Osman Koç is the CEO of UserGuiding, a platform that helps teams improve user onboarding and build in-app experiences that drive adoption.
With all the co-pilots, agentic AI tools and “tokenmaxxing” going on in the industry, many product teams are releasing new features and updates very quickly and frequently.
This development can sometimes be a good thing for some products and teams, as it means actualizing backlog items and long-term planned projects faster (if not easier). However, from what I’ve seen speaking with leaders about their user onboarding strategies, it has also caused feature bloat for some products.
Why Shipping Every Feature Idea Is A Bad Idea
“We’ll ship as many feature ideas as we can, and the ones that stick with the users will stick” is a dangerous path to follow in product planning. It causes what we call “feature bloat” in the industry.
Yes, with AI, developing and releasing new features might not seem like as big of a time/energy investment as it would have been before, but every new feature you release will require upkeep effort and maintenance. Each one will also impact the UI, UX, user onboarding, support load, documentation and product performance.
Additionally, features outside your product’s scope will require you to release other features alongside them to make them part of something, because, let’s be honest, you need to complete a workflow. If you’re offering one part of the workflow, you cannot expect your customers to pay for another tool to complete the rest of the workflow they started with your tool. For example, if you offer an email marketing tool, but you decide to offer in-app surveys, you need to provide at least a few more in-app communication features to make sense of the survey feature.
Then comes updating and extending marketing, sales and customer success efforts.
So, a new feature shipment made easy-peasy with your AI comes with a lot of additional work. This is not to say that you didn’t need to do all of this planning previously. Nowadays, however, with all the quick updates and releases we’ve been seeing in the market, I sense that this planning part, where you compare the potential pros and cons of a feature release, often gets lost in favor of speed.
Asking Your Customers What They Need
A very easy way to make sure what you ship resonates with your actual user base is to involve your users in the product planning process.
Let’s say you don’t know if the top five feature ideas you get from your copilot are relevant to your market. Or, maybe you don’t want to mimic your competitors blindly without actually knowing whether your ideal customer profile really cares about that capability.
You can answer these questions by creating a feature request hub for your customers to share their insights, suggestions, needs and wishes with you.
A dedicated hub/page or a simple form in your app allows people to tell you what they are looking for. You can also create fancy votable boards with third-party apps or build a page yourself. You can even collect all the insights in an Excel sheet when you’re just getting started.
What matters is that you open the door to communication and show users you’re open to suggestions and care about their experience.
Again, here, too, shipping every feature idea is a bad idea; do not feel obligated to ship every idea coming from your customers. If something is out of your product’s vision, or requires a lot of development energy, you should be able to say no instead of overpromising and underdelivering.
Tips To Get Started With Feature Request Collection And Management
It wouldn’t be helpful at all to just point to a problem and not offer a solution. So, here’s what you can do if you’re just getting started with feature request management:
1. Find a feature request management system that works both for your team and user base. If you don’t have a big user base, you can put a simple suggestion form in your app and collect the answers in an Excel sheet. But if you have a big and active user base, managing all the answers in an Excel sheet can be hectic. You might want to create a dedicated hub where you can manage duplicates and let people see each other’s suggestions before submitting a new one and upvoting an existing request.
2. Pay attention to insights from your internal, customer-facing teams. Let them add ideas they hear repeatedly from (potential) customers in their meetings. This will also help you spot emerging trends in your market.
3. Choose a prioritization framework. There are several methods, like time-value, but choose one that makes sense with your customer base. For example, you might want to prioritize your top accounts’ requests if you’re a small startup. But if your business model depends heavily on freemium users’ happiness, you might want to look at their requests first.
4. Finally, share your roadmap with your users. Show them which of their requests are under development. You can also notify users who requested a feature once it’s live.
Releasing an MCP when your users have been asking for more detailed analytics or smoother integrations with the tools that 70% of your user base uses alongside your tool could make some of your customers happy. But it’ll certainly make a great portion angry, too.
But again, if you’re not collecting feature requests, how can you know that? Maybe some users send an email, and others mention it in customer success meetings. Without proper management, you have no way to know how popular the request is.
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