What is your strategy for how much engineering resources you dedicate to custom work for large enterprise accounts vs core roadmap?

This is a great question! In the 5 B2B enterprise SaaS organizations I have worked practiced no custom development! Although we may build specific features for target customers and in that case, each company has done this differently and all of the strategies have pros and cons. My favorite method is to have each product group or squad dedicate a portion of their roadmap to support revenue or Paid Monthly Active users. In practice, this would look like making sure the capacity of the engineering ...Read More

In general, I am not a proponent of building custom solutions for a single customer.  However, if there’s a large customer who wants something that will serve the broader customer base, then we’ll consider it and prioritize it accordingly.  Once you ship something, it’s out there in the wild forever (until you sunset it).  And it’s tough to sunset things since someone will end up using it and relying on it.  So, product managers need to be extremely prudent with their decisions about what makes ...Read More

The eternal tug-of-war that every PM, especially Enterprise PM, runs into. Balancing custom asks with long-term roadmap work is hard, especially when big deals or renewals are on the line. I dedicate some eng capacity to enterprise needs but I treat custom work like an investment. If it doesn't scale, inform the roadmap, or unlock strategic deals, it’s probably not worth the detour. Here are additional details on how I approach it. Set clear swimlanesI try to carve out capacity intentionally, li ...Read More

I usually ask myself a few questions when we are being asked to commit resources to 'tasks outside of the strategic product roadmap'. The primary aim is to not deviate from the core road map unless the short-term benefit (retaining the customer) is justified.  Is this feature request bespoke only and doesn't require any product-level change? - If yes, offload it to the 'professional services team' and bill the customer directly for the work done. Usually larger enterprises prefer getting the one ...Read More

This is a big part of why I love working in the mid-market - we flat out refuse one off features for enterprise accounts. My roadmap is so much more scalable and predictable than when I was large enterprise focused it's a joy.  Looking back, even when I was a large enterprise PM if I had it to do all over again I would just refuse custom work. It's almost never worth it. Sure, I get it, if it's a super minor feature you are just accelerating that's appicable to more than one customer for a $5M d ...Read More