Faced with endless potential use cases, Datycs' CEO reveals their prioritization strategy: they wait for a new feature request, such as for social determinants of health, to mature and be echoed by two or three other customers before investing significant resources in building it.

Instead of fielding endless private Slack DMs, create a public intake channel for all requests. This system allows the entire team to see the volume of work, enabling better triage and load balancing, while also building empathy with stakeholders who can now visualize the team's true workload.

Customers request specific features (supply), but this masks the true demand—the underlying problem they're trying to solve. Focusing on the 'why' behind the request leads to simpler, more effective solutions, like building a digest email instead of a complex 'advanced settings' page.

Post-IPO, sales-driven feature requests can derail the roadmap. Pendo's CPO advises creating a formal process, often with a dedicated program manager, to analyze commits for broad applicability and explicitly calculate the opportunity cost against the strategic roadmap before approving them.

Use a dedicated AI chat as a dynamic feature backlog. Continuously feed it new ideas and user feedback, prompting the AI to maintain a ranked table of features based on estimated build time and potential impact. This creates a low-friction system for choosing what to build next during focused work sprints.

Avoid the trap of building features for a single customer, which grinds products to a halt. When a high-stakes customer makes a specific request, the goal is to reframe and build it in a way that benefits the entire customer base, turning a one-off demand into a strategic win-win.

Instead of waiting for experience teams to request an API, platform teams should analyze top-level business goals and proactively propose services that unlock new use cases. This shifts the dynamic from a reactive service desk to a strategic partner.

When users request a specific feature, like an API, don't take it at face value. Ask 'why' to uncover the underlying job-to-be-done. The user's goal might be a centralized view of comments, which can be solved with a dedicated feed—a much simpler solution than building a full API.

To stop incomplete requests, configure your ticketing system (e.g., Jira) to require all necessary information—like asset links and UTM parameters—before a ticket can be submitted. This forces stakeholders to do their upfront work and saves the ops team from chasing down details.