When users never use the features they asked for
I remember a conversation with an inexperienced PM, who was still in the mode "we need to add X because a customer asked for it".<p>What I've learned - although I've never had a PM role - is not to blindly just give customers what they ask for, but to figure out what they really need. Their feature requests are often a proxy for something else they aren't able to articulate.<p>Another thing to be careful about is adding that one thing a customer asks for but nobody else does. You end up wasting cycles and bloating the product with these one-off asks. Sometimes you have to stand your ground and say "no", because the ROI just isn't there. Startups in particular are vulnerable to this because they haven't got a large enough customer base and capital yet to comfortably say "no", and end up with features jammed into the codebase that are still there, years later, when the original customer that asked for them are long gone.<p>There are exceptions of course - perhaps the feature is for some legal requirement e.g. "we need to show this specific set of Terms & Conditions before the user clicks Yes" they must have and can't live without.