Feature Request Template for Product Managers for SaaS Products

Anyone close to the problem. Customer success managers, support reps, sales engineers, and individual customers can all submit requests. The PM should not be the only person writing requests because that creates a bottleneck and filters out context. The PM's job is to score and prioritize, not to be the sole intake point. Provide the template to customer-facing teams and train them to write problem-first submissions.

Set a review cadence. Every quarter, archive requests that have been in "Backlog" status for 6+ months without gaining new evidence or votes. If nobody has asked about it again in half a year, it is either solved, irrelevant, or too niche to prioritize. Notify the requester before archiving so they can re-submit with updated evidence if the problem persists.

Customer voting (via tools like Canny, Productboard, or a simple upvote system) is useful for measuring demand, but do not let votes dictate your roadmap. Votes measure popularity, not impact. A request from 200 free-tier users will outvote a request from 5 enterprise accounts that represent 40% of your revenue. Use votes as one signal alongside revenue data, strategic alignment, and effort estimates. The [PRD template](/templates/prd-template) is the next step once a request is approved and needs to be fully specified for engineering.

A feature request captures a problem and a proposed solution from the perspective of the requester. A [user story](/glossary/user-story) is a development artifact written from the user's perspective ("As a [persona], I want [action] so that [outcome]") with [acceptance criteria](/glossary/acceptance-criteria). The feature request comes first. Once approved and prioritized, the PM translates it into one or more user stories for the engineering team.

Document it the same way. Score it honestly. Then have a conversation about tradeoffs, not rankings. Show leadership what will be deprioritized if the requested feature moves up. "We can build this, but it means pushing back the Q1 activation goal by 3 weeks. Here is why the activation work scored higher." That framing turns a political negotiation into a strategic discussion. The [Product Discovery Handbook](/discovery-guide) covers techniques for aligning stakeholder priorities with user evidence.