Customer Obsession Isn't a Slide in My Deck
It's the filter every roadmap decision runs through, and the standard I hold my teams to.
Every company says "customer obsessed" somewhere in a deck. Most of them mean it as an aspiration, not a working filter anyone is actually held to.
The best product decisions come from teams who feel safe enough to disagree, curious enough to stay close to the customer, and clear enough on the mission to move without waiting for permission.
In practice: a decision doesn't ship because it's clever, or because it's what leadership wants that quarter. It ships because it holds up against a real customer's experience — including the edge cases nobody planned for.
On TurboTax Live at Intuit, that meant designing for two sides of a stressful moment at once: the customer navigating one of the most stressful financial moments of their year, and the CPA supporting them live, in real time. Neither side got to be an afterthought — and it became the fastest-growing product in Intuit's history in its first year.
That's the standard I build into teams, not just apply myself. A single leader's judgment doesn't scale. A team that holds itself to that standard does.