Nobody argues with it. The numbers go up. Customers say thank you. Every individual decision holds up under review. And then one day you look at what you've built and can't say what it is anymore.
This is a story about that.
The Merchant Who Tried to Please Everyone
A merchant owned the busiest spice shop in the city.
You could smell it from the end of the street. People came from three districts away because they knew — if it was a spice, he had it, and he knew where it was.
One customer asked for exotic herbs.
He added them.
Another wanted imported tea.
He stocked it.
Another requested pottery.
He made room.
Then fabrics.
Then books.
Then tools.
Every request came from a real customer.
Every addition increased sales.
Years later —
People entered his shop.
Walked around.
Left empty-handed.
His oldest customer smiled sadly.
"I used to know exactly where to find what I needed."
The merchant looked around at his shelves.
He had said yes to everyone.
His shop had become everything.
Which meant it no longer stood for anything.
Inside the Product Room
Customers are experts in their problems. That expertise is real and you should take it seriously.
But they are not responsible for protecting your product's identity. That was never their job. It's yours.
Every request is valuable information.
Not every request belongs on your roadmap.
Those two sentences look like they contradict each other. They don't. A request tells you something true about a customer's world — what they're struggling with, where they're improvising, what they expected and didn't find. All of that is worth knowing. None of it obliges you to build the specific thing they described.
The trap is that the alternative to listening looks like arrogance, so teams over-correct into obedience. They build the herbs, the tea, the pottery, the fabrics. Each one defensible. Each one requested. And the shop slowly stops smelling like anything.
Here's the part I've had to learn the hard way: the hardest thing in product management isn't saying no.
Saying no is uncomfortable, but it's a skill you can practice, and most people get reasonably good at it.
The hard part is saying yes only to the requests that reinforce what your product is trying to become — and being able to explain, out loud, in a room full of people who disagree, what that is.
Because if you can't finish the sentence "we are the product that ___", you have no filter. And without a filter, every reasonable request wins.
The role of a product leader is not to fulfil every request.
It's to preserve the purpose of the product.
A question to sit with:
If a customer walked into your product tomorrow, would they know within thirty seconds what it's for?
Or would they walk around, and leave empty-handed?
Every product has a story. Every story has a lesson.
Previously in this series: #1 — The King Who Built Too Many Doors
See you in the next Product Room.
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