Product Delight by Nesrine Changuel - Review
Operationalising the “Aha!” Moments & Why Delight is the New Strategic Baseline
This is a review of Product Delight, written by Nesrine Changuel. Nesrine is a renowned product leader, formerly at Google, Microsoft and Spotify, and was also a special guest on the Product Opscast.
Operationalising the “Aha!” Moments & Why Delight is the New Strategic Baseline
We’ve spent the last decade perfecting the “Feature Factory.” Despite recent efforts to focus on outcomes over outputs, let’s face it: we all have small factories whirring away in our teams. We’ve got the CI/CD pipelines, the automated Jira workflows, and the velocity charts to prove it—and all the while, we’re shipping soulless software. We are optimising for “functional” when the market is demanding “memorable.”
As a product leader, I want my product to be the one users talk about at dinner parties. As a Product Ops professional, I want a system that makes those “magic moments” repeatable, measurable, and scalable. Nesrine Changuel’s Product Delight is the first book I’ve read that really dives into the importance of memorable products, providing practical steps on how to achieve this time and time again.
Like most good reads, the value is suddenly obvious once stated. But what has been missing are the steps to make it happen and the ROI arguments to take to leadership. It’s all here.
1. Breaking the “Functional Floor”
In Product Ops, we talk a lot about “Product-Market Fit,” but Nesrine introduces a more critical threshold: the Functional Floor. The reality of modern SaaS is that “it works” is no longer a differentiator. If your app doesn’t crash and the buttons do what they say, you’ve simply cleared the baseline. The “Delight Gap” is where products go to die—that space where a user uses your tool because they have to, not because they want to.
Nesrine’s framework forces us to look at our roadmaps through a different lens. She argues that delight is a strategic requirement for long-term LTV (Lifetime Value). For an Ops person, this is music to my ears because it provides a decision-making framework for prioritisation that isn’t just based on who screamed loudest in the Slack channel.
2. The Product Delight Grid: A System for Surprise
The core of the book is the Product Delight Grid. If you’re tired of “delight” being a hand-wavy, timey-wimey concept discussed in brainstorming sessions with sticky notes, this grid is for you. It categorises delight into four quadrants: Functionality, Usability, Reliability, and Pleasure.
For the Ops-minded, this grid is a prioritisation framework. And while you may sigh and say, “Not another one!”, this is not a replacement for your existing stack, but a complement to it. It allows you to look at a roadmap and realise you’ve spent 90% of your resources on the bottom of the grid (Reliability/Functionality) while ignoring the top (Pleasure/Elevation).
From this, two underappreciated perspectives emerge:
Anticipation (Strategic Empathy): Data-driven mind-reading. Using metrics to identify a friction point and solving it before the user even registers the frustration.
Elevation (The Craft of Small Things): The “Micro-moments.” In Product Ops, we often focus on the “Macro” (the big launches). Nesrine reminds us that the “Micro”—a clever bit of copy, a haptic feedback loop, a celebratory animation—is what actually drives the emotional hook.
3. The Metrics of Emotion: Measuring the “Vibe”
“How do you measure a feeling?” This is something I’ve wrestled with in Product Ops for years... and I’m still figuring it out.
Nesrine, drawing on her PhD-level research and her time at Google and Spotify, provides a toolkit for measuring Reflected Value. She moves us away from vanity metrics (likes/clicks) and toward Confidence Gain.
For a Product leader, this is a game-changer. We can actually track how a product makes a user feel about themselves. Are they more confident in their job because of our tool? Do they feel like a “power user” within the first 30 seconds? Nesrine shows us how to bake these qualitative signals into our quantitative dashboards, turning “delight” into a KPI that leadership actually cares about.
For Product Ops—given that the term “Product Managing the Product Manager(s)” just won’t leave us alone (and is oddly apt here)—we can use the same principles to measure the work we do. We can track the changes we make in our colleagues’ lives and the behaviours we change, alongside standard realised value.
4. Ethical Scalability: The Anti-Addiction Guardrail
In 2026, the topic of addiction in technology has never been more relevant, with streaks, social media, and the constant bombardment of noise. Many products confuse addiction with delight. Nesrine draws a hard, ethical line here that is essential for any modern product organisation.
Delight is value-additive; it aligns with the user’s goals and helps them grow. Addiction is value-extractive; it uses dark patterns to keep users scrolling without purpose. As Product Ops, we are the stewards of the product’s integrity. Nesrine provides a framework for “Ethical Delight” that ensures we are building long-term trust rather than short-term engagement hacks. She uses Spotify Wrapped as a masterclass in how to use data to build a positive emotional bond and personal reflection rather than just a data dump.
True delight is built on trust, and trust is the only currency that scales.
The Verdict: From MVP to MDP
The era of the “Minimum Viable Product” is over. “Viable” is boring. “Viable” is a commodity. Viable gets your first customers, but probably not your next, and certainly not for long. We need to think about the Minimal Delightful Product (MDP).
If you want to build a Delight Engine—a product organisation that treats user emotion as a first-class citizen in the SDLC—this book is your manual. Nesrine has taken the “magic” of great design and turned it into a repeatable discipline. This is where Product Ops absolutely shines: creating that system and strategically positioning it to ensure it is valued, measured, and funded.
If you want your product to be more than just a utility—if you want it to be a brand that users miss when they aren’t using it—this is your manual.
“Users do not remember features. They remember how a product made them feel.”
For product leaders: Stop shipping features. Start shipping Delightful Products. Your churn rate will thank you.
For Product Ops professionals (as Nesrine eloquently put it on the Product Opscast): “Delight is not a nice-to-have.” Ensure delight is a key tenet in your team’s thinking. And while you are at it, think about how Product Ops can delight them, too.
Find out more about Product Delight and order now via Nesrine’s website: