This has been my experience too, but with a slight difference - the new feature is very often an ask from sales, who are trying to close either a big new sale, or a big renewal. The prospect/customer demands some obscure feature that like 1% of our users will use (at most), but they’re a big prospect/customer. Product/UX/dev push back, say we should be working on features, performance and reliability that will benefit most customers, but it’s hard to come up with the precise revenue impact of this. Sales are better at convincing execs, and “this will help us close a $1 mil/year deal” is very tangible, so the new feature gets built.
This is kind of a symptom of “the buyer isn’t the user”, though. Often we build these features, then monitor usage, and the customer that demanded it doesn’t even use it! Or we build it, and it doesn’t matter, we still don’t close the sale.
I think the core issue is “building for users” and “building to close specific sales” are often strongly at odds with one another, and most of the time “building to close specific sales” wins.
This is kind of a symptom of “the buyer isn’t the user”, though. Often we build these features, then monitor usage, and the customer that demanded it doesn’t even use it! Or we build it, and it doesn’t matter, we still don’t close the sale.
I think the core issue is “building for users” and “building to close specific sales” are often strongly at odds with one another, and most of the time “building to close specific sales” wins.