Help Me Choose My Racquet

What problem or opportunity existed?

Tennis racquets are specified in head size, weight, balance, string pattern, stiffness, and swing weight. Those specifications are meaningful — to people who already understand them. For everyone else, the product catalogue asked customers to become experts in racquet engineering before they were allowed to choose one.

The result was a decision customers were not equipped to make, and a common resolution of buying nothing.

What I owned, led, and influenced.

I launched a guided product-selection experience designed to help customers determine which racquet fit their needs. I led the experience concept and design — the logic of what to ask, in what order, and how to translate approachable answers into a genuinely appropriate recommendation.

Teams, systems, and constraints involved.

The difficulty in guided selling is not the interface. It is the mapping — translating what a customer can comfortably tell you about themselves into product attributes that actually correlate with a good outcome, without oversimplifying to the point of giving bad advice.

It also had to earn trust quickly. Ask too many questions and people abandon; ask too few and the recommendation feels arbitrary. That balance had to be found rather than assumed.

The strategy, experience, or operating model introduced.

Instead of requiring customers to interpret technical specifications, the experience asked about how they played and what they wanted, then guided them toward products that suited them. It shifted the burden of expertise from the customer to the experience — which is the whole idea behind guided selling.

Aligning teams and moving the initiative forward.

I worked with product specialists to convert expert knowledge into questions an ordinary player could answer confidently, and pushed to keep the experience short enough that people finished it. Where product expertise and customer comprehension pulled in different directions, I advocated for comprehension — a technically perfect recommendation nobody reaches is worth nothing.

The impact that resulted.

Prince launched a guided racquet-selection experience that simplified a genuinely complicated purchase decision, giving customers a path from uncertainty to an appropriate product without requiring them to learn the specification language first.

The leadership capabilities shown.

An early, practical application of guided selling, personalization, and product discovery — using decision support to remove friction from a complex purchase, well before those patterns became standard eCommerce vocabulary.

• Guided Commerce
• Personalization
• UX
• Product Discovery
• Customer Journey