Sept. 27, 2025

The Power of Emotional Design in Product Management | Nesrine Changuel on Product Delight

In this episode of An Hour of Innovation podcast, host Vit Lyoshin sits down with Nesrine Changuel, former product leader at Google, Spotify, and Microsoft, and author of the Product Delight book. Together, they explore why emotional design is the missing link in product management and how companies can build products people truly love.

Nesrine shares powerful stories from her career, including how Chrome addressed user stress with the “inactive tabs” feature and why Spotify’s biggest hits like Discover Weekly emerged from hack weeks, not executive mandates. She explains her Delight Framework, a four-step model that helps teams identify emotional motivators, turn them into opportunities, and balance functionality with delight. The discussion dives into why product management is not about B2B or B2C, but B2H, business to human, and how emotional motivators shape user behavior across industries, even in enterprise tools like GitHub and Jira.

You’ll also hear Nesrine’s perspective on measuring emotional connection with metrics like NPS, CSAT, and Google’s HaTS survey, and her insights on the role of AI in creating more human-centered products. From balancing roadmaps with her 50-40-10 rule to lessons on innovation culture at Spotify and Google, this episode is packed with actionable takeaways for product managers, designers, and innovators.

Show Notes

Nesrine Changuel is a seasoned product leader, speaker, and innovation coach. She has shaped global products at companies like Google, Spotify, and Microsoft, where she worked on Chrome, Meet, Skype, and Spotify’s user experiences. Nesrine is the creator of the Delight Framework, helping teams bring emotional connection into product design, and she is the author of Product Delight, a book that makes emotional design actionable for product managers, designers, and innovators worldwide.

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Takeaways

An emotional connection is just as important as functionality in product design.
Users remember how a product makes them feel, not just what it does.
Motivational segmentation goes deeper than demographics or behaviors by focusing on why users engage.
Spotify users aren’t just there for music; they seek inspiration, connection, and productivity.
Product management is not B2B or B2C, it’s B2H: business to human.
The Delight Framework helps teams systematically design for emotional connection.
Roadmaps should balance features using the 50-40-10 model (functional, deep delight, and surface delight).
Hack weeks at Spotify produced major features like Discover Weekly and AI DJ.
Emotionally connected users stay longer, buy more, and refer more than satisfied users.
Delight can be measured with metrics like NPS, CSAT, and Google’s HaTS survey.
Emotional design applies even in “unsexy” industries like GitHub and Jira.
Humanizing AI requires culture and leadership that embrace it, not block it.
The best products remind users that real humans are behind the experience.