Recently I was speaking with a product leader at an enterprise B2B company.
Their team was looking for ways to improve win rates in competitive deals.
One idea on the table seemed straightforward:
focus the roadmap on capabilities that appear repeatedly in RFPs.
In enterprise sales, large buyers often evaluate vendors through a formal document called an RFP — Request for Proposal. It lists the capabilities vendors must support: integrations, security requirements, reporting features, compliance standards.
The reasoning was simple.
If customers keep asking for the same capabilities in RFPs, building those features should improve the chances of winning the deal.
At first glance, that logic is hard to argue with.
But the real question is whether that assumption is actually true.
What RFPs actually represent
RFPs are designed to make vendors comparable.
Procurement teams need a structured way to evaluate multiple options, so the document becomes a checklist of capabilities each vendor must support.
That checklist is useful for comparison.
But it doesn’t necessarily reflect how the final decision gets made.
By the time an RFP appears, the buying process is usually already underway.
Vendors have been shortlisted.
Internal stakeholders have debated risks.
Champions have formed preferences.
The RFP formalizes the evaluation.
It rarely begins it.
Why feature gaps can be misleading signals
Feature gaps are highly visible.
If a competitor checks a box that your product does not, it’s tempting to assume that closing the gap will improve win rates.
Sometimes that’s true.
But enterprise buying decisions are rarely determined by feature coverage alone.
Buyers are managing a different set of risks:
whether the implementation will succeed
whether the solution integrates with existing systems
whether internal stakeholders can align around the decision
whether the vendor can be trusted long term
In many cases, the vendor that wins is not the one with the most features.
It is the one that feels like the safest decision.
When RFP signals actually matter
None of this means RFPs should be ignored.
Some capabilities are simply table stakes.
Security requirements, compliance standards, or core integrations often determine whether a vendor can even stay in the evaluation.
And when the same requirement appears repeatedly across deals, segments, or regions, it may signal a genuine shift in market expectations.
The challenge is distinguishing those signals from the noise created by procurement mechanics.
The real leadership decision
The deeper question product leaders face is not:
“Should we build the features requested in RFPs?”
The real question is:
“Does this signal justify shifting product investment away from our strategic priorities?”
Because every roadmap decision is also a decision about where not to invest.
And in sales-led organizations, signals from deals arrive with urgency.
But urgency is not always evidence.
A question to think about:
💬 When Sales says a feature is needed to win deals, what evidence convinces you it’s real demand rather than deal pressure?
Hit reply and tell me - I love hearing your thoughts.
Until next week,
Elena Leonova
Executive product & business-strategy leader
I work with senior product leaders, Directors, and VPs to help them master product strategy when decisions are high-stakes, ambiguous, and made at scale — where trade-offs matter and the cost of getting it wrong is real.
This newsletter reflects the thinking behind my work across:
• Product Executive education — From PM to Strategic Product Leader on Maven
• Advisory & coaching — product strategy and executive decision-making
• Writing & research — including my forthcoming book The Art of Platform Products
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenleonova
Website: https://elenleonova.com