Business-to-Human (Humanization Delighter)
Ask 'if my product were a human, how would the experience be better?' to raise the bar
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
A reframing that treats every product, B2B or B2C, as business-to-human (B2H) because a human with emotions is always the end user. Its signature tool is the humanization delighter: benchmark your product not against competitors but against a real person performing the same job, which forces a much higher experience bar.
Origin
Coined by Nesrine Changuel as 'B2H' after interviewing product leaders at B2B companies (GitHub, Atlassian, Snowflake, Dropbox) for her book. She cites Dyson's head of product (Andy) for the vacuum-vs-human-cleaner benchmark and notes Dropbox's 'cupcake' and Snowflake's 'superhero' product principles as parallels.
Core principles
- 01As long as humans use the product, their emotions need to be honored, regardless of B2B or B2C
- 02Rising B2C expectations bleed into B2B; B2B products are expected to feel more human
- 03Benchmark against a human doing the job, not against competing tools
- 04In a competitive market, the product that addresses emotional needs wins even if both 'work'
How to run it
- 1
Reframe the product as business-to-human
Drop the B2B/B2C distinction and accept that a human with emotional needs is always the end user, so emotional connection applies to every product.
- 2
Pick a human benchmark, not a competitor
Instead of comparing yourself to rival tools, ask how the experience would be better if a real person delivered it. Google Meet compared itself to an in-person conversation; Dyson compared its robot to a hired human cleaner.
Pro tip Ask 'If my product were a human, how would the experience be better?' The gap between your product and a thoughtful person points straight at your next feature (e.g. Dyson adding room-by-room recommendations a human cleaner would naturally do).
- 3
Build to close the human gap
Ship features that remind users there are real humans behind the product and that meet the higher bar the human benchmark exposes.
In the wild
Joining Google Meet as covid hit, Changuel's team chose not to benchmark against Zoom or Teams but against how the same meeting would feel if everyone were in a room together, setting a deliberately higher bar.
→ A human-level goal that reframed product thinking and drove features aimed at making remote meetings feel like real conversations.
A Buffer leader shared that they emailed ~2% of clearly inactive paying users offering a refund, knowingly losing revenue, in the name of trust and integrity.
→ Inviting users to cancel paradoxically deepened trust and emotional connection, with some choosing to stay, building brand over time in a B2B context.
Common mistakes
Assuming delight is B2C-only
Believing emotional connection doesn't apply to enterprise software leaves you building a product that merely works, so a competitor addressing emotional needs wins.
Is it for you?
Best for
B2B and enterprise product teams who assume delight is a consumer-only concern and are being out-experienced by more human-feeling competitors.
Not ideal for
Situations where the benchmark human comparison is genuinely irrelevant, such as pure infrastructure with no human-facing surface.
From the transcript
“I came up with this concept of B2 which is business to human”
“as long as there are human using the product at the end of the day then they need their emotion to be honored”
“If my product was a human, how would the experience would be better?”
“do you know what did we compare Google Meet to the best”
“we don't compare our Dyson vacuum cleaner to other vacuum cleaner. We compare them to what if I hire a real person”
“there are about 2% of our users who are not using Buffer”
“we're going to lose money. Yes, but it's about trust and integrity”
From the episode
A 4-step framework for building delightful products
Nesrine Changuel (Spotify, Google, Skype)