Add one more feature or else…
03 Aug 2017
Any eta on sorting personal tasks, specifically by date? If we can’t have that soon we’ll have to move to another project mgmt platform
First thought: “oh no, they are going to leave. We should do something”.
Over the last few years, we have gotten a bit slammed with this kind of requests from customers. Earlier, I would panic and start fluttering around my developers to get it fixed. Now, I take a deep breadth. There is no need to panic and if the customer needs to leave, they will regardless. A feature does not save your product! Revenues don’t increase because of more features.
Bottomline, no one can be held hostage to feature requests. But, wait. We are still growing, and every customer counts. Yes, that is true, but you rather have 100 right customers than 200 of them who take you on a different path of software customization. In the end, your bloated software product will lose its voice and will be doing many things for many people.
Focus.
I am not implying that you shouldn’t listen to your customers. Some feature suggestions are great. Just don’t get caught up in these kinds of emails. Assess the email. See if the feature or improvement would benefit the majority of your customers. If it does, then plan it in your development roadmap instead of trying to push it out this week. Lastly, don’t promise a date when the feature gets launched. I have made this (promising a date) and have been burnt a few times — due to bug related issues, something more urgent coming up, etc.
So, the next time a customer tries to put you in this position send them this:
Thanks for taking the time out to send in your feedback. We will certainly take this up with our team and see if this could be beneficial to most of our customers, fits the vision of our product and does not complicate the app for all our users.
If we do decide to get this done, we’ll announce it within the app and also on our twitter channel @brightpodapp.
How do you’ll handle the “under the knife” scenarios?