Handling Customer Feature Requests

An interesting twitter thread on handling customer feature requests.

Criticism of asking “why” faive times. Use it as a learning opportunity and use friendlier language.

“We’re not going to build it” or “we’ll put it on the roadmap” are not helpful. When a customer asks for a feature we really want to know

• what problem do they want to solve?
• what can’t they do at the moment?
• what triggered them to ask for this now?

If you had this already what would it allow you to do?

I like the idea of asking what hack or workaround they’re currently using. Maybe they’re using emails, sticky notes, or meetings as a workaround. This requires some probing as these workarounds might be invisible to the customer. But a key point is, if they don’t have a workaround now it isn’t a real problem.

If we already have the feature and the customer didn’t know about it, that’s a learning opportunity too.