Feature Request from an Important Customer

"It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who payes the wages".

- Henry Ford

If you are in the product management role in an enterprise software company, you have probably come across the following situation at least once.


You and your team are working feverishly towards the finish line of a release. Suddenly there is an escalation from the sales channel. One of your important customers is making a feature request that needs to be addressed quickly. The big sale to another department in that customer may not come to pass. Or, the customer may not renew the Enterprise License Agreement that’s coming up in a few months. Unless, of course, you promise to add the feature the in the next release or worse still, deliver it as an emergency bug fix within the next few weeks!

Feature requests come from customers all the time. Handling an urgent request coming on the final leg of a major release could be quite tricky. Both the feature ask as well as the customer need to be carefully evaluated. For example, is the customer considered a leader for technology adoption in their industry? In many industry segments, it is common for companies to co-operate in areas that are not related to their core competence. For example, IT departments of two pharmaceutical companies may collaborate to find the best image management software even though they are fierce competitors on the R&D front. Partnering properly with a leader of technology adoption would help in generating leads for your products elsewhere in the industry.


If your hands are tied from R&D resource perspective you should also have a honest discussion with the customer to pay for quick delivery. A lot of times product managers simply forget to ask the customer to pay.  In quite a few cases, I have seen the customer willing to pay for the development cost for important features they cann't wait for. It’s a relatively easier conversation with R&D when the customer is willing to pay for it.


In addition to standard questions on cost and trade-offs (e.g., other feature(s) you might need to drop to accommodate this) some other things you might consider in the above example:

• How important is the issue to the customer (e.g., is this a compliance related issue that an external auditor identified and non-compliance could have serious implications for the customer)?
• Is this request localized to one part of the customer or could this be an enterprise level issue even though only one department has reported it right now?  
• Is this company considered to be a leader in technology adoption in the industry segment(s) in which it plays in?
• Is the customer a “poster child” for the use cases your product is driving?
• Potential for the customer for being a reference customer?
• How well do their “ask” align with your strategic roadmap?
• Do they push the envelope of your product (e.g., performance, scalability etc.) that will lead to better understanding of your product’s limitations/heights in the real world scenarios?
• ..