🎃 The Best Product Feature No One Asked For

👋 Hey friend,

Last week, I was deep in customer email mode when something made me actually smile mid-workday.

Our internal comms tool had been completely reskinned for Halloween. The usual clean green and white interface was suddenly covered in tiny jack-o-lanterns and candy corn. Zero impact on functionality. Pure delight.

I sat there grinning at my screen like an absolute goofball.

Here’s the thing: Halloween is my favorite holiday. Before I ever touched a product roadmap, I spent years as a makeup artist. October meant transforming people into zombies, vampires, and elaborate fantasy characters. It was pure creative joy with zero business justification required.

So seeing those little digital pumpkins just made me smile.

At the startup I worked at before HubSpot, we went all out with seasonal theming. During the holidays, snowflakes would drift across the top banner of the app. Customers loved it.

These weren’t features anyone requested. They didn’t move metrics. They weren’t on any roadmap.

But they made our product feel human.

When you break into PM from a non-traditional path like I did, you absorb this constant message: focus on impact, solve real problems, justify every decision with data. And that’s right, most of the time.

But somewhere in all that learning, we can forget that products are used by actual humans who appreciate moments of unexpected joy.

Two quarters ago, one of my engineers pitched adding a character to our internal library tool. Something to guide teams through the template building process.

My first instinct? It felt frivolous. We had actual bugs to fix, actual features users were asking for. Did we really need a mascot?

Then I remembered those snowflakes. I remembered that the fun was the point.

We shipped it. Meet Charty.

Charty walks internal teams through template building. He’s helpful, he’s friendly, and yes, he wears a beret and carries a baguette during the translations step. Because why not?

The response: Teams who previously dreaded building templates now actually look forward to it. We get Slack messages about Charty. It also reduces the number of questions we get about timelines for approvals.

A tiny character that takes zero clicks to skip completely has become something not only fun, but also informative.

Overwhelmed by biased news? Cut through the clutter and get straight facts with your daily 1440 digest. From politics to sports, join millions who start their day informed.

Sign up now!

Here’s what I’ve learned: you can’t delight your way out of a broken core experience. If your product doesn’t work, no amount of cute animations will save you. (Just like how good makeup can’t fix bad skincare.)

But once your foundation is solid, these moments matter more than you’d think.

I now budget “delight time” into every quarter. It’s usually small, maybe 2-3% of our capacity. We use it for:

None of these features will make it into a case study. But they’re the difference between a product people use and a product people love.

If you’re worried about justifying this to your team or leadership, here’s the frame that works:

“This improves brand perception and emotional connection to the product, which impacts retention and word-of-mouth growth.”

You’re not wrong. And you’ll have data to back it up eventually.

But sometimes the best reason is just because it makes someone’s day a little brighter. Because work doesn’t always have to be serious to be valuable.

That’s something I learned painting faces for a living before I ever learned to write a PRD.

This week, pick one small surface in your product and add something unexpectedly nice:

Ship it before you talk yourself out of it.

Then watch what happens when someone notices.

Not every feature needs to change the world. Some just need to make someone’s Tuesday a little better. Some just need to make someone smile the way those jack-o-lanterns made me smile.

And that counts too.

Happy Halloween,
– Stef 🎃

💬 Want to talk product? I’m mentoring on ADPList! If you’re trying to balance metrics with magic, or just need a sounding board, you can book a free session with me right here.

AI will eliminate 300 million jobs in the next 5 years.

Yours doesn't have to be one of them.

Here's how to future-proof your career:

Start learning AI now

If you like Stef the PM, here are a few other reads worth checking out: