Kano Model

Using the Kano method to find Opportunity Hypothesis's 

Background:
“In the 1980s, Professor Noriaki Kano created a framework to help teams uncover and classify three categories of customer needs/attributes. Looking at where your product falls can help you uncover opportunities to work on next based on unaddressed or unspoken needs. Furthermore, it helps you assess if investing in your opportunity will provide a worthwhile return, helping you transition into prioritizing your opportunities.”

“The Kano model defines three principles that a product needs to achieve to be successful over time:

1. Value attracts customers.
2. Quality keeps customers and builds loyalty.
3. Innovation differentiates your product from others and keeps you competitive.

Then it maps these principles into feature categories.”

1. Basic Features
• “Generally you find out about a lack of basic features from complaint systems, lost-customer surveys, and attrition analysis.”
2. Performance Features (satisfiers)
• “These are the things customers are often judging your app by and the things they look for before purchasing. Your customer’s satisfaction with these features will be proportional to how well you execute them. These are fairly easy to find information about by talking with customers, be it through interviews or surveys, because they’re things a customer will often explicitly ask for, compliment, or complain about. For example, faster performance in an app leads to greater satisfaction. Having fewer steps to achieve a goal also increases satisfaction.”
3. Excitement Features (delighters)
• “These are the unexpected “wow” features that become product differentiators, innovations, and unique selling points, such as the iPhone’s capacitive touch screen, Android’s notification panel, or Wi-Fi on an airplane midflight. When you do these well they create significant excitement and delight. If they’re missing, customers stay neutral: they don’t know what they’re missing. These features are the hardest to discover and really require an understanding of customer need. They’re often found only qualitatively.”

These are generally graphed against Investment and Satisfaction.

Over time, each category moves down.  Excitement becomes Performance and possibly Basic.



Excerpts From: Josh Anon. “The Product Book.” Apple Books.