How many features have you built that didn’t move the needle? Many teams struggle to pinpoint what truly matters to their customers. The problem isn’t just prioritization—it’s clarity on what customer’s value.

Organizations have invested heavily in delivering superior customer experiences—appointing Chief Design Officers, adopting customer experience as a primary business driver, and restructuring culture, metrics, and operations to be more customer-focused. Yet, despite these efforts, two common challenges persist: (1) A lack of clarity about what target customers truly value, and (2) Difficulty prioritizing problems due to too many competing demands.

Both of these challenges are solvable, but they require a systematic approach to untangle their complexities. In this article, I’ll unpack these challenges and share proven methods that have helped teams improve focus and deliver impactful customer experiences.

Why Teams Can Misunderstand What Customers Want

The absence of customer insights is often misdiagnosed as a need for more feedback. While customer feedback is important, it tends to center on improving existing experiences rather than revealing unmet needs or priorities. Without clarity, teams play the “guessing game” building features that miss customer priorities and overlook high-impact opportunities.

The Prioritization Trap: Too Many Problems, Not Enough Focus

Teams frequently struggle with prioritization because they lack a structured approach to defining and evaluating problems. Organizations face a range of challenges—customer experience, technology, operations, talent, and competitive pressures—that are often interconnected. Without a clear framework and criteria for prioritization, teams lose focus and spread their resources too thin.

Understanding these challenges is the first step. But how do we shift from ambiguity to focused action? The answer lies in a structured approach to prioritizing what customer’s value to the most.

The Starting Point…

Establishing a rigorous product ecosystem pays dividends in the long term. Numerous methodologies can help structure and prioritize customer problems, but selecting the right combination can be daunting. Below, I share a three-phase approach that has consistently helped teams create focus and drive impactful outcomes.

Step 1: Create a Customer-Focused Framework

To align a large organization on a customer-focused strategy, influence must happen across three organizational levels. Each level requires tailored framing to ensure clarity and alignment:

  • Executive Altitude: Focus on strategic business objectives, market opportunities, and value propositions. A CX ecosystem map provides a 30,000-foot view, helping executives connect customer satisfaction to business impact.
  • Senior Stakeholder Altitude: Emphasize strategic pillars and desired customer outcomes. Service blueprints and Jobs to Be Done analysis clarify unmet needs and highlight key gaps to address.
  • Team Altitude: Dive into customer interactions within specific contexts. Journey maps offer granular insights to guide execution.

Step 2: Build Confidence Through Customer Insights

To prioritize effectively, teams need clear, validated customer insights rather than assumptions. This phase focuses on gathering the right data, identifying gaps, and translating insights into action.

Audit Existing Insights

  • Identify recurring pain points and behavioral patterns from customer feedback, analytics, and past research.
  • Determine where assumptions may be driving decisions instead of real data.

Fill Knowledge Gaps with Targeted Research

  • Use user interviews, behavioral analytics, and prototype testing to uncover unmet needs.
  • Apply structured tools like research matrices and A/B testing to validate insights.

Translate Insights into Priorities

  • Synthesize findings into clear, data-backed problem statements using journey maps or Jobs to Be Done analysis.
  • Align priorities with Phase 1’s framework to ensure focus on high-impact opportunities.

Step 3: From Insights to Action: How to Prioritize the Right Problems

Finally, translate insights into actionable priorities:

  • Draft problems using consistent language that is consumable by all stakeholders.
  • Rank problems based on impact and effort, include your customers in the ranking process.

Guiding Principles

To maximize the effectiveness of this process, I embed the following guiding principles into teams:

  • Be Inclusive: Engage the whole team to align on customer problems and insights.
  • Be Inquisitive: Use a research matrix to systematically document what you know and what you need to learn.
  • Be Exhaustive: Push the team to think deeply about root causes of customer top needs and how satisfied they are with your ability to meet those needs.
  • Be Succinct: Draft problems in clear, concise language and summarize them in a format that your stakeholders can relate to.
  • Be Objective: Focus on high-impact problems and use data-driven criteria for prioritization, protect against internal biases.
  • Be Transparent: Regularly share progress with the team and stakeholders to foster engagement and a shared customer-focused language.

In short…

This framework is an high-level summary of the 3 phases, each phase has key questions & suggested methods for the team to solve for. This approach will help teams (1) provide clarify for how they aim to provide value to their customers (2) align everyone on the problems to solve & (3) outline the path forward. For a deeper dive into this framework, please visit the Building a Customer-Centered Vision article.