Caught between roadmaps, deals, and customer noise? Explore a smarter way to prioritize with help from Dave Epperly’s data-driven heat map approach.
You've been there before – trapped between engineering's roadmap, sales' promises, and a growing backlog of customer complaints. Which feature should you prioritize? The one that makes the most noise, the one with the biggest customer, or something else entirely? For project managers, this balancing act often feels like navigating without a compass.
To understand a better approach, we spoke with Dave Epperly, a customer success leader who's been building a data-driven solution to this universal challenge. His "heat map" approach offers project managers a powerful new lens for decision-making – one that could transform how projects are prioritized across the organization.
Unlike traditional project management dashboards that focus on timelines and deliverables, Epperly's heat map concept visualizes customer pain points across multiple dimensions simultaneously.
"What I'm trying to build is a way to provide a heat map of all the elements of the product," Epperly explains. The “three lenses,” as he refers to them, are "Where is it hot by volume of complaints? Where is it hot by MRR/ARR/Contract Amount? And where is it hot by customer pissed-off ratio – where are they cursing at us?"
This multi-layered approach acknowledges that customer issues impact the business in different ways. Some problems affect a small number of high-value accounts, while others frustrate dozens of smaller customers whose collective revenue is substantial.
"We have one midsize customer that has an issue, but maybe we have 20 small customers that have something that's easily fixed, that combined, their weight is much, much higher than anybody else," Epperly notes. "That's a very difficult thing to figure out."
The heat map consolidates fragmented data from multiple sources into a unified view – creating a single source of truth that cuts through the noise.
This example heatmap shows tickets across two major product lines with multiple components. This view allows the product team to quickly assess what areas require attention from three lenses: an MRR at risk perspective, a customer “temperature”, and a volume perspective.
For project managers, a heat map approach solves several critical challenges:
Too often, customer needs get overlooked in favor of internal priorities or the loudest voices in the room. A heat map gives PMs objective data to advocate for customer-centric decisions.
"If I could filter through those three lenses, then I can go into the conversation with anybody, really – whether it's a project manager or the CTO – and say, 'Look, this is the signal. I know it because of this, that, and the other,'" Epperly explains. "So you now get to choose whether you push your product roadmap or address this stuff now and save [customers]."
This changes the conversation from subjective opinions to objective business impact – and strengthens the PM's position when arguing for changes to the roadmap.
One of the toughest challenges for project managers is deciding between addressing a critical issue for one major customer versus fixing something that affects many smaller accounts.
"Each one of those things is weighted by MRR, volume of customers, and then the temperature of that customer as well," Epperly points out. "As a CS person, how do you push for prioritization amongst all of those groups based on what is smart across your data? Because from an individual's perspective, I don't give a shit. Like, this is my biggest customer and they're going to leave if this is not fixed right now. So does that trump everything else or does it not?"
A heat map helps answer that question by visualizing the cumulative impact of seemingly smaller issues that might otherwise go unaddressed.
Project managers constantly face the question: "What should I work on next?" A heat map provides a clear answer based on data rather than gut instinct.
"Usually what that means is the customer with the most money in the pot gets taken care of," Epperly notes about the current reality in most organizations. A heat map offers an alternative – a prioritization framework that balances various factors to identify what truly deserves attention first.
By visualizing issues across multiple dimensions simultaneously – complaint volume, revenue impact, and customer sentiment – the heat map creates a more nuanced view of priorities than simply defaulting to the largest customer's demands.
Beyond its value to project managers, a heat map approach can transform how different teams collaborate around customer needs:
The relationship between project management and engineering can be contentious, especially when it comes to changing priorities. A data-driven heat map changes that dynamic.
"There's also an element of 'tell me a story' in this," Epperly notes about making data compelling. "It's not just the data – make it real for me."
With a heat map, conversations become less about opinions and more about the objective impact on the business, while still maintaining the human element that makes data meaningful.
For executives focused on growth, acquisition often takes precedence over retention – despite the economics not making sense.
"It's really about customer acquisition costs because it's around five to eight times more expensive to acquire than it is to retain," Epperly explains. Yet this reality often gets ignored in many organizations where "Sales and Marketing stacks (top of funnel) still tend to be huge. CS tends to take a more scrappy approach by necessity."
A heat map makes the retention side of this equation visible and quantifiable – critical ammunition for conversations with leadership.
Customer success, support, and sales teams all interact with customers but often lack a shared view of priorities. For organizations managing thousands of accounts with lean CS teams, having a clear visualization of priorities becomes essential.
"In many organizations, Customer Success teams supporting large account volumes often work across borders, languages, and time zones. That dynamic, paired with lean staffing models, can create unique prioritization challenges and communication gaps that aren't always visible to product or engineering teams," Epperly explains.
A heat map gives these teams a common "scoreboard" to align around, ensuring everyone understands what matters most from a customer perspective.
Building an effective heat map requires thoughtful implementation:
Define exactly what you'll measure and how you'll weight different factors. Epperly recommends at least three dimensions:
These metrics offer a balanced view of both quantitative impact (revenue, volume) and qualitative factors (sentiment).
The challenge with most organizations is that relevant data sits in multiple systems.
"We have bugs, issues, product enhancement requests and usability concerns all coming at us from the customer side," Epperly explains. "On the inside of the organization, customer signals tend to be scattered across teams and tools: support tickets in one system, product feedback in another, and roadmap priorities in a third, etc. This fragmentation makes it difficult to align around a unified customer reality."
This data fragmentation is precisely what makes a heat map valuable – but also challenging to build. Identify which systems contain the data you need and plan how to bring it together, whether through integrations or regular exports.
"Currently, everything is piecemeal. Every vendor is putting AI into their system, and so you have to sort of tie it together to make it make sense," Epperly notes.
Start small to prove the concept. The reality is that even valuable initiatives like this face implementation challenges in busy organizations.
"It's a side project that is a super important one," Epperly admits about his own heat map initiative. "But there are too many things that are happening in the moment right now for us to go H.A.M. on that. So we're making slow progress towards those goals... I would like to say it's working amazingly, but it's not."
This candid acknowledgment reflects the reality many organizations face: the strategic initiatives that could provide the most long-term value often get deprioritized in favor of day-to-day operations. Begin with a single product line or a subset of customers to demonstrate value before expanding, and be prepared to advocate for continued investment in the project.
The heat map approach transforms how project managers prioritize work – moving from subjective judgments to data-backed decisions that benefit both customers and the business.
"The reality is that if you don't have a great data-backed argument, product is hand-tied to do what the roadmap says. However, by aligning on cross-functional metrics tied to retention and expansion, PMs and CS leaders can build together and win together," Epperly explains.
A heat map changes that equation by making customer pain visible, quantifiable, and impossible to ignore. It gives project managers the tool they need to advocate effectively for the right priorities – not just what's on the roadmap or what the loudest stakeholder demands.
For organizations ready to move beyond gut instinct and political battles over resources, a heat map offers a compelling path forward – one where decisions are guided by real customer impact rather than internal dynamics.
Are you ready to build your own heat map? Start by auditing where your customer feedback lives today, and take the first step toward a more customer-centric approach to project prioritization.
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