Most of the discussion here will be technical, especially around feature flags and friends. That’s fine, but please don’t miss out that this is a clear signal to charge these customers a lot more money.
So to paraphrase Arubis, this is a business question,not a tech question. At what price point is the technical investment covered ?
Interesting, can you explain this a little more? Some of our customers chomp at the bit for particular features, and when we can we give them early access. We do not charge them more for arguably huge amounts of value add to the product.
I wonder how to have these types of conversation, internally and with users. I'm a PM but have a direct line to management. I'm frustrated with how much money I believe we are leaving on the table, even if it doesn't directly benefit me.
Someone can forget to have a separate set of terms and suddenly the support team are on the hook for supporting previews to a greater degree than expected. If features aren't locked then suddenly features get jammed in because the preview is a good hook for customers who haven't yet acquired your product.
If they say "OK, great", you've got immediate revenue to bring back to your management, and a strong case to continue doing more of the same.
Customers routinely over-and-under-estimate future value, compared to what they're then willing to pay.
They're often wrong in both directions, they usually won't pay as much as they think they will, _and_ they'll often pay far more than they think you will.
There are many, many reasons for both kinds of errors, many of which can be de-risked in advance and safely ameliorated.
*I'm willing to play ball too, e.g. for a staff position I might take extra vacation in lieu of more cash, tradeoffs like that. But basically I'm not gonna take on extra hassle without being incentivized — because I don't have to and don't want to, all there is to it
- this incurs real costs, so we should charge for this. (The charge doesn't have to be related to the costs! But if you're doing something extra there should be an extra line on the invoice)
- this customer wants something that other customers don't have. There's all sorts of real-world services where you can pay to board the plane first or get to the front of the concert. These may be several times more expensive than the regular service. That lets you phrase it in fawning terms ("you can join our Super Elite Ultra Platinum Preview Fellows") and thereby extract much more money.
I read this as “A customer that asks for advance notice of feature changes is likely to be a big enterprise customer that values stability and predictability, and the fact that they’re asking suggests your product is important enough to their process to matter, so you should take this opportunity to charge them a ton of money for an ‘enterprise support plan’ which includes advance notice of new releases, etc.”
As the GP said, it’s a signal that they’re a certain type of customer.
That's also engineering effort: you need to maintain feature flags or a different environment, which is not cheap in the long run