Apr 6, 2023 4 min read

Professional Tools at Home

The Kano Model helped prioritize my search for a place to live and work in Medellín, Colombia.

Diving into the Kano Model, sorting features I want in an apartment

Feeling some anxiety and frustration with my search for an apartment for the remainder of our stay in Medellín, I decided to make a list of all the aspects that were rattling around in my head. I started prioritizing, considering what would delight, satisfy, and disappoint me.

After a beat, I realized was applying the Kano Model I learned in a course on Value-Driven Product Ownership. While the obvious utility of the course and model is for the workplace, the concepts are applicable to all sorts of areas of life…including an anxious apartment search. So, on a Sunday afternoon, grappling with the fact that I wasn’t going to get every feature I want in an apartment, and feeling dissatisfied after looking through AirBnb at what felt like 100s, I took this new tool from my mental kit and dove in.

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The Kano Model, by Noriaki Kano, has been around since 1984. Kano has you sort all the potential features by how much it will satisfy to dissatisfy the customer (in this case, me!). He also considers that many times features aren’t a binary (there/not there) but rather there’s a range of how well they are implemented. For example, my satisfaction with an apartment location isn’t an on/off switch; my satisfaction will shift based on how “functional” the location is.

Applying the model and then checking my thinking with my partner, I noticed a few things about the model and my search:

The model draws out assumptions to be named and discussed. I thought that availability for the remainder of our stay was a must-have. However, through discussion we decided we could move twice if it meant places with which we were fully satisfied. This shift opened up many more options!
Things that once delighted people can become expected, even “must-haves.” I see this show up regarding plumbing:
- Home indoor plumbing was once a delightful new invention, even my father remembers the wonder of his dad installing it in their rural home. Now, I (and he!) would be highly dissatisfied if our home didn’t have running water. (Though, I’ll note: almost half a million people in the US still live without adequate indoor plumbing and worldwide the numbers are much higher).
- Furthermore, I expect a US home to have hot water in the shower and sinks. I am ok with only cold showers in hotter climates but given our temperate weather in Medellín, I would be disappointed to not have hot water in the shower. While, given the differences in plumbing systems, I was surprised and delighted to have hot water in the sink in our current apartment! Which leads us to...
Context matters. Where people are influences their priorities. I’m looking for a furnished short-term rental in Latin American city of 4 million. My sorting of features is quite different than my typical unfurnished, long-term rental search in the US. For example:
- A queen bed would be a delightful luxury. Maybe it’s having to go up all the flights of stairs, common in any city, that smaller beds abound? Even if a listing claims a queen bed, it is probably mistaken; I keep an eye on how many pillows wide the bed is in the pictures.
- I would expect an oven in a US home, but ovens are not common in apartments here. We have a long-standing tradition of my partner making pizza from scratch once a week. While a full-sized oven in our first home in Colombia was delightful, we learned to work with just a toaster oven in our second home. For this third home, we only require space in which we could put a purchased toaster oven.

UPDATE: In the end, it was thanks to another friend-of-a-friend connection that we found a place with all the must-haves, satisfiers, and several bonus delights (colorful, Colombian-owned, with trees outside!).

Trees out the windows, colorful touches, and staircase leads to another room we use as a 2nd office space

Now that we’ve been in the place a month, we have clarified a few changes in our priorities given the additional experience. This is a benefit of short feedback loops. I can already incorporate our updated priorities as I search for where we’ll live in July in Ecuador – and I am enjoying a more relaxed search process!

Written Feb 20, 2023; updated & posted April 6, 2023.