KANO Model

Use the Kano model view when you want insight into how customers will react to the items in your backlog. Kano makes it easy to prioritize the right combination of features to offer a viable product that can potentially improve customer satisfaction levels and even delight your customers.

Configure each of your items according to 3 different categories — Basic, Exciters and Performers. Basic are those items that your customers expect to see in the product you’re developing. These items must be developed as without them your customers will be unsatisfied. Exciters are items that your customers might not even expect to see in the product, but including them and investing in them will generate a disproportionate increase in customer satisfaction and a positive response to your product. Performers are features that generate a linear correlation in customer satisfaction in accordance with the effort you invest. For example, increasing the processing power of a laptop computer. While sufficient processing power is a basic expectation, doubling that metric could actually double the delight of the user.

This view is especially relevant for stakeholders interested in customer-satisfaction focused metrics. Kano delivers data-driven objectivization that shows how the development of a specific item can affect your customers’ level of satisfaction with your products.

Using the Kano Model view you’ll be able to measure customer satisfaction, understand which of your backlogged items can provide it and even see how you can take customer satisfaction to the next level — customer delight.

The Kano Model was originally conceived in 1984 by Japanese researcher and consultant, Noriaki Kano. He believed that customers’ satisfaction with their products is derived from the level of functionality that it provides. He determined that features can be classified into different categories detailing their impact on the customer.