The Committee vs. The Customer: Why Your Feature Request Died in a 'Sprint Planning Meeting'
In the modern SaaS landscape, we all talk about being "customer-centric." We "listen to the user" and "iterate on feedback." It’s a beautiful narrative. It’s also, in many companies, a complete fantasy. It begins with a simple, high-ROI proposition from an active user. Let's call him Dave from Operations. Dave emails support: "This is great, but it takes six clicks to generate a report. Can you just put the 'Export' button on the main dashboard? It would save us hours." A brilliant, simple, profitable idea. Dave is literally telling you how to retain his business. And that is the last time his idea will be simple. Because it doesn't go to an engineer. It goes to the Organizational Chart.
The Anatomy of a Good Idea's Demise
1. The Product Manager (The Value-Add): Dave's request lands in a "New Feedback" queue. A Product Manager sees it. "Interesting," he thinks. "But 'just adding a button' isn't a feature. This user thinks they want an 'export' button, but what they really need is a 'Dynamic Reporting Hub.'" He re-tags the request, expanding its scope from a 30-minute task to a Q3 initiative. Business Impact: The ROI just cratered. It's been replaced by 'strategic alignment.'
2. The Senior Product Manager (The Synergizer): The "Reporting Hub" idea gets bumped up. "This has potential," the Senior PM says. "But why stop at exports? This is an opportunity to integrate our new (and completely ignored) AI-analytics modal. We can have a pop-up that suggests other reports they might want to run! This will drive engagement!" Business Impact: A simple tool is becoming complex 'feature bloat.' The user's original goal, saving time, is now secondary to the company's goal of justifying the AI budget.
3. The Director's Review (The Risk Mitigation): The Director sees the initiative. "I like the ambition," he says. "But we need to ensure this is compliant. Let's add a three-step legal confirmation wizard before any data can be exported. And we'll need a new permissions layer. Form a sub-committee to workshop the user-flow and ensure all stakeholders are aligned." Business Impact: Customer friction is added in the name of corporate CYA. 'Stakeholder alignment' simply means more meetings, not a better product.
4. The Sprint Planning Meeting (The Misallocation): Six months later, Dave's button request arrives at the engineering team. It is no longer a button request. It is "EPIC-724: A Holistic Re-imagining of the Data-Access Paradigm." It has 42 acceptance criteria and a 14-page requirements document.
The lead engineer stares at the specs. "So... they want a pop-up, that triggers a wizard, that requires new permissions, to... export a CSV?"
The committee beams. "Exactly. It's what the users asked for!"
Business Impact: The company's most expensive, high-leverage assets, its engineers, are now tasked with building a bureaucratic nightmare that is the polar opposite of the customer's request. The cost of this "feature" is now 100x the original, and its value is negative.
Velocity vs. Vertigo
This is what happens when a company's structure becomes more important than its product. The organization is built to have meetings, not to solve problems. Every layer of middle management and process-driven "vision" acts as a filter, adding cost, time, and complexity until the original user-value is unrecognizable.
At BidPointX, we find this model... inefficient.
Our business strategy is different because our structure is. We deliberately invest in deep engineering and technical talent before we invest in executive layers and process managers. We believe the shortest, most profitable distance between a customer problem and a shipped solution is a straight line.
When you send us feedback, it’s not fed into a bureaucratic machine. It's read by an engineer. An engineer who, like you, just wants the tool to work better.
We've made a conscious business decision to prioritize product velocity over organizational bloat. Because at the end of the day, you're not paying a subscription to fund our committees. You're paying us to make your job easier. And the best way we can do that is to build, ship, listen, and build again.
Want the button moved? You got it.