When decisions are heavily sales-driven--be it the loudest voices in the room are the sales team, or a big deal is coming down the pipeline requiring custom work--individual solutions start overriding problem-based thinking. It leads to a nasty cycle where clients just blindly ask for features and changes, but no one actually sits down to discuss or think about the "why" behind them.

Honestly the best way to deal with this is to train sales and client-facing teams to start defining the problem in the first place, and to set expectations with clients that the conversation needs to be about problems instead of proposed solutions. Product then needs to gather all the requirements (scoping how much dev work it takes, metrics on how much a change affects all clients vs. individual ones) to make good decisions on what the best solution should be. It's cheap to say "product teams need to be more problem-focused" because the idea pipeline rarely starts on the product team in the first place. Client-facing teams need to play a stronger role in defining the problem itself.

(This is mostly relevant for B2B, by the way. May not be as true for consumer tech.)