Will It Blend

When someone (who isn't a paying customer) starts saying they want features from X, Y, and Z all in one package, and they aren't offering solutions, it's a fine time to ask: WillItBlend?

If it is a paying customer, you might wish to keep the question to yourself.

Tossing together a bunch of random features into a single package can be extremely hard or even impossible to implement (in case of contradictory features). It would not be unreasonable to argue that such features do not 'blend' - you cannot put them together into one package. Therefore, to ask "WillItBlend" is to ask whether the features can even be put together, and also implies a question of justification for any answer provided.

And it just happens to be a phrase that alludes to a series of funny videos on youtube: http://youtube.com/results?search_query=Will+It+Blend. Viva culture.

Perhaps a far better question to ask is, how do these features fit into the current design? Are these features even supported under the current architecture? If not, then you aren't taking about adding features to an existing product -- you're talking about a new product.

See, once again we gotta separate what's malleable from what isn't. That's the only way to know if certain change requests can be honored or not. Eh?