As a PM that has started my career in Support/Success... I don't think I could ever advocate a strict two-request limit.
Customers (and customer teams) are a non-stop firehose of feature requests. It's important for the product team to hear all these requests, mostly so they can be understood. It's tedious work, but I do it with the intention of looking for patterns and having a pulse on the customers. You might be surprised by what you find, especially how many feature requests are actually different solutions to 1 larger problem.
My team does this using ProductBoard (https://www.productboard.com/) to synthesize all incoming feature requests on a weekly basis. We sit for 30 minutes as a team to go through direct requests, lost sales opps, etc.. This weekly work pays dividends when it comes time to prioritize features for the next quarter/year, etc.
Customer teams can feel empowered when they are given the tools/opportunity to prioritize things on their own, but the huge downside is that they feel silenced on a large majority of things they can't tell you (i.e. the "lower" priority" requests). This can really eat away at the morale of customer teams that feel they can't share their customer stories with you. When they hear feature requests from customers that they know are low-priority, it feels horrible to tell a customer it won't even be looked at by Product (it's even worse to lie).
I'd recommend a system where all feedback is shared, but only 2-4 feature requests are "voted" for officially by each customer-facing team.
Agreed that discipline around being reactionary is important.
I work with maintaining both a customer-facing website and documents (instructions, order forms, etc.). I have learned many times that a change based on a single issue can result in trading one problem for another. Allowing for trends to develop will help better define the best solution and help the most people. Defining a trend can be objective, but three occurrences in close proximity typically does it for me.
Totally agree with the “yes and” approach of firehose plus top two - I haven’t had a chance to update the post yet, but responded to similar feedback here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971011
Cool! Another weird thing I've noticed when feature requests are capped for customer teams, is that customer teams will "game" the system.
At scale, customer facing ICs will do things to benefit them personally. It's not a bad thing, it's just human. Sales people do what they need to get quota, Support want to keep their ticket backlog down and CSAT high, etc.
If you receive all customer facing feedback, you can make the final prioritization call on your own. If requests have been filtered too much before they reach you, the priority must be taken with a grain of salt.
Customers (and customer teams) are a non-stop firehose of feature requests. It's important for the product team to hear all these requests, mostly so they can be understood. It's tedious work, but I do it with the intention of looking for patterns and having a pulse on the customers. You might be surprised by what you find, especially how many feature requests are actually different solutions to 1 larger problem.
My team does this using ProductBoard (https://www.productboard.com/) to synthesize all incoming feature requests on a weekly basis. We sit for 30 minutes as a team to go through direct requests, lost sales opps, etc.. This weekly work pays dividends when it comes time to prioritize features for the next quarter/year, etc.
Customer teams can feel empowered when they are given the tools/opportunity to prioritize things on their own, but the huge downside is that they feel silenced on a large majority of things they can't tell you (i.e. the "lower" priority" requests). This can really eat away at the morale of customer teams that feel they can't share their customer stories with you. When they hear feature requests from customers that they know are low-priority, it feels horrible to tell a customer it won't even be looked at by Product (it's even worse to lie).
I'd recommend a system where all feedback is shared, but only 2-4 feature requests are "voted" for officially by each customer-facing team.