I chose the title to this article carefully, actually, hoping it would grab your attention as a print business owner with a reaction like “Are you crazy? I pay the software vendors too much money for too little value to spend my time selling them on anything!”

I’m writing this article for those print business owners, management, and strategic thinkers who want to increase their chances of getting features that are important to THEM into the software products they use every day. Let me start with a short list of methods that don’t work very well. 

So now let’s talk about how to finesse the software development process to give the features you want to see in future releases the best chance of rising to the top. First and foremost, here’s an interesting fact. Most printers don’t submit any feature requests. Really, they don’t. I’m always surprised when I talk to printers who have zero engagement with their vendors around feature requests. In fact, I also interact with a lot of printers who never reach out to technical support at their vendors. These printers just continue to plod along, assuming there are no better ways to use the software or that the software features are determined and not influenced by current customers.