be able to have a hot shower at 3am. You have to observe and research to find these basic expectations.

kano-model-2

Delightful Features
At the opposite end of the spectrum are features that delight the user. These score very highly on satisfaction and in many cases may not take as much investment. Small incremental improvements here have an outsized impact on customer satisfaction.

Returning to the hotel example, you can see a lot of features that were developed to delight the customer – from the concierge to a complimentary glass of wine on arrival to the Doubletree Hilton chain that has made giving every customer a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie on check-in a central part of their experience. They bake and give out more than 60,000 cookies per day. Checking in can be a delight when you get a freshly baked cookie to go with the paperwork.

The beauty is that these features can deliver so much more user satisfaction per unit of investment than basic features. That cookie probably costs pennies compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to build and maintain the hot water system in the hotel.

Migration From Delight To Expectation
One of the most challenging aspects of the Kano model is that it predicts that all features will migrate from delightful to basic expectations. Once a user has come to expect that delightful feature – whether because you’ve had it for a while or because all their other products have it – the feature has become something they expect. The absence of that feature would now be a frustration, and you need to discover new delightful features.

By giving everyone a cookie every time they check in, and making it part of their brand promise and advertising, the cookies stop being special. Pretty soon their guests just expect the cookie and cease to be surprised or delighted by it. Again, they’d probably be pretty cross if they didn’t get it though.

Lessons For Product Managers

  1. Define your users’ needs in light of the Kano model. What are the basic expectations that they simply expect to be there and where would the absence of these features lead to frustration?
  2. Map your products and features against the Kano model. Which features are meeting basic expectations? Only invest in developing or maintaining those to the extent that you need to satisfy the customer. Which features are your delighters? Focus your efforts here and make sure you’re constantly developing new ones.
  3. Monitor your customer satisfaction and competition to ensure that features you think delight users haven’t slid into basic expectations and no longer help your customer satisfaction.
  4. Find and focus on sustainable delighters that truly differentiate your product and continue to deliver customer satisfaction over time.

Comments 25

I’ve never heard of the Kano model, thanks Martin for introducing this for us! I’m neither an engineer nor a project manager but I think I have to show this post to my colleagues.

The thing is there are a lot of models out there to prioritise software/product development but it turned out it’s really hard to find tech teams that are following these.

As far as I see tech or product teams use some kind of mixture of different methods not sticking purely to one. I did interviews with startup tech leaders, asking them how they prioritise software development. It could be a great addition to this post.

I just leave the link here if you want to check this out: http://codingsans.com/blog/startup-prioritise-software-development

Four years since this was published and I’ve come across it. Great read for someone interested in getting in to Product Management. Thanks Martin.

I love this post. It introduced me to the Kano model, which then led me to find awesome presentations on it by Jared Spool [1] and Jan Moorman [2]. If you haven’t watched those, go do it as soon as you can!

This of course left me wanting to learn even more about it, so I started digging around the web for blog posts and scientific research.

The Kano model is just fascinating and it’s very useful to guide prioritization decisions towards customer satisfaction.

Going through all of this information, I realized that everyone could benefit from a step-by-step, in-depth guide with everything I’d gathered. So I decided to do just that and recently published it here: http://foldingburritos.com/kano-model/?ref=mtp

I hope this helps you learn everything you need to understand and **use** the Kano model to prioritize your product backlog for customer satisfaction and delight.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewpz2gR_oJQ
[2] https://vimeo.com/62646585

Kano analysis without an overarching product strategy can lead to a fractured, incoherent product. A product should stand for a single idea that differentiates it from other products in the competitive landscape of the mind of the prospect. It’s important to evaluate features not just in terms of their potential to satisfy or delight, but in terms of supporting and strengthening a larger value proposition.

With all respect, the whole idea behind Kano analysis is to develop value proposition. Your “overarching” product strategy should therefore be based on a Kano assessment. To stay in business, you make Kano part of your continuous improvement process so that you can innovate timely. Sorry, I should seek to understand first … if not Kano, how do you determine a product that stands for a single idea that differentiates it from other products?

Good article, Thank you for sharing it with us. Though, we all have to bare in mind that the market is very dynamic and we all have to be very agile to cope with its speed and curves not to say directions.

Satisfaction is not only what we measure as a value, it’s more about the client’s reaction to the product, to its flexibility and ability to adjust to the market and customer’s needs.

We have to raise our product as a child – step by step, we not getting old, but the child to be well mannered and up to the speed of the time.

