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!

Financial Analysis ... It Pays to be Proactive

Doing regular financial analysis of your product(s) is an important part of a product manager’s job. With everything else going on around you, it’s hard to do it in a disciplined manner though. In the early part of my product management career, I tended to be more reactive – GM asks for reports about how we did in a certain vertical or in a specific geo in the recently concluded quarter and I would scramble to get the reports out of the sales system. A few years back, I was entrusted with the responsibility of leading a product management team to nurse a product suite back to financial and functional health. Through that experience I learned the power of doing proactive financial analysis and powerful insights you can get through data driven analysis.

So what kind of financial analysis would you do and how frequently should you do it?