As product managers, we’ve all been there. You’ve spent multiple sprints building what you thought was the perfect feature, only to launch it and hear crickets from customers. Or worse, you hear complaints about how it doesn’t actually solve their problem.
At Intuit, we’ve learned a great method to avoid this trap isn’t better market research or more competitive analysis. It’s something we call Design for Delight (D4D), and it fundamentally changes how we approach product management.
What is Design for Delight?
Design for Delight is a customer-centered methodology that helps product teams deeply understand customer problems before jumping to solutions.
It’s built on a simple but powerful premise: fall in love with your customers’ problems, not solutions. The methodology revolves around three core principles:
- Deep Customer Empathy: Understanding not just what customers say, but what they actually do
- Go Broad to Go Narrow: Exploring many potential solutions before committing to one
- Rapid Experimentation: Testing ideas quickly and cheaply to validate what works
This isn’t just feel-good theory. D4D directly impacts business outcomes because when you truly understand customer problems, you build solutions that people actually want to use.
Why D4D Matters for Product Managers
One of our core values at Intuit is customer obsession. We deliver unrivaled customer benefit to power our customers’ prosperity. As a PM, part of our job is bringing this customer perspective to every meeting we attend because when we focus on the customer, we win.
Devin Mercier, Staff Product Manager at Intuit, learned this firsthand while working on Mailchimp’s Marketing Automations team. The team had a persistent challenge: small business marketers wanted the benefits of marketing automation, but they found setup too complex and time-consuming.
Instead of diving straight into building features prominently displaying our generative AI campaign creation features, Devin and his team started with understanding the real customer problem. Through customer research, they discovered that small businesses lacked both the time and resources to build effective automated campaigns. But here’s the key insight: customers didn’t care about AI. They cared about getting their marketing campaigns set up faster and performing better.
“Without D4D, we might have built a flashy AI feature that showcased our technical capabilities but didn’t solve the real workflow friction,” says Mercier. “Instead, we focused on user needs first, which led to dramatically improved customer satisfaction.”
How to Apply D4D as a Product Manager
Start with Deep Customer Empathy
The most powerful D4D method is the customer follow-me-home. This isn’t a user interview where you ask hypothetical questions. Instead, you observe customers in their natural environment as they experience the problem you’re trying to solve.
Watch them struggle with their current process. Ask “why” questions about the workarounds they’ve created. The goal isn’t to validate your solution; it’s to deeply understand their world.
During the automation research, Devin’s team didn’t just ask customers what features they wanted. They watched them attempt to set up automated campaigns and saw where they got stuck. That’s how they learned that the complexity wasn’t in the technology itself, but in the decision-making process of where to start.
Write Customer Problem Statements (Not Solution Statements)
Here’s where most PMs struggle: writing problem statements that don’t sneak in solutions. A good customer problem statement follows this format:
“I am a [specific customer type] trying to [desired outcome], but [problem or barrier] because [root cause], which makes me feel [emotion].”
For example: “I am a small business owner trying to set up automated marketing campaigns, but I get overwhelmed with a blank canvas because I don’t know where to start or what content will actually help my business, which makes me feel like I’m wasting time on something that might not even work.”
Notice how this focuses on the customer’s experience, not on what feature (or technology) might solve it.
Go Broad, Then Narrow with Purpose
Once you understand the customer problem, resist the urge to jump to the first solution that comes to mind. Instead, brainstorm multiple approaches. For the automation project, Devin’s team initially considered building 15 different automation types. But through the narrowing process, they focused on just 3 high-traffic flows. Quality in fewer areas built more customer trust than mediocre coverage across everything.
Experiment Before You Build
The final piece is rapid experimentation. Once you have potential solutions, test them as quickly and cheaply as possible. This might mean creating paper prototypes, building fake landing pages, or even manually delivering the experience to see if customers find value.
Making D4D Part of Your Daily Practice
D4D isn’t a one-time workshop. It’s a mindset that should influence your daily decisions as a PM. Before every feature discussion, ask: “What customer problem are we solving?” Before every design review, ask: “How do we know customers will find this valuable?”
Most importantly, get comfortable with being wrong. The whole point of D4D is to fail fast and cheap so you can build solutions that actually work. Your first customer problem statement won’t be perfect. Your initial prototypes will have flaws. That’s not failure; that’s learning.
The teams that consistently build products customers love aren’t the ones with the best initial ideas. They’re the teams that iterate fastest based on real customer feedback.
According to Mercier, “When you make D4D part of how you work, you stop guessing what customers want and start knowing. And that’s when product management becomes truly rewarding.”