Feature Request Management: The Ultimate Guide for 2025

Have you ever said yes to something you'll regret later?

Someone asks you out for drinks on Friday, and then Friday arrives, and you wish you had kept quiet. 😅

In the world of SaaS, your customers will make a lot of requests and often ask for new features. And if you say yes to things you can't deliver, the consequences are much worse than a few awkward drinks.

Today, we will explain feature request management. You will learn how to collect customer feedback, manage feature requests, and align them with your product mission, vision, and revenue goals. 👇

What are feature requests?

A feature request is a suggestion from customers for a new capability or improvement in your product. It helps companies understand what users want and guide future product development.

Feature requests are often collected by customer support, sales, and product teams. Ideally, they are gathered into one place, where you can carefully evaluate each requested feature and determine whether it is worth building into your product.

✨ Start collecting & managing feature requests with Featurebase for free →

How to collect and manage feature requests effectively

At first, managing feature requests may sound like something only product managers can do. But actually, it's pretty effortless if you use the right methods and tools. Here is an easy, step-by-step process for managing feature requests.

1. Establish clear feedback channels

Before doing anything, consider where users leave feedback requests now and where you would want them to in the future. For example:

• On your website
• In your app
• In emails
• On social media
• In live chat
• And others

Depending on where new feature requests come from, you'll choose an appropriate feature request tool and create a form to capture them. Ideally, the tool you select should allow users to add feature requests across various platforms.

You can check out Featurebase (👋 that's us), a product feedback tool that helps teams centralize all feedback into one place with in-app widgets, feedback forums, and integrations.

2. Centralize feature requests in one place

Now, you'll need a feedback board or a similar app to keep all the feature requests in one place. It will allow you to sort and prioritize requests and keep everything neat.

If you're just starting, you can use something as simple as Jira or a Google Sheet. However, as mentioned, the best way to do this is to use dedicated feature request software, such as Featurebase:

3. Categorize and tag requests

Even though you've (hopefully) centralized your requests, users' pain points still vary, and identifying the most critical needs can take considerable time.

To create an effective feedback system for managing feature requests, you should categorize them and add relevant tags.

To illustrate why using a dedicated tool saves you so much time, here's how Featurebase automatically categorizes all new feedback for you using AI:

4. Review and prioritize feature requests

You'll have all the submitted feature requests in one place, and now comes the hard part: deciding which ones are worth your time and money.

You should review and assess these feature requests to determine:

• Which requests align with your business objectives
• The effort required to build a feature
• The number of existing users requesting this feature
• And more

If you're using Featurebase, you can easily see how many users have asked for that feature and, more importantly, how much they pay you—because not all feature requests are equal.

5. Communicate with users

It's one thing just to collect feature requests, and it's something else to respond to users when you (don't) want to build a requested feature. As you accept or deny, each user should be in the loop about their submission.

You can, again, automate this with feature request management tools. Instead of updating users one by one (and most likely forgetting to do so), they update the interested users via email automatically when you start working on their request:

7. Implement and track success

The final and most important step is to launch the features you built AND notify users that they are live.

Depending on the level of user engagement and overall feedback, you can learn if the features meet customer needs or if you've spent a good chunk of time and money on product ideas that won't move the needle for your business.

One of the best ways to keep your users updated about the new feature releases is product changelogs. Every time you create a release, you can notify your users about it with a neat popup inside your product, which also sends out an email.

Why managing feature requests is important

The short answer is that you won't have the time or resources to build all your customers' desired features. Also, not all user feedback will be helpful, and some feature requests will have no value for your business (and those of other customers).

But here are some more reasons why an effective feature request management process is necessary: 👇

1. To align your product with users' needs

Instead of blindly following your product roadmap (or a gut feeling 😅), you can collect feature requests to ship features that align with your users' actual needs.

Feature request management helps you focus on the most important ideas, avoid random features, and ultimately build a product that people want.

And what better way to do so than to get these ideas from the users themselves?

2. To effectively prioritize resources

Unless you're a company like Salesforce, you won't have unlimited time and money to build every feature request, and saying "No" plays a big part in effective feature request management.