This sounds good in theory but the practice is difficult. Satisfaction is related to Psychology and the degree of problem a customer/market faces.By the time you measure monitor the above and deliver a product, what seems satisfactory now may not be the same tomorrow and satisfaction, expectations keeps changing.

Due to this, it is difficult to use Kano model and I suffered somewhat to adopt it practically

Well even Confucius said “all good things are difficult to achieve”.

You are of course right that it is difficult to measure satisfaction, but that’s part of the point – if you’re not at least trying to measure and monitor it how are you going to achieve it?

And even without precise measurement the Kano model still functions as an excellent framework within which you can understand and plan your product. It’s amazing how many product people don’t know which of their features merely meet customer expectations and which actually provide some delight and differentiation to their competitors.

Great article Martin. Strong echoes of Herzberg’s two-factor theory in Kano’s model – not that that is a bad thing. It totally rings true with my experience in software development, but easy to see how it is extremely true in other sectors, such as automotive for example.

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About the author

I was first introduced to the Kano model in a talk by the brilliant Jared Spool, and it immediately struck a chord with me. Here is a beautifully simple model to distinguish between basic and differentiating features. The model was developed by Noriaka Kano in the 1970s and 1980s while studying quality control and customer satisfaction. It challenges the conventional belief that improving every aspect of your product or service leads to increased customer satisfaction, asserting that improving certain aspects only serves to maintain basic expectations, whereas improving other aspects can delight customers with less effort. The Kano model is a simple two-axis grid, comparing product investment with customer satisfaction. The power of the Kano model comes in mapping your different features against this simple grid. The Kano model Basic Features Basic features that a user expects to be there and work will never score highly on satisfaction, but can take inordinate amounts of effort to build and maintain. A great example Jared used was the hot water in a hotel. Modern hotels spend a fortune ensuring that every room has hot water instantly available, night and day. The boiler in the basement is going all night and day and there are recirculating heat pumps on every floor to circulate water throughout the pipes to keep it hot. Now, no customer is going to rave on Twitter or TripAdvisor about how good the hot water in their hotel was, but if it wasn't there, or it wasn't hot enough, or took too long to get hot, you bet there would be a complaint, and a loud one. No matter how much effort you put into this feature you will only ever be able to meet basic expectations. Investment in this area is all about downside protection. This doesn't make them any less important, but it becomes crucial to understand at what point you've met the users' expectations and to stop there. Any further development is a wasted effort. One challenge with basic expectations is that a user will never tell you about them. If you sat someone down and asked them to design their perfect hotel they'd probably talk about comfortable beds, a nice TV, maybe the view, etc. They would never think to mention that they'd expect to be able to have a hot shower at 3am. You have to observe and research to find these basic expectations. kano-model-2 Delightful Features At the opposite end of the spectrum are features that delight the user. These score very highly on satisfaction and in many cases may not take as much investment. Small incremental improvements here have an outsized impact on customer satisfaction. Returning to the hotel example, you can see a lot of features that were developed to delight the customer - from the concierge to a complimentary glass of wine on arrival to the Doubletree Hilton chain that has made giving every customer a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie on check-in a central part of their experience. They bake and give out more than 60,000 cookies per day. Checking in can be a delight when you get a freshly baked cookie to go with the paperwork. The beauty is that these features can deliver so much more user satisfaction per unit of investment than basic features. That cookie probably costs pennies compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to build and maintain the hot water system in the hotel. Migration From Delight To Expectation One of the most challenging aspects of the Kano model is that it predicts that all features will migrate from delightful to basic expectations. Once a user has come to expect that delightful feature - whether because you've had it for a while or because all their other products have it - the feature has become something they expect. The absence of that feature would now be a frustration, and you need to discover new delightful features. By giving everyone a cookie every time they check in, and making it part of their brand promise and advertising, the cookies stop being special. Pretty soon their guests just expect the cookie and cease to be surprised or delighted by it. Again, they'd probably be pretty cross if they didn't get it though. Lessons For Product Managers
  1. Define your users' needs in light of the Kano model. What are the basic expectations that they simply expect to be there and where would the absence of these features lead to frustration?
  2. Map your products and features against the Kano model. Which features are meeting basic expectations? Only invest in developing or maintaining those to the extent that you need to satisfy the customer. Which features are your delighters? Focus your efforts here and make sure you're constantly developing new ones.
  3. Monitor your customer satisfaction and competition to ensure that features you think delight users haven't slid into basic expectations and no longer help your customer satisfaction.
  4. Find and focus on sustainable delighters that truly differentiate your product and continue to deliver customer satisfaction over time.