We stopped treating every feature request as a roadmap item

One thing we’ve been learning while building B2B software is that customer feedback can be surprisingly difficult to interpret.

A customer asks for a feature, explains exactly why they need it, and it feels obvious that we should build it.

But then you start asking:

How many other customers have this problem?

Is the requested feature actually the solution, or just the customer’s preferred solution?

Would building it make the core product stronger, or simply more complicated?

We’ve started separating the problem being reported from the feature being requested.

That small distinction has helped us think more carefully about what should actually make it onto the roadmap.

For other product teams, how do you decide whether a customer request deserves to become a product feature?