172 / How Emotional Connections Deepen Product Delight, with Nesrine Changuel

Nesrine Changuel is a product coach, advisor, and speaker with more than a decade of senior-level product experience at Google, Spotify, and Microsoft. Soon she will add “author” to her long list of accomplishments with the publication of Product Delight: How to Make Your Product Stand Out with Emotional Connection (September 23, 2025).

In this episode of Product Momentum, Nesrine guides us through her Product Delight Model. In the process, she reminds us that while strong functionality creates an initial sense of trust and reliability, it is our products’ thoughtful human touches that extend beyond trust to build a strong emotional connection.

Here’s what else we learned:

Delight Combines Function and Emotion

To Nesrine, building delightful product means creating technical solutions that address a user’s functional and emotional needs. Product managers are well accustomed to building products that solve a functional problem, she says. But that’s usually not enough.

“What I’m advocating for is making sure that your tech product is of course functioning well,” Nesrine adds, “that it’s solving for functional needs. But we must also try to include users’ emotional needs into your solutions.” This combination of needs fulfillment makes an emotional connection that secures the bond between product and user.

The Three Pillars of Delight

To achieve product delight, our products must solve existing user challenges, exceed user expectations, and anticipate unspoken needs.  

“First,” Nesrine continues, “we need to make sure that whatever we’re building is solving for something that the user is needing. Next, we cannot be content with just meeting user needs; these days, that’s not enough. We need to exceed them. And third, we need to develop the ability to [see around corners], anticipating future needs.

Humanizing AI Interactions

Understanding a user’s motivations for using a product is essential to providing product delight. Though the study of demographic and behavioral segmentation fills in some of the blanks, motivational segmentation helps us tailor products to users’ emotional drivers.

“I think we’re in a much more demanding time for product delight, especially with AI,” Nesrine adds. “AI will certainly improve our product’s functionality. But we should not fall into a world where all products feel like robots. We need to get this human touch, and humanization is extremely important for creating the emotional connection” that drives delight.

---

At INDUSTRY on September 9-10, the Product Momentum team recorded five in-person episodes that we’ll drip out over the next several weeks. Don’t miss upcoming conversations with John Cutler, Sahil Jain, Axel Sooriah, Shensi Ding, and Michelle Parsons. Great insights from outstanding product leaders!

The post 172 / How Emotional Connections Deepen Product Delight, with Nesrine Changuel appeared first on ITX Corp..