Kano Model : Customer delight driven prioritisation framework

Prioritisation framework for product requirements

What is Kano Model ?

The Kano model is a framework used to prioritise features on a roadmap based on how likely they will satisfy or delight users.

The Kano model of product development and customer satisfaction was published in Japan in 1984 by Noriaki Kano, Tokyo University of Science’s professor of quality management. This model helps prioritising the age old problem for Product managers i.e. should i invest in basic features, or wow features, or improvements ?

Kano Model helps user to select the right combination of features :

• Minimum basic features that must be there

• Performance features to start working on or to start investing on

• WoW features which will impress the users

Img credit : Wikipedia

Feature categorisation ?

• Features to Include

  • Basic : Another term for these features are hygiene features. These are the features which the user expect to have in your product. For ex: having search option in restaurant listing app is a hygiene feature.

  • Excitement : These features are also known as delighter. If provided they leads to disproportionate increase in customer delight. For example : Event based rehaul of Swiggy app is a delighter. For new years eve, whole Instamart app have converted itself into party planner app.

  • Performance : These features provide proportionate increase in customer satisfaction. For example : Providing another filter parameter in a listing service. Or increasing file storage size from 15 GB to 20 GB in Gmail.

• Features to avoid

  • Indifferent : Indifferent features are the one for which the user doesn’t care about. For example : Providing number of appointments of the day of the plumber coming to your house from Urban company.

  • Dissatisfaction : These are the features if you provide them then they will upset the customers. For example : Forced ad-wall before accessing your own records in Google Drive.

When to use Kano ?

• Resource constraint

• Time constraint

• Looking for ‘WOW’ feature

How to use Kano Model ?

1. Feature list

2. Survey your customers

3. Categorise answers

4. Collate data

5. Prioritise the features

To survey your customers ask them to rate these two questions for each feature in below survey format :

Then we map each feature basis the survey into feature category ;

Where D : Delighter , Q : Questionable , I : Indifferent , M : Must have ,

P : Performance , R : Reverse

We ignore Indifferent and Questionable ones.

Then we collate each of these features into those categories. In below case i have assumed there are 5 users whom i surveyed and feature 1 came out as delighter for 3 and performance feature for 2 :

Last and most important step : Prioritise framework :

1. Start with Must haves

2. Then include as many performance features

3. Next add delighters - Cut performance features if deemed necessary to include some of these

4. Remove reverse features

5. Ignore indifferent features

This is a simple but effective way of prioritising features which users truly need. Hope this helped. Happy learning.