[datadrivenangel]

There is a difference between a hard no (We are not doing that) and this softer no (We are not doing that but we are not committed to not doing that), and in less mature organizations that difference is important and very useful.

[kjellsbells]

Yes, but here be dragons, especially in front of customers (B2B sales).

Sales Engineers for example are trained never to give the hard No to a customer request. Sometimes, they think they are saying no but the customer hears, "maybe". For example, "we'll consider adding that to the roadmap". Now the PM is stuck developing a single feature, the customer just got handed a stick to beat you with, and your CFO just got lumped with revenue thats unrecognize-able until some feature ships in who knows when.

[code_biologist]

Yep, I worked on a B2B product riddled with features that were there to make a sale. The success rate of those features converting to a sale was less than 20%, and none of those conversions were the whale clients.

The features were typically well implemented and integrated with the rest of the product, and totally unused.

The features added substantially to the complexity of the code base. It's funny to see HN defend quality over quick and dirty software. Though I understand and agree with the sentiment, the unused features were much more difficult to remove because of their "quality" (as measured in the eyes of the dev team).

[ryandrake]

Just thinking back, so many features I've written over my career were each done for a single sales prospect that never materialized into a sale. So much tech debt and wasted effort generated over so many years.