[mb22]

"feature requests that are fishing expeditions on the customer's part". This is a red flag. If your product market fit is strong, and you understand your value proposition, your prospects requests should fall somewhere on the roadmap. If they are too far out in left field, you may have other problems. The more your product solves a real problem, the more willing enterprises are to do things your way (take a patch every week, forgo some network architecture standards, etc). When selling, look for the signs that they are willing to play ball as an indication of commitment.

[derefr]

Those feature requests might be, say, integrations with other software they run (often one-off internal software) that they'd otherwise end up doing themselves. They want to see if "just asking nicely" will be enough to get that work done, rather than having to plan a whole project around it (even though it obviously would translate to you having to plan a whole project around it.)