I'm having as hard time imagining this situation. There's no expansion of the market possible? Potential customers never say no based on features? No reductions in cost possible? Nothing that would get existing customers to pay you more?
I don't think I've ever worked on anything where I didn't have a "nice to have" list of interesting things that could easily keep me busy for a year, basically at all times. This is stuff like making the build or deploy or backups faster; tools to make troubleshooting simpler; making the UI retain my last filtering selection when I log in, or fixing that annoying bug where text sometimes overlaps an image. Or it can be as big as rewriting the entire backend processing system, because everytime we touch it, 10 new bugs appear and it has zero ability to be unit tested. This isn't even getting into the product itself.
Seems like a failure (or more likely total lack) of product management.
It happens more at companies where there are multiple products. The opportunity cost of expanding features on product A is expanding features on product B. And then product C comes along, and it’s really hot, and so if A is stable and earning good marks, it doesn’t change much.
I don't think I've ever worked on anything where I didn't have a "nice to have" list of interesting things that could easily keep me busy for a year, basically at all times. This is stuff like making the build or deploy or backups faster; tools to make troubleshooting simpler; making the UI retain my last filtering selection when I log in, or fixing that annoying bug where text sometimes overlaps an image. Or it can be as big as rewriting the entire backend processing system, because everytime we touch it, 10 new bugs appear and it has zero ability to be unit tested. This isn't even getting into the product itself.
Seems like a failure (or more likely total lack) of product management.