Leveraging your Product Development Results with the Kano Model

In this week's episode, Ricardo introduces the Kano Model, one of the easiest and more effective ways to prioritize product and service's features based on their potential to satisfy clients. Listen to the episode to learn more about the five patterns or categories created by Noriaki Kano to classify the features and identify those you should focus on developing.

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Episode transcript

The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.

0 (0s):
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minutes podcast today. I like to talk to you about the Canon model. It's an extremely helpful tool for you to identify the quality features of your products and services in order to satisfy your customers. It was developed in the eighties by professor Noriaki Kano from the University of Tokyo. So it seems like, okay, it's 40 years old, so it's not useful. It's the opposite. It's extremely useful and extremely simple for you to analyze product features that will drive more customer satisfaction. And these it's not related to the methodology, you are developing your product, but much more about the features, the scope of the product you are developing.

1 (49s):
Basically it compares two factors, one side, the potential to satisfy customers. And on the other side, the investment required to satisfy this customers. So when you compare these two factors, you can create five potential buttons for the features. So basically the first button it's called basic, or must be, these are the features of your products and services that you have no option. If you don't do them, your customer will be unhappy. But if you do them, it does not relate to increase that section. For example, you are talking about a car and you may say, Oh, my car comes with a headlamps, having a headlamp.

1 (1m 34s):
It's not something that will drive satisfaction, but not having a headlamp. Okay? Then we'll make people unhappy with the product. So these are the basic ones. The basic ones are the ones that you have no choice, but doing that, the second one are performance or one dimension features. What is that the best way to explain this is, think about storage in a computer. So if you increase and invest more in storage, I'm gonna say in normal limits, you increase the satisfaction of your customer. So if your customer has a storage and you double the storage, there is a chance that your client will be much happier than with the normal storage.

1 (2m 19s):
So this is performance. Of course, this has a limit, but this is like, imagine align, going to functionality and satisfaction. The third one is called excitement, attractiveness. It's something like the lightness. It's something that you provide to your customer that he or she does not expect any increase dramatically, his or her happiness and satisfaction with the product. So let me give you a couple of examples. First one, a face ID on smartphones when it was released at first time, people were not expecting that. So when face ID came, people get extremely happy because it's something that if it did not exist, people will not be unhappy, but because it exists, it's I spike of happiness.

1 (3m 11s):
Second example, it's extra miles or upgrades in car rental or airlines. So you don't expect that. But if you go in last minute, you have a free upgrade. This is something that creates this spike. I'm not saying you are expecting the nut, the great, okay, you are not expecting that. So these, this what we are calling excitement pattern. Then on the opposite side, we can, I have two basic patterns. The first one is in the Farron butter means it doesn't matter. For example, if you do that, or if you don't do it does not change the satisfaction of the customer. For example, let's suppose the color of the components inside your computer, unless you are a completely fan of opening computers and doing this kind of stuff.

1 (4m 2s):
It doesn't matter if it's black, blue, right? Because it's something you don't even know the color of the internal components off your notebook, for example. So if you invest on that, you are not necessarily increasing customer satisfaction because it doesn't matter. And last but not least is what we call the reverse pattern. It's something that you invest a lot in instead of increasing satisfaction, you are decreasing satisfaction. A perfect example for that is let's suppose you are doing an advertisement. So if you do more advertisement, okay, you may get more customers, but let's suppose you do this in a more extreme way.

1 (4m 46s):
And suddenly in front of your new restaurant or your new movie theater, there are 50,000 people waiting to get in. Is this success? Oh, maybe if you are the owner, you may feel that success in the first minutes of opening your restaurant. However, what happens with the 49,950 people that will not get to sit in your restaurant? You will create a wave of dissatisfaction. So these is what we call reverse. So you create something. For example, you create a software that is so cumbersome, that has so many features that people say, I would love it to be more simple.

1 (5m 29s):
So these is what we are calling here. The reverse pattern. One final message on that. It's very important that these are not written in stone. They change. And what is a very typical change? Is that something that brings the Siteman now maybe becomes a performance indicator future, and maybe become a must be in the future. For example, a cell phone, the first time that for example, Steve jobs showed the with no keyboard and that it brought the massive excitement of people under their product. But today this is a must be. So if you don't have that kind of feature in your smartphone, you will have a hard time to sell it.

1 (6m 14s):
So what was excitement? 10 years ago, it's now just a basic must be butter. And these is what changes because people change their desire and you change the limits even more. If your product is related to technology and why I shared this with you, because this is so simple, you can have a basic spreadsheet with the futures and you try it with the group and with your customers to understand if this is a basic performance, excitement, indifferent, or reverse feature. And based on that, you can prioritize which kind of feature should you put in place and develop faster on your next release.

1 (6m 55s):
And these will increase satisfaction and improve your results. So I hope you enjoyed this podcast and tune in next week with another five minutes podcast.

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