Lore

Kano Model

The Kano model sorts customer needs/features into three categories based on how they affect satisfaction:

• Must-have: expected baseline; presence doesn't add satisfaction, but absence causes dissatisfaction.
• Performance: satisfaction scales roughly linearly with how well the need is met — more is proportionally better. This is where most competitive activity concentrates.
• Delighter: unexpected; adds outsized satisfaction relative to effort, precisely because the customer isn't expecting it.

Needs migrate over time: today's delighter becomes tomorrow's performance feature, which eventually becomes a must-have (e.g., smartphone cameras). A strategy built entirely on today's delighters will erode as the market catches up.

Dan Olsen uses this categorization as the row axis of the Product Strategy Grid to identify which single performance dimension a team can own and which delighter is currently unique — the same pattern he finds in Instagram's 2010 Strategy (Performance + Delighter Case Study) and Uber's Series A Positioning (Three-Dimension Case Study).

Categories

Categories

The Kano model plots how fully a product meets a need (X-axis, 0–100%) against resulting customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction (Y-axis). Needs sort into three categories:

• Must-have — doesn't increase satisfaction even at 100% fulfillment (e.g. secure transactions, HIPAA compliance), but causes increasing dissatisfaction as it goes unmet. "A must-have... let's assume for a minute the product fully 100% meets the must-have need — it doesn't actually make the customer happy... the way it works is as you fail to meet the need it makes them increasingly unhappy." You don't compete on must-haves — you just have to have them, at parity with competitors.
• Performance — more fulfillment creates proportionally more value, usually quantifiable (% faster, % more relevant). Most competition happens here; it's where a team should look for a dimension it can uniquely own (see Product Strategy Grid).
• Delighter — absence causes no dissatisfaction, but presence creates outsized positive satisfaction (early-car GPS, Instagram's 2010 filters — see Instagram's 2010 Strategy (Performance + Delighter Case Study)).

Categories are not fixed: "yesterday's delighters become today's performance, become tomorrow's must-haves — and the pace with which that evolution happens just depends on the level of innovation and competition in your space." A delighter that gets copied migrates down into a performance dimension, and eventually into table-stakes.

Delighters Have a Shelf Life

Needs are not fixed to a category permanently — the competitiveness clock in a category keeps moving, and today's delighter is tomorrow's must-have once competitors copy it. Instagram's filters were a genuine delighter in 2010; by the mid-2020s the same feature would be a baseline must-have, since its absence would get an app laughed out of the store. A delighter-based strategy therefore has a shelf life by design — it is meant to be copied — which is why product strategy has to be revisited rather than set once. See Instagram's 2010 Strategy (Performance + Delighter Case Study).

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