When you hear a request, it’s your job to understand the motivations which led to it. You do that by digging around the question to find the root cause. Why do they bother doing it this way? Why do they want the feature? How are they currently coping without the feature? Dig.
Questions to dig into feature requests:
“Why do you want that?”
“What would that let you do?”
“How are you coping without it?”
“Do you think we should push back the launch to add that feature, or is it something we could add later?”
“How would that fit into your day?”
Questions to dig into emotional signals:
“Tell me more about that.”
“That seems to really bug you — I bet there’s a story here.”
“What makes it so awful?”
“Why haven’t you been able to fix this already?”
“You seem pretty excited about that — it’s a big deal?”
“Why so happy?”
“Go on.”
