Fieldnote · tickets −40%
Killing our most-requested feature
Customers kept asking for custom fields. We said no, shipped templates instead and support tickets fell by 40%.
The problem
Custom fields were the top request for two years. Every large customer wanted them, and every version we sketched made the app slower and harder to learn.
What we did
I asked twenty customers what they would do with custom fields. Almost all of them described the same five forms. We shipped those five as templates and wrote a memo explaining the no.
The result
Support tickets fell by 40%, and the two customers who threatened to leave renewed for two years.
What I’d do differently
Publish the memo to customers sooner. The no landed better than the silence before it.