Video: Building a winning product strategy from the Kano model by Jared Spool

The Kano model is a beautifully simple but often misunderstood model for mapping out customer satisfaction with various features of your product. We've covered the Kano model before after seeing Jared Spool talk about it so we were delighted to have him join us at #mtpcon this year to really tackle it in depth and show how it should be applied.

Customer Journey Map

Jared starts out by laying out the customer journey map, which maps customer satisfaction through every step of the customer's interaction with your product. This highlights clearly where in your process your customers are getting frustrated, and where they're getting delighted, and thus where you need to focus your work.

Not Sucky ≠ Delightful

What's important to note though is that not sucking is not the same as being delightful. So while we want to move our customers from frustrated to delighted, we need a mechanism to understand which features we simply need to not suck at, and which we can use to truly delight the customer.

Enter the Kano Model

The Kano model is a simple two-axis grid, comparing product investment with customer satisfaction. It was developed by Noriaka Kano in the 1970s and 1980s while studying quality control and customer satisfaction and challenges the convention that improving every aspect of your product leads to increased customer satisfaction.

The model lays out three basic sets of features – those that meet basic expectations in your product, those that satisfy the customer and those that delight the customer.

The key is understanding what the basic expectations of your product are, and just how much investment you need to make to meet those expectations, so that you can spend the rest of your time focusing on the delightful features that will ultimately make your product successful.

Innovation

He further argues that innovation isn't simply adding new features, but adding new value. And that using the customer journey map and Kano model allows you to focus on the areas where you can truly add value to your customers, and thus add delight.

Watch the video to get a masterclass in applying these tools and developing a winning UX and Product Strategy.