The Kano Model in Theory and Practice
A key concept in product management that I found myself explaining a few times in as many weeks.
The Kano Model has been around for a long time as a tool in product and innovation management. It isn’t a “framework” to prioritise work, but rather a way to evaluate product and marketing efforts. My favourite thing, in other words, a mental model to help you think though product management situations. The Kano model gives you a common way to differentiate product features and align sales and marketing with the customers’ world.
While there is a lot more to the theory behind it and way to evaluate particular areas, I want to focus on three key takeaways you can implement directly. It’s another one of those things where you don’t need to fully grok the theory or attend to the full academic discourse to make use of it, but you do need to be careful to understand what it can — and can’t — offer you.
What is the Kano Model
The Kano model is a theory for product development and customer satisfaction developed in the 1980s by Noriaki Kano. While originally there are 5 categories with much text and details, I find it easier to talk to the diagram and explain the important concepts.
The diagram has two axes: how well a feature is implemented, and how satisfied are customers with that implementation.
The brown line represents “Basic Needs”. If you don’t have them people will likely pass over your product, but once you have them there’s no point in investing further. Think of the basic function of making a call or sending a text on a phone. There’s only so much you can tweak a dialer, and vastly diminishing returns to working on it. In B2B software, think of the login screen.
The blue line represents features that you will be evaluated against others. If you have the more features that matter to your audience than ones you’re missing, they’ll buy from you. In an app-store context, that would be ‘does it have the apps I use and care about?’. In Enterprise/B2B that would be the requirements on an RFP. You might not have all the feature at the highest quality, but (assume rational buyers) there’ll be some matrix about what they use to weight decisions.
The green line is delighters. These are unexpected features, aspects that your customers and users haven’t thought about, but once shown get them really excited. Not having them does not detract from an offering, but once presented might get them in love with the product overall and sway a buy decision. Think of the iPhone’s recent ‘satellite emergency call’. In other products that would be whatever innovation you’re the first to bring to market.
The key observations
Now that we understand the basic categorisation of features, there are some important lessons you need before you can make use of the model.
1. You don’t get to decide
As much as we believe in our own ideas, we don’t get to decide what our customers care about. We can guess and we can (and should) try various innovative new features, but it’s the market who will tell us what they’re worth.
This is why thinking in bets, product discovery, and solution discovery are so important to product management. You need to balance continual innovation (including disrupting your own business) across multiple efforts that are likely to fail, only to find the ones that do indeed matter to the paying customers.
2. Features’ position degrade over time
25 years ago, the ability to send a short message from your phone to someone else was ground breaking. Today it’s a basic need. As competitors enter the market or simply copy your innovation, the value of the delighters reduces. They become a standard expectation.
No matter how good your moat is (think Apple’s Walled Garden or Netflix personalisation), it won’t hold off the competition forever. You must keep innovating, not just incrementally but disruptively, in order to keep ahead.
3. Customers (mostly) talk about the delighters
Just as the value of new features degrades over time, so does the conversation around your product changes. You’ll find that users and customers mostly talk around the delighters, the unexpected surprises that just made their day. How they didn’t even know they had a problem, and now can’t imagine life with this nifty new thing.
Customers do also talk about the extremes of the functional needs (blue lines), on needs they have which you met exceedingly well or failed miserably, though to a lesser degree. Following what customers say about your product and features amongst themselves (eg on social media or unmoderated user forums) will provide you with a lot of insights into what matters to them, and therefore on what areas you need to improve (either double down on or innovate in).
4. The model only tells you where you are
Not where you’re going. It is a snapshot in time, representing how features in your product are perceived by the users and buyers. It says nothing about the maturity level of the product and the market / space it is in. It only provides oblique, implicit vision of the competitive landscape. It certainly doesn’t tell you what is a good balance of features in your case, not which areas you should invest in.
How to utilise the model for alignment
I find it fascinating that 40 years ago Prof Kano put such a strong theoretical description of many of modern product management’s tenets. But understanding the theory and putting it to practice are two different things.
Given the model, it’s easy to see the impact it can have on product marketing and gross grouping of priorities. You can glean from your competitors and how customers talk about them what are the basic, functional, and delighting features. You can tell what areas you need to just get basically working, and what features you might need to just be ‘good enough’. The more impactful your core delighters, the more you’ll be forgiven for lacking other polished functional features.
At least in the beginning, when you sell to the technically-savvy early adopters. As you transition to the early majority, you’ll need a lot more polish in your functional performance areas. You’ve exhausted the people who will buy it for the sheer coolness of the delighters, and start running into those that have needs that must be met with a minimum level of competency for them to make a buy decision.
So how can you use the model?
0. Collect customer feedback
Before you even begin, remember that you need to collect customer feedback. No surprises, as that is the One Job™️you have as a product manager. Whether you trawl social media for hashtag-my-product or send customer questionnaires asking them to rate features on a scale between I want to have its babies to kill it with fire, you should collect, collate, and analyse all market feedback. You should map it to the features or areas in your product, and place those on one of the curves.
1. Messaging frameworks
The marketing department’s favourite topic to extract out of product management. If you understand which features get your users really excited and why, you can centre the discussion of sales and marketing around them.
If you understand which functional features you do so well they shine over the competition to the point users mention them, you can weave them into the discussion. Same with features you know you do well enough, but that the competition sucks.
In this way, you can centre the discussion around your strengths and attraction points (as validated by customers), without wasting time on features that are simply ‘tick the box’ exercise, nor with sinking into bad-mouthing the competition. You simply focus all your efforts on the aspects that really matter, for the biggest impact. Product, marketing, and sales working in concert — amazing!
2. Balanced prioritisation
Referring to the observations above, remember that the model shows a snapshot of your features in time. It doesn’t tell you what is a good balance for your product, industry, market, etc., but you can draw some conclusions and see which areas you need to get to ‘good enough’ and how much you should invest in disruptive and incremental innovation. This isn’t at a particular feature level, but at a whole-product (or portfolio) level.
That said, before launching a new product or even a feature you can review the features you have and the level to which they need to be implemented when doing market analysis. Yes, I know, you’re out to change the world with a totally new, ground-breaking materially disruptive way of doing things. But, let’s face reality, people are already dealing with aspects of the problem, even if it’s just Excel over email. More likely, there are some competitors in the market. So understand exactly how different your solution is, what is the vertical maturity, and then what are the table-stakes you need to build to enter the market, and what you’ll need later to conquer it.
Hope you found this article insightful! I’d love to know if you heard about the Kano model before, and how you might have used it. Do you have any other burning questions about the theory behind product management?