[a-saleh]

You mention that you might write an article on distinguishing the tangential feature requests from the useful ones. I would really like to read that :) Especially if I could send it to our product managers, because our product has been in a cycle "we need an enterprise sale" > "potential customer mentions a feature they would have liked" > "we scramble for a month to write the feature and close the deal".

To be honest, it is much better now, but as a QE on the project, now I get to deal with so many half-abandonned/half-finished features.

[Negitivefrags]

The key is to ignore the feature request, and focus on the problem.

Users don't come to you with problems, they come to you with shitty solutions.

You need to take their solution, reverse engineer their real problem from that, then work out a good solution for that problem that fits well with your product.

[scott_s]

"My job is not to give the users what they want, it's to give them what they need."

[timoth3y]

That's a bad place to be stuck in. I'll see if I can put something together that makes sense and is fairly comprehensive. At the moment, a lot of it is "I know it when I see it" but that's not exactly helpful.

[a-saleh]

Fortunately we seem to be moving away from that now-days :)

And I have talked with our guys and I can sort of see it from their view-point. from their point of view it often is the hunt for the last `checkbox`, the last necessary tick somewhere on the customers requirements page.

In their mind it often seems as a simple calculation, on one hand potentially so much $/year from big-corp vs 2xManxMonth to get a new feature over the line? No brainer.

An I am struggling to somehow explain that you need to add much more to those two developer months, because with every feature there are bugs and regressions and customer tickets, e.t.c. and suddenly it takes one developer in perpetuity.

[StavrosK]

Isn't a big part of it the client saying that "it would be nice if..." versus "we can't use this unless"?

[davidgerard]

Much as a salesman can tell when a customer is saying "I would most certainly give you money if you turned your product upside down and painted it blue", which is correctly translated as "I will never buy your present offering."

[firasd]

Set Your Priorities: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/SetYourPriorities.htm...

A couple recent related articles:

1) How to Pick Winning Product Features https://medium.com/pm-insights/how-to-pick-winning-product-f...

2) Building Products https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/building-pr...

[roel_v]

That dynamic is very different for one size fits all software than it is for consultancyware, though.