Building products that matter

Understanding the Product Development Dilemma

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"Customer don’t always know what they want until you show it to them." - Steve Jobs.

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"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses instead of automobiles." - said Henry Ford.

Though, we, at Leanbase, built a feature specifically designed to gather customer feedback. At first glance, this might seem contradictory—but it isn’t. Here’s why.

The Balancing Act of Customer Feedback

Product teams face a fundamental challenge: building only what customers request can lead to uninspired solutions, while ignoring feedback altogether risks irrelevance. Every product decision exists within this delicate balance.

History has shown that groundbreaking products like the iPhone, Airbnb, or Figma weren’t born from direct customer requests. Instead, they stemmed from vision and intuition. However, many promising products have failed because they lacked a true market need. So how do you strike the right balance?

Customer Feedback Sharpens, Not Defines, Product Vision

At Leanbase, we believe the most impactful products come from a strong vision that is refined through customer insights. Users often describe symptoms rather than root problems. They might ask for specific features they’ve seen elsewhere or suggest solutions tailored to their individual needs, which don’t always align with broader market demands.

For example, when users request “custom fields,” they’re actually expressing a deeper need that requires interpretation. Just as a doctor doesn’t rely solely on a patient’s self-diagnosis, product teams must dig deeper to understand the real problem behind feature requests.

Why We Built Customer Feedback Workflows

So why did we create a dedicated customer feedback workflow within Leanbase? Because customer insights, when captured properly, become a powerful tool to inform and refine product decisions.

The Challenge of Managing Feedback at Scale

In small teams, understanding customer needs happens naturally—engineers talk directly to users, support teams notice recurring issues, and insights flow organically. But as companies scale, feedback becomes scattered across multiple platforms—emails, support tickets, Slack threads, app reviews, and research notes. What was once a clear signal gets lost in the noise.

Many teams attempt to capture feedback through various tools—support teams use Intercom, sales teams use CRM platforms, and product managers maintain separate research documents. However, when product teams need to act on this feedback, they often struggle to piece together a fragmented picture.

Centralizing Customer Feedback for Better Decisions

At Leanbase, we’ve seen firsthand how scattered feedback leads to wasted development efforts. When we noticed repeated requests for “custom fields,” we didn’t just implement them blindly. Instead, we analyzed user conversations and discovered that nearly 40% of these requests stemmed from a need to track customer priorities effectively. A simple custom field wasn’t the best solution. Instead, we created a purpose-built workflow that connects customer needs directly to product development.

We designed Leanbase to ensure that customer requests don’t get buried or treated as abstract votes for features. Instead, they are directly linked to engineering tasks, creating a seamless connection between customer input and product execution.

How Leanbase Helps Teams Prioritize Feedback

Our customer feedback workflow allows teams to:

Bring customer's voice into product development - collect and centralize feedback from various channels into one actionable system.
Identify high impact needs - prioritize requests based on business metrics like revenue impact and customer tier.
Eliminate manual tracking - replace spreadsheets and scattered notes with an integrated, automated feedback management system.

The Future of Product Development with Leanbase

Our goal is to help growing teams stay as close to their customers as they were in their early days. We’re working on integrating Leanbase with platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot to ensure teams can capture and act on customer insights seamlessly. Additionally, we’re exploring AI-powered tools to help product teams filter noise and identify the most impactful requests.

The best products are built at the intersection of vision and deep customer understanding. Leanbase helps teams develop this intuition—allowing them to listen, interpret, and act on customer feedback without being limited by it.

Want to see how Leanbase can improve your product development process? Try it today at leanbase.com!