THE ART & SCIENCE OF SEAMLESS EXPERIENCES

Using customer-driven prioritization to align teams and ship

Every product team faces the same quiet trap: a backlog full of good ideas and no shared way to decide which ones matter. Opinions win over evidence. The loudest voice sets the roadmap. And teams pour effort into features that customers barely notice while overlooking the ones that would have won their loyalty.

I've spent years solving that problem with a discipline rooted in customer insight rather than internal debate. Working with my friend and collaborator Susan Teague Rector, I helped bring the Kano method into practical, repeatable use — and built a free, simplified calculator, published through UX Magazine, so any team could field the technique quickly and make prioritization a shared, evidence-based conversation.

Image from UX Magazine: https://uxpamagazine.org/using-kano-across-enterprise-healthcare-ux/

At a Glance

Business problem: Product teams struggle to prioritize features objectively, often building what feels important internally rather than what genuinely satisfies and delights customers.
My role: Championed customer-driven prioritization as a core team practice; co-created a simplified Kano calculator to put the method in every researcher's hands.
The approach: Applied Kano — a Six Sigma methodology — to categorize features by their real emotional impact on customers, then built a tool to make the technique fast and accessible.
What I built: A free, downloadable Kano calculator and a published method, detailed in UX Magazine.
Strategic value: A shared, defensible way to align teams, guide roadmap decisions, and invest effort where it moves customer satisfaction most.

Why It Mattered

This work reflects how I lead. I look for the recurring friction beneath the surface — here, the endless, opinion-driven fight over what to build next — and I replace it with a durable method the whole team can rely on. Then I make that method accessible, so its value outlasts any one project or person.

My conviction is simple: great products aren't the result of building more, but of building the right things for the people you serve. My job as a leader is to give teams a clear, customer-grounded way to make those calls with confidence — to align around evidence, protect the features that create delight, and ship work that genuinely satisfies the people we're building for.

The Kano method and simplified calculator are freely available through UX Magazine.

The Approach

I turned to Kano because it does something most prioritization methods can't: it reveals how customers feel about a feature, not just whether they want it. By asking both the positive and negative version of a feature question, the method uncovers the emotional truth behind each request and sorts features into categories that actually guide investment.

Must-have features are the ones customers simply expect — the price of entry. Performance features earn satisfaction when present and frustration when absent, so they reward direct investment. Excitement features are the delighters: their absence costs nothing, but their presence can set a product apart. Seeing features through this lens changes the conversation entirely. Instead of debating opinions, the team debates evidence.

The barrier was practical. Kano is powerful but can feel heavy to field, especially for lean research teams under pressure. So Susan and I built a simplified calculator that handles the scoring automatically — a researcher records responses, and the tool produces a clear aggregate view of where each feature lands. We published the method and the tool through UX Magazine so it wouldn't stay locked inside one team. The point was leverage: give people a fast, credible way to make better decisions, and the practice spreads on its own.