How Product Managers Should Handle Those Dreaded Sales-Led Feature Requests

By the time it’s been escalated, it’s too late to fight the ideological battle

I’ve had a few conversations recently about those dreaded sales-led feature requests. You know, the ones where a sales team comes back from a sales call with a must-have feature that absolutely must be inserted into the roadmap immediately otherwise they can’t get the deal, and it sounds pretty easy anyway, and it’s just table stakes functionality and it’s obvious that we need this. Oh, and also it’s worth £250K in revenue, which will help hit quarterly targets, and this customer is a named logo that gives us credibility in such-and-such market.

A plucky product manager who is well up-to-date with their latest LinkedIn thought leader advice might think they can defeat this argument through the awesome power of Product Thinking™️. They will construct a sensible argument around the fact that the opportunity cost is high, there’s other, more important stuff on the roadmap, and that we’re not supposed to be serving this market anyway. They will say things like “revenue is not a good product goal”. This will end up being escalated to the CEO because these types of impasses always get escalated to the CEO (who is, after all, the actual CEO of Product).