[hw]

Sometimes a product team think they know what their customers want and are tunnel-visioned with their 'wheel' too much to see the forest through the trees. Also, it's not uncommon that product teams prioritize feature requests from their larger accounts over smaller ones.

Feel free to check out Re:amaze [0] (I'm a co-founder). Our philosophy and product is driven solely by customer requests - not looking at what others do and just trying to fill a competitive feature checklist. If there's something you need that you don't have right now that we can solve, we'd be absolutely happy to discuss. We leave no customer request stone unturned.

We're starting to look at our 2018 roadmap and the first thing we are doing is looking at feature requests by our customers (both big and small, we don't discriminate) and plan around solving our customers' pain points. In fact we do that every week as well, albeit at a smaller scale.

On the issue of disjointed teams, I really do think it's extremely important for the product team, engineering team and everyone in a company to be involved with customer support and actually answer customer support conversations. That's the only way (aside from being a customer directly) that the company as a whole can get behind the customer and understand their pain points. That's in fact how we do things at Re:amaze. While that might be shunned at and not too feasible at larger companies, there's still a ton of room for a sliver of that to happen.

[0] https://www.reamaze.com

[charlesdm]

Totally agree! I work on a completely different product in a different market (Stockfolio, a stock and crypto investment app: https://stockfolioapp.com) but I've found exactly the same thing to apply.

Once you have a working product in a market you know exists, the most important features will frequently pop up; people will reach out to you. You can then use all that feedback to build out a great product.