Product management glossary
Feature request
Definition: A feature request is a suggestion from a customer, prospect or colleague for a new capability or a change to an existing one.
Feature requests are one of the richest sources of product insight, and one of the messiest. They arrive by email, support tickets, sales calls and chat, often with vague titles and little context. The same request turns up many times in different words.
Managing feature requests well means capturing them in one place, cleaning and de-duplicating them, linking each one to the part of the product it affects, and keeping the person who asked informed of its status.
A single feature request is rarely a reason to build something. The pattern across many requests, weighed against strategy, is what matters.