Paul Graham has famously written that "the default state of a startup is dead." So, to survive with limited resources, you must focus all your time on shipping the features that make the most impact.

3. To improve customer communication

How you collect, manage, and respond to feature requests shows customers how much you value them. From the first contact with the feature request form to the completed feature, how you handle communication can make or break customers' trust and satisfaction.

In smaller startups, this is done by founders and later product owners or support. In bigger companies, this is the job of a product service manager.

For example, here's a screenshot of our live chat that shows how customers react to quick communication. 👌

4. To identify trends and gaps

When you track feature requests, you can learn what bothers your customers the most without spending time on complex and expensive user research.

You also won't fall into the feature parity trap of building just all the features your competitors offer because your customers will tell you exactly what they expect.

Top tips for feature request management

If you don't have a product team and you're just building out your SaaS, you may not be familiar with the feature request management process or how it works. These are some of the best tips and recommendations to get started. 👇

1. Centralize your product feature requests with a feature request tool

Your users will submit feature requests at any point that is convenient to them. Email, live chat, support calls, your social media profiles... you name it.

This is why getting a feature request tool such as Featurebase is crucial, as it helps you gather all that stuff in one place.

This allows you to merge similar requests into one and even reduce duplicate feedback by showing users' existing requests.

✨ Start collecting & managing feature requests with Featurebase for free →

2. Categorize and prioritize feature requests

Not all feature requests are created equal. To understand the real value of each, you must:

1. Categorize them: Divide them by product parts, effort required, etc.
2. Understand who's behind them: Is it an enterprise customer or a freemium user? This matters a lot.

With Featurebase, you can let users vote on the feature ideas they want to see. This gives you an initial overview of the popularity of ideas. But even then, 100 votes from free users may look better than 5 from enterprise customers.

That's why you can also sync your customer's data like revenue, plan, and company size and use this data to segment feedback based on what matters:

3. Engage with users

Communication is a major part of managing feature requests. From the moment someone submits a feature request to the point the feature is shipped, the customer should be informed each step of the way. A big part of feature request management is also clarifying users' ideas with them.

If you're collecting requests through Google Forms or emails, you may follow up with them individually via email. But with Featurebase, you can use the comment section and @ mentioning to have endless conversations with users:

4. Analyze trends in customer feedback

If the same feature keeps popping up, it's a sign that it demands immediate attention. By doing some occasional feedback analysis, product managers can identify:

• Common themes
• Portions of the product that need more work
• Feature requests that should be shipped as soon as possible
• Ideas that are nice to have but don't have a major impact on user experience

5. Balance vision and feedback

Collecting feature requests is important but should not take over the broader company vision and mission. If you get too preoccupied with feature request tracking and collection, you'll lose sight of what you want to achieve in the coming years.

Don't implement customer requests that don't fit your vision, even if many existing customers request them.

Keep your product roadmap aligned with your overall business goals and product vision. We love the 50/50 approach when prioritizing our roadmap - 50% long-term strategy, 50% customer feedback.

6. Involve cross-functional teams

Managing requested features is often on the shoulders of the product team, but other departments will also have valuable insights into what features users need.

Customer support, sales, customer success, marketing... These teams all have different interactions with customers and may understand some of their needs better.

So, make sure to collect internal feedback as well.

7. Measure and iterate

When you translate a new product feature request into a finished feature, you need to determine whether the work was worth it. In other words, whether the time and money spent on development impact the user experience, customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, revenue.

This also helps massively when prioritizing feature requests in the future.

Conclusion

Feature request management is much more than just collecting ideas—you need to align customer needs with your product vision, all while maintaining strong relationships with your users.

Doing all this work manually can be very painstaking, but you don't have to go through all that. With Featurebase, you get all the tools in one place to collect, track, manage, and communicate feature requests. ✨

It comes with a free plan, affordable pricing, and super quick onboarding, so there's no downside to trying it. 👇

Start collecting & prioritizing feature requests with Featurebase for free →