Solving customer priority conflict with the Kano model
Solving customer priority conflict with the Kano model
Figuring out what really matters most to your customer can be challenging, especially when they don't seem to know! Here's a great tool for replacing ambiguity with clarity.
Figuring out what matters most to your customer can be a real challenge. Sometimes it’s as simple as nobody having enough clarity on what really has impact with your customer. Other times, it comes down to conflicting needs and desires — the product team wants better analytics, the marketing team wants hot new social engagement tools, and your customer probably wants something totally different.
How do you figure out what to deliver this sprint — and make the most impact with your customer because, let’s face it, the only thing really driving success is customer engagement. A happier customer translates into recurring revenue and, we all hope, more customers using your product.
If you’re new, welcome to Customer Obsessed Engineering! Every week I publish a new article, direct to your mailbox if you’re a subscriber. As a free subscriber you can read about half of every article, plus all of my free articles.
Anytime you'd like to read more, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.
Priority versus delight
Customer Obsessed Engineering (and the playbook) is all about delighting your customer; about discovering what delivers the most satisfying, impactful experience right now.
Prioritizing features can seem pretty straightforward. Just pick the most important feature and put it at the top of the backlog, right?
Early in product development that’s pretty easy: The car you’re designing needs to have a steering wheel. Probably brakes, too. Those are fundamentals.
But then it gets more nuanced. What’s more important, a fuel gauge or tail lights? How about bluetooth for the sound system versus self-steering? Automatic windshield wipers versus tire pressure sensors?
Having a massive backlog with dozens of features ranked in the proper order can be overwhelming. In part, that’s because humans generally tend to be pretty bad at evaluating large matrixes of information — we focus on what’s in front of us. The self-steering feature is super important! But wait, so is a playing music from my phone!
The Kano model
The Kano model is a tool that can replace all this ambiguity with clarity.1
Developed by Professor Noriaki Kano in the 1980s, it’s a theory of customer preference. What I love about the model is how it connects with customer desire — instead of asking for a priority or ranking, it essentially asks “how do you feel about this feature?”
Pawel Huryn recently wrote a post in The Product Compass about the Kano model. His post quickly and concisely explains how the Kano model exposes your “customers' feelings and emotional responses.” He also contrasts the Kano model with another method, Opportunity Score, for assessing the value delivered into your customers’ hands.2
The real strength of the Kano model is how it approaches feature evaluation. By asking about feelings, it avoids the abstraction of forcing us to mentally rank features into a matrix in our head. It lets us be more human and just react. “I don’t like it. I like it.”
The Kano model also does something that’s fairly unique: It analyzes both the presence of a feature as well as its absence.
For example, think about the steering wheel in a car. If you ask, “If the car has a steering wheel, how do you feel?” you might get a fairly indifferent response. “I don’t mind,” or maybe “I expect it.” It’s not really a feature that most customers will prioritize because it’s assumed to be there. In order to uncover our customer’s perceptions towards our product, we need to use the Kano questionnaire. It consists of a pair of questions for each feature:
One asks customers how they feel if they have the feature;
The other, how they feel if they do not have the feature.
By asking, “If the car does not have a steering wheel, how do you feel?” you may get a very different answer: “I don’t like it.”
Exploring this duality (the presence versus absence of a feature) exposes important intelligence that is often lost in simple prioritization.
The Kano model provides a system for categorizing responses and gaining further insight. FoldingBurritos.com has an excellent, in-depth guide to the Kano model. The post goes into detail on both discrete analysis and continuous analysis, two different techniques for honing in on the greatest value.3
I’m impressed with the Kano model. The model feels like it will ease prioritization discussions and expose some formerly missing intelligence. Most important, I think it fills a missing gap, offering us a way to connect more viscerally with our customer — so much so, I’ll be adding the model to the Delivery Playbook toolbox. Look for it in the chapter on value mapping.
If you’re struggling with feature prioritization — or, you just want to have the added assurance that you’ve gone the extra mile to connect with your customer value — I recommend exploring the Kano model.
If you find Customer Obsessed Engineering and the Delivery Playbook valuable, please share it with your friends and coworkers.
Noriaki Kano, the Kano model, Wikipedia.
Pawel Huryn, Kano Model: How to Delight Your Customers Without Becoming a Feature Factory, Jul. 13 2024, Substack.
The Complete Guide to the Kano Model, Jun. 5 2015, FoldingBurritos.com.