Why your power users are your biggest product risk.
How optimizing for advanced users can alienate the majority of users.
There's a moment in every product manager's career when you realize your biggest fans might actually be leading you astray. Mine came during a quarterly review when our sales director presented a detailed feature roadmap. It wasn't our roadmap. It was theirs.
"These are exactly what we need to close more deals," they said, clicking through slides that outlined custom reporting dashboards, advanced filtering options, and workflow automations that would make their team unstoppable. But we weren't building a tool for sales directors. We were building a platform that needed to work for everyone from part-time customer service reps to C-suite executives.
This is the power user paradox: the people who love your product most can accidentally poison it for everyone else.
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Hidden costs of getting it wrong.
We once built what seemed like an obvious win based on strong voices from our call center teams. These power users had identified a friction point: transferring calls between sales teams was clunky and slow. They painted a clear picture of lost deals and frustrated customers, so we prioritized building technology to make these transfers seamless.
The feature worked perfectly. Adoption was abysmal. While our power users were vocal about this problem, they represented a tiny fraction of actual usage. Most agents rarely transferred calls at all, and when they did, the existing process wasn't actually blocking their success. We'd spent months building a solution to a problem that affected maybe 5% of our user base.
Meanwhile, we missed addressing basic usability issues that affected everyone: slow load times during peak hours and confusing navigation that made simple tasks take twice as long.
Keeping champions without losing focus.
Here's what changed my approach entirely: you can keep power users engaged without letting them hijack your product roadmap. When our sales leaders wanted increasingly specific features for their teams, we got strategic about keeping them invested without building what they asked for.
Instead of saying no and risking their advocacy, we were radically transparent about our broader mission. We walked them through our vision for mass adoption and explained how their success depended on our ability to serve a much wider audience. These were smart business people who understood that a tool used by five people couldn't deliver the organizational insights they ultimately needed.
Then we made them heroes without building custom features. We created case studies of their wins, featured them in conferences, and turned them into product educators who helped other teams discover the same value.
Result: we kept their championship while staying focused on broader adoption.
A framework for smarter decisions.
Power users aren't the enemy, but they're also not infallible product strategists. Here's the framework I use now to extract the right insights without getting pulled off course:
Ecosystem impact assessment
Before building any power user-requested feature, ask questions to determine whether it could poison the ecosystem for other users. LinkedIn's InMail generated significant revenue from power users but increased spam and degraded trust for everyone else. If a feature could negatively impact non-power users, either contain it through premium tiers or find alternative solutions.
Second-order effects audit
Power users often request features that seem isolated but actually change behavior across your entire user base. When Tinder added aggressive fraud detection to satisfy power users concerned about fake profiles, it accidentally blocked legitimate high-value users. Always map out how a feature might ripple through your entire ecosystem.
Resource allocation rule
Allocate roughly 70% of development resources to mainstream user needs and 30% to power user requirements. This isn't about ignoring your most engaged users. It's about maintaining the balance that keeps your product accessible while still innovating for advanced use cases.
Champion conversion strategy
Before automatically building what power users request, explore whether you can solve their underlying need through better communication, documentation, or workflow guidance. Sometimes the solution isn't a new feature but helping them use existing features more effectively.
Making better choices.
Your power users are deeply invested in your product, which makes their perspective both valuable and potentially myopic. Companies that scale successfully learn to extract insights from power users without letting them drive the roadmap.
The next time your most vocal user presents you with a detailed feature request, pause and ask: Are we solving a problem for the 5% or building value for the 95%? That question will save you months of development time and keep your product accessible to the people who need it most.
What power user request are you currently considering that might be worth questioning?
Until next week,
Mike @ Product Party
Want to connect? Send me a message LinkedIn or Bluesky.
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