This advice applies generally - leaning into the interests of your team acts as a multiplier. I haven't seen it done often, and sometimes it's explicitly frowned upon, but I often advocate for team interests to influence roadmap prioritization.
"But the customers' needs should prioritize the roadmap!"
Yes, they should, but it should be balanced. Better to have 10x the output, a happy team, and hit a broad surface area of customer value, than a slow, clock-punching team who comes into work being told what to work on by dictum based upon the most high customer demands. A sign you're doing this right is if there is some slight tension between engineers working on what they like, and what management feels is the important thing to be doing. You want that tension, and need to manage it from falling too far to one side or the other.
It often turns out if you have a balance here, you'll see innovation happen as a side effect. Team interests of a smart team often are somewhat far afield and lead to bursts of creativity, and can lead to new forms of thinking that lead to new features. Ensuring the team groks the customers' needs, and their demands, as well as giving them opportunities to pursue their passions, allows them to connect the two together when inspiration hits. Often times to innovate you need to do more than just listen to your customer, you also need someone with an orthogonal interest, knowledge, or talent stack to cross-connect things into something greater than the sum of its parts. Empowering the builders on your team to explore things is a good way to harvest some of this 'innovation space.'
I also think that customers often don’t know their needs, if that makes sense: the team can often see ways to streamline a product that never occur to the customer because the current behavior “anchors” their ideas (although, the reverse is often true too)
"But the customers' needs should prioritize the roadmap!"
Yes, they should, but it should be balanced. Better to have 10x the output, a happy team, and hit a broad surface area of customer value, than a slow, clock-punching team who comes into work being told what to work on by dictum based upon the most high customer demands. A sign you're doing this right is if there is some slight tension between engineers working on what they like, and what management feels is the important thing to be doing. You want that tension, and need to manage it from falling too far to one side or the other.
It often turns out if you have a balance here, you'll see innovation happen as a side effect. Team interests of a smart team often are somewhat far afield and lead to bursts of creativity, and can lead to new forms of thinking that lead to new features. Ensuring the team groks the customers' needs, and their demands, as well as giving them opportunities to pursue their passions, allows them to connect the two together when inspiration hits. Often times to innovate you need to do more than just listen to your customer, you also need someone with an orthogonal interest, knowledge, or talent stack to cross-connect things into something greater than the sum of its parts. Empowering the builders on your team to explore things is a good way to harvest some of this 'innovation space.'