We actually restructured our entire product to win the sale of a very large customer who’s users didn’t fit perfectly into our metaphor. It was unwieldy and we basically rolled the whole thing back several years later.
They were usually never used, or used by an incredibly small percentage of users.
The platform ended up a complete mess because of the number of hacky features implemented and was a nightmare to maintain.
I'm sure we ended up losing more business due to the instability of the platform than we gained from adding these.
It's incredibly frustrating for the engineering teams who continually warned of the risks of rushing these things in without any analysis of usage.
Sometimes it is not the number of users that need the feature but just 1 or 2 very important users... The ones that have the final say over Yes we use this, or no we do not
Video conferencing vendors would talk about this a lot until Zoom ate their lunch, then suddenly their principles about not adding features go away.
Mind you his approach actually seemed to work - people would ask things in sales meetings then you'd never hear of that request again. It only went wrong in one sales meeting where one person realised what his approach was and started asking for sillier and sillier things....
Did you close the booking because of that feature? That type of decision is sometimes dependent on the financial situation of the company.
Yes, but who cares if they used the feature or not (!?!) the question was, did the buyer think it was 'essential' for the deal to go through.
I mean, cynically of course, but it matters.