When customers win, your business wins
Your Best Customers Don't Want More Features
8/20/20262 min read
Your Best Customers Don't Want More Features
Here's a hard truth that product-led companies don't always want to hear:
Your best customers don't necessarily want more features. They want less friction.
We spend an enormous amount of time talking about product roadmaps.
What's next?
What's the new capability?
What feature are competitors launching?
What can we add to make the platform more powerful?
And those things matter.
But spend enough time with customers and you start hearing a different story.
They want the integration to work.
They want implementation to be predictable.
They want their employees to actually use the technology.
They want data to move cleanly between systems.
They want fewer workarounds.
They want support to resolve issues quickly.
They want upgrades to happen without disrupting their business.
And they want to know that the technology they invested in is actually making their lives easier.
More functionality doesn't always mean more value.
Sometimes, the highest-value product improvement isn't another feature.
It's removing three steps from a process.
It's eliminating a manual reconciliation.
It's making an API easier to work with.
It's improving documentation.
It's making an integration more reliable.
It's reducing the number of people required to get something live.
It's fixing the thing that customers have been quietly working around for the last two years.
This is where Services has an incredibly important role to play.
Services teams live in the gap between what the product is capable of and what the customer is actually able to accomplish with it.
That gap is incredibly valuable intelligence.
If the same implementation challenge shows up across five customers, that's probably not five customer problems.
It's probably a product problem.
If customers consistently need custom work to accomplish the same outcome, maybe that shouldn't be custom anymore.
If partners repeatedly struggle to integrate with your platform, perhaps the answer isn't better partner training. Maybe the platform itself needs to become easier to integrate.
And if customers keep asking for more features to solve problems that could be addressed by making the existing product easier to use?
Maybe we shouldn't build the feature.
Maybe we should remove the friction.
🥃 Hard Truth
The best product roadmap isn't necessarily the one with the most features.
It's the one that creates the most customer value with the least complexity.
As technology becomes more powerful, I think this becomes even more important.
AI and Agentic technology will give companies the ability to build more, automate more and customize more than ever before.
That doesn't mean customers want more complexity.
Quite the opposite.
They want technology to disappear into the way they work.
The best technology isn't always the technology that does the most.
It's the technology that makes the customer feel like they're doing less.
That's my Happy Hour thought this week.
What are you seeing? Are your customers asking for more functionality, or are they really asking you to remove friction from what already exists?
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