triage-requests

# Triage Requests Demand intake and theming: turn a noisy stream of individual asks into a small set of weighted themes, then make an explicit build / watch / decline call on each — so the loud minority doesn't set your roadmap. **Grounded in:** *Escaping the Build Trap* — Melissa Perri: tie every request to an outcome and say no to output-chasing. **Go deeper (The Product Channel):** [Effective Prioritization](https://sidsaladi.substack.com/p/week-11-effective-prioritization) ## When to use this - You've collected a quarter's worth of feature requests across sales notes, support tickets, and user feedback and need to make sense of them. - A single big customer (or a loud Slack channel) is pushing a request and you need to size whether the demand is real and broad. - Leadership asks "what are customers asking for?" and you only have a messy spreadsheet. - You keep getting the same ask in different words and want to collapse it into one theme with a count. - You need to close the loop with requesters — tell sales/support/users what you decided and why — without writing each reply from scratch. ## Before you start (gather these) - **The raw requests** — pasted tickets, sales notes, survey rows, quotes. Each ideally with: who asked, what they asked for, source (sales/support/user), and any account/revenue/segment tag. - **Strategy filter** — your current product strategy, theme, or "what we're NOT doing this year." Without this, every triage drifts into a popularity contest....