How should small but highly requested features be prioritized in technically driven B2B products?

Question

In technically driven B2B products — such as hosting panels, billing systems, or extensible CMS platforms — it’s common for users to request small but high-impact features, like:

• Custom messages on maintenance pages
• Public-facing redirects during downtime
• Editable or translatable UI labels

These requests often share three traits:

• They’re technically simple (sometimes solvable in under a day)
• They’ve been raised consistently for years
• They have a significant effect on the end-user experience

I'm trying to understand how product teams can approach this kind of situation. Specifically:

• Are there prioritization models or frameworks that take into account user frustration over time, not just effort vs. impact?
• How could decisions like this affect brand perception or community trust in the long run?
• Have you seen ways to quantify the cost of not implementing simple but highly visible features?

I've looked into RICE, MoSCoW, and Kano models — but these mostly emphasize technical value or effort estimation. I'm interested in strategies that better address the emotional or reputational side of product prioritization.

• Euphoric: I don't think understanding impact of a feature on user is related to software in particular. Making this question off-topic. The little I know about this, I would recommend reading book "How to measure anything", that might give you idea how to build business model and estimate the impact for nebulous things as "emotional or reputational impact". And I would also recommend learning about "Cost of Delay", which I think is good way to represent value of features to implement.
• DavidT: The combination of "They’re technically simple" and "They’ve been raised consistently for years" probably doesn't reflect well on your brand, however thats outside the scope of SE. With respect to scheduling we typically create a small bucket of 5-10% of dev time to deal with these types of issues, we typically choose the item thats most requested to work on first inside this bucket - even if you choose wrong, the small nature of the request makes it a minor issue.
• Thomas Owens: I don't understand why RICE or MoSCoW wouldn't work. What says that RICE's impact can't account for things like user frustration over time or reducing the burden on front-line support teams having to process these frequent requests? What says that the number of people requesting this and/or the frequency can't be a factor in deciding if something should move from Could to Should to Must in MoSCoW?
• Greg Burghardt: We have a limit of one question per post. The question asking if there are prioritization frameworks might be on-topic if you get lucky and such a framework exists, otherwise the question could get closed as off-topic (asking for resources, libraries or recommendations are off-topic in the help center). The second question is not answerable with facts, making it opinion-based, which is not suitable for the Q&A format of this community. The third question about how to quantify the cost of not implementing something is answerable, in my opinion. I just think this post needs more focus.
• Kilian Foth: Why the "but" in your problem statement? Surely, high demand and low effort are both "pro"'s in any reasonable methodology?

Answer 1

None of these methods is limited to "technical value". In fact, very often "business value" is considered, be it business value for the users (e.g. enabling higher productivity) or for the software producer (e.g. less calls to the helpdesk, less loss of customers going for better products). So Moscow, Rice etc should work if the business value related to user's emotion is taken into account.

In this sense, a feature expected by many users and for a long time should go a least to ShouldHave (Moscow) and would have a high reach (Rice).

But I understand that it's not that easy:

• It's not obvious to quantify the business value associated to users dissatisfaction, that has moreover a cumulative effect;
• It is not easy to objectively assess if it's still really dissatisfaction or if the users got used to work without and have found efficient workarounds (if it was awaited for a long time).

More generally, even if we address well the prioritization (e.g. feature upgraded to ShouldHave or even MustVave), we may still face the traditional scheduling issue of starvation when there are many feature requests: there may always be a features of comparable priority that are deemed more important and use all the resources available in the current cycle.

If you are confronted with this, you may fine tune your prioritization process to consider within the same priority class a booster for a limited number of very small cost items:

• the pro: it's sometimes quicker to implement such a feature than to discuss again and again why it should or not be included in the current sprint;
• the cons: the risk is that too many low cost changes might be boosted and end up consuming resources, delaying significantly bigger items (not to speak of the sometimes underestimated interdependencies that make the small change a little more tedious than initially expected, see also Hofstader's law). This is why it is important to limit the number of boosted small changes (a few per sprint would not significantly impact the overall outcome).

• gnasher729: Management is often incapable of understanding the negative value of "end users hate your software". And eventually there comes the point where customers switch software and nobody in management understands why.
• Basilevs: @gnasher729 in B2B management or sales works with management, and end-users are often irrelevant and will suffer without any reprieve or consequences. Gotta love B2B.

Answer 2

The cost of this type of "customisation request" isn't so much in the work required to implement, but the on going support of the customisations over time.

Your product can soon evolve into something where 90% of your dev effort is in tweaking, adding and maintaining the various customers individual custom features. This can be expensive and at some point they will switch to a competing product which offers those features "out of the box" and promises "user controlled customisation" with zero cost and immediate effect. (Whether that's true in practice or not)

What you should consider with these requests is not so much the benefit for the individual customer making the request, although this may be the priority early on when you have one or two main customers, but on the features offered by your competitors.

You want to make the product that people want to switch to. Not the one they are tied to but hate.

So prioritise the features your competitors offer and implement them in a way that exceeds that offer, while keeping the maintenance cost lower.

Rather than constantly adding piecemeal customisation to v1, consider making a v2 you can upsell to your current and new customers

Answer 3

At UnifyBoardTM, we’ve learned that the real challenge with small but highly requested features isn’t their complexity — it’s how they’re perceived and prioritized. These features often have low technical cost but high emotional impact on users. Ignoring them for too long weakens trust, even if the product remains technically solid.

To manage this, we reserve a small portion of each sprint (around 5–10%) for "quick wins" — features that users repeatedly request and that enhance user experience or reduce support friction. We also factor in user frustration and churn signals into our prioritization framework, treating "emotional ROI" as part of the overall impact.

Whether in B2B or B2C, these small but thoughtful features can set your product apart – not just through functionally, but by building trust and reputation.

Thanks to everyone who shared insights and frameworks — they helped us reflect and refine our approach.

• gnasher729: Wanted to write an answer that recommended doing one sprint every few months for these "quick wins". The effect will be more or less the same. And thanks for mentioning that you want features that reduce support cost. Especially cost for support that your company oats for..