How do you strike a balance between accommodating feature requests, creating customer value, and driving product growth? It’s always tricky, so we look at how you can manage expectations and your feature requests successfully.

The feature request dilemma

Feature requests can leave you at the horns of a dilemma. You’ll receive feature requests from many stakeholders – customers, sales, C-suite and more, and need to balance their conflicting needs and priorities.

Practically all roadmaps will contain some features that are outside the core product vision – an occasional bit of flexibility to win a big deal is simply pragmatic and a part of life. What the product team mustn’t do however is end up accommodating everyone so that the stated vision and strategy become incidental and the product ends up not meeting user needs and expectations. As Liz Love, Group Product Manager at Secure Code Warrior, comments in this MTP post, How to resolve the tension between product management and sales: “I remember a sales team telling me repeatedly about the new module they were being asked for, but it didn’t fit with our strategy so we didn’t plan to deliver it. In the end, the sales team sold it anyway and I was forced into changing the roadmap as a result, putting our strategy at risk. I’ve experienced issues like this throughout my product management career.”

Recognise genuine business and product growth

Currently product managers are under a lot of pressure to understand ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) can be used and find ways to incorporate it into their products. Mind the Product has lots of advice, case studies and training courses that will improve your knowledge of AI and help you to judge where it’s appropriate to incorporate it into your product so that it’s used to drive growth. This is our AI Knowledge Hub. Cassie Kozyrkov, CEO at Data Scientific and formerly Chief Decision Scientist at Google says in this interview with MTP: “It is the role of product managers to think precisely and ensure that organisations aren’t building AI tools without direction or strategy.”

There’s nothing new in how you do this – you apply fundamental product management principles and methodologies in the same way you always have done. This recent Product Experience podcast episode, The future of product in the age of AI: Yana Welinder (CEO, Kraftful) shows some ways you can leverage the power of AI to save you time and create user stories, fine-tune financial models and use AI to amplify diverse customer feedback. As Yana says AI can really help you to get insights out of your data faster and focus on the creative aspects of your role. As LLM models improve and learn, using these models will become easier to learn, she says, adding that the most important thing product managers can do is to remain open-minded and curious about the possibilities of AI.

How do you make strategic decisions?

It should be a given that thoughtful prioritisation, transparent communication, and strategic decision-making lie at the heart of successful management of feature requests.

You can strive to make decisions based on their impact, but skewed expectations and pressure for a speedy outcome can get in the way of this. This MTP post from Matt LeMay outlines some of the pitfalls and traps that get in the way of strategic decision making, Six common traps that undermine strategic product management.

Find the metrics that matter

It’s not enough to understand metrics, you also need to pick the ones that matter.  Clear metrics are a good indicator that a company knows what it’s doing, and if a metric doesn’t solve a problem or drive a strategy forward then it’s a vanity metric. This MTP post, Quick read: Best practices for picking product metrics, gives you a good run-through of the factors you need to consider when evaluating your product metrics.

Do you iterate or innovate?

Most businesses will comfortably iterate rather than innovate – iteration is cheaper and not as risky as innovation and helps the business to slowly improve and achieve significant improvement and success over time. But sometimes you might need to take a leap and start something new in response to market trends, and that means innovating.

In this ProductTank Toronto talk, Managing products at scale, Lindsay Rothman, who was Lead Product Manager at FreshBooks at the time, outlines the benefits of thinking like a startup in a bigger company, and looks at how to stay innovative once you’ve reached product/market fit. FreshBooks was an established business with a loyal customer base when she joined. She relates how she and her team completely reimagined and resigned the platform in response to changing market conditions and ageing technology.

How do you manage expectations?

Clear and transparent communication lies at the heart of so much of all of this, not least at managing the expectations of others with the business. Getting the level, cadence and method of communication right is something that will vary from stakeholder to stakeholder and from business to business, so inevitably there will be some trial and error before you hit on a way of working that suits everyone. Here are some case studies and advice that can help you discover what might work in your situation.

In this MTP post, The key is communication: Leading a travel product through the pandemic, Peek’s CPO Navya Rehani Gupta talks about the communication initiatives she instigated to see the company successfully through the pandemic. Marta Rolak, Product Director at Springer Nature, draws on her personal experience of communication challenges with stakeholders, in this MTP post Repeat, repeat, repeat: the secret to successful communication for product managers.

Further reading

On creating heat maps to help you prioritise – Too Many Features and Too Few Developers

On learning to do things differently – A case study: The hidden costs of constantly shipping new things