There is a category of features that product people keep underbuilding. Not because we don't know it matters. Because we know it matters and still cannot quite justify it in the language that roadmap conversations require.
I'm talking about delight.
Not delight in the abstract, startup-pitch sense of the word. I mean the specific, sometimes irrational things that make a person feel something when they use a product. The things that make them tell someone else without being asked.
Let me start with a colour picker.
I volunteer with a church ministry department. High volume, lots of coordination, the kind of operational workload that, if you have ever tried to manage it, ends up living inside WhatsApp chats & groups and going missing three hundred messages deep. I put together an internal tool to help. Most of the team got on board fairly quickly; the need was obvious and the tool delivered.
But there were stragglers. People who acknowledged the need, said they'd use it, and kept not doing so.
One of the 'early adopters' made a small request during a conversation. Could she change the colour of the app & add a profile picture? She wanted pink.
I'll be honest: I sat with that for a second. It felt cosmetic. Indulgent, even. The app already did the thing it was supposed to do. What did the colour have to do with it?
I built the feature anyway.
She posted in the church WhatsApp group that evening. Not a quiet mention. A proper announcement, complete with enthusiasm and exclamation marks: we can change the colours now, isn't this incredible? People reacted. Others got curious. She had gone from a early adopter to an advocate, and none of the functional features had achieved that. A colour picker had.
That stuck with me.
Not long ago, I was in a ride with an InDrive driver and asked him why he uses that particular app. I was genuinely curious. He didn't talk about the fare structure or how quickly the ride matched. He said the interface just feels right. He likes how he moves through it. That was his whole answer, and he seemed very settled in it.
I have known people who haven't switched banks in years, not because the rates are better, not because the loan products suit them, but because the app looks and moves in a way that feels like theirs. The experience is the product, in their mind.
We often treat retention and advocacy as outcomes of good strategy. And they are. But the inputs to that strategy are not always what we think they are.
Delight does not sit neatly in a sprint. It doesn't generate a dashboard metric you can point to in a review. "We added a feature that made six people very happy" does not land well in a business case. So we cut it. We prioritise what we can justify and park what we can't, and delight usually falls into the second bucket.
But here is what I think we're missing when we do that.
Delight is how you get users to do your marketing for you. Not because you've incentivised them. Not because you've set up a referral programme. Because the product made them feel something, and people share things that make them feel something. The church WhatsApp post was not planned. Nobody asked for it. It happened because someone experienced a moment of genuine joy inside a tool, and she wanted other people to know.
That is the kind of growth you cannot manufacture with a campaign.
I am not saying ignore functionality. The tool still had to solve the actual problem. But functionality is the floor, not the ceiling. It gets people in. Delight is what makes them stay, what makes them talk, and what makes the stragglers finally convert.
If you build products, I would ask you this: when did you last ship something just because it would make a user smile? Not because a metric demanded it. Not because a user story required it. Just because it would make someone's day a little bit better inside your product.
That is where your evangelists come from. And evangelists, it turns out, are worth more than any feature you can put on a roadmap.