Thirty-eight people asked for PDF export. Twenty-four asked for per-team permissions. The decision looks obvious — and that is exactly where most teams go wrong.
The vote-count trap
A vote is a signal, not a measurement. It says someone took the time to click, one day, on an idea they understood. It says nothing about what they represent for your business, or how urgent the need really is.
In most public portals, the most-voted requests are also the oldest, the best worded, or the ones a customer forwarded to their colleagues. None of that is a prioritization criterion.
What a vote leaves out
It does not say who votes. A request backed by eight accounts worth €1.1M in annual revenue has nothing to do with one backed by thirty free-plan users — even when the second shows more votes.
A vote counts a person. A request should count what it unlocks.
Three numbers to look at
How to settle it in a meeting
Put both requests side by side with those three numbers. The discussion rarely lasts five minutes: the gap is visible, and nobody has to defend a gut feeling.
What we do at Khony
Our own roadmap follows that rule: we sort by revenue at stake, then by trend, and only then by vote count. Our portal is public — you can check.