A situational PM question. You’re in the PM’s seat, and there’s a call to make.
The situation: You’re the PM for a B2B expense tool. Your largest customer, worth about 18% of annual revenue, wants a custom multi-step approval workflow built just for them.
What you know:
Their contract renews in four months, and their VP has hinted they are looking at competitors.
Two other customers have asked for something similar, but less specific.
Building it exactly as specified would take your team most of a quarter.
This quarter’s roadmap is focused on reducing churn among small customers.
Your call: What do you do with this request, and how do you tell the customer?
There’s no single right answer. Reply with what you’d do and why, and I’ll follow up with a question or two.
I wouldn’t build it exactly as specified, and I wouldn’t say no either — I’d negotiate a smaller, shared version.
That 18% of revenue and a renewal in four months is real leverage, but a quarter-long one-off is a trap: it stalls the churn work and leaves you with a feature only one customer can use. Since two other customers want something similar, I’d dig into the common job underneath — likely multi-step approvals with different rules by amount or team — and propose a configurable first version that covers that shared core, with a clear timeline before renewal.
To the customer, I’d be direct: here’s what we heard, here’s what we can ship and by when, here’s what we’re deliberately leaving out for now, and here’s the workaround in the meantime. That keeps the relationship honest without letting one request rewrite the roadmap.
There is the risk that building this feature will not guarantee a renewal.
The approach I would take is as follows. I would acknowledge that this is a desirable feature, but I would also acknowledge that this is highly specialized work that won’t have broad applicability with other users.
Instead, I would see if we can evolve the platform for our expense tool to allow our customer to build this workflow themselves with their own unique requirements. Platformizing the capability so that every customer is now empowered to solve this themselves precisely to their own tastes. That’s the approach I would take.
