Beyond Feature Requests: How RisingWave Labs Manages Product Priorities with Limited Resources

Every successful startup eventually faces the same challenge: too many feature requests, too few engineers. For RisingWave Labs, this challenge came early as they built their streaming database platform.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, founder Yingjun Wu revealed how his team navigates the complex landscape of competing customer demands with limited resources. The solution required rethinking their entire approach to product development and customer interactions.

“Every single people, every single user asking for different things,” Yingjun explained. “Some of users will ask about, okay, whether you can have integration with this system or that system… and some people will ask, okay, do you have, let’s say, GCP support? Do you have Azure support?”

This flood of requests created a challenging paradox. Each request seemed equally valid and urgent, but with “just dozens of engineers,” they couldn’t build everything. The situation was particularly complex given their open source nature.

“Because we are also open source software. RisingWave Labs is open source in GitHub and we actually get a lot of questions from the open source community as well as from our prospects,” Yingjun shared. This dual pressure from both open source users and commercial prospects complicated prioritization further.

Their solution came from an unexpected source: Amazon’s customer-obsessed culture. During his time at AWS, Yingjun learned from Jeff Bezos’s approach. “Jeff actually mentioned a lot about, okay, you probably don’t need to focus too much about what your competitors have done… That the thing you should do, and the thing you should focus on is the customer.”

But applying this principle at a startup required adaptation. Unlike AWS, RisingWave Labs couldn’t build everything customers asked for. Instead, they developed a more nuanced approach to customer conversations.

“Don’t just talk to them about big ideas because if you just talk about the big ideas, they will say that it’s a cool idea and I fully support you,” Yingjun advised. “Talking about big idea doesn’t really work. You should talk to them about the details of your product even if you haven’t implemented it.”

This detailed approach to customer conversations helped them understand not just what features customers wanted, but why they wanted them. This deeper understanding enabled better prioritization decisions.

The strategy has proven effective. Despite limited resources, RisingWave Labs has maintained focus while growing significantly. “We want to be focused within the next three to five years probably. We are not spin across different domains. We will not do AI and we are not do RAM… We will have focus.”

For B2B tech founders facing similar challenges, RisingWave Labs’ approach offers valuable lessons:

1. Detailed customer conversations reveal true priorities better than surface-level feature requests
2. Being customer-obsessed doesn’t mean building everything customers ask for
3. Maintaining focus is as much about what you don’t build as what you do
4. Open source adds complexity to prioritization but can provide valuable feedback

The key is finding the balance between serving customer needs and maintaining sustainable development practices. As Yingjun’s experience shows, sometimes the best way to serve customers isn’t by building everything they ask for, but by understanding their needs deeply enough to build the right things first.