I've watched a lot of teams go through the same arc. You hit product market fit, requests pile up faster than anyone can read them, and eventually somebody says it. We need a real system for this. So you go tool shopping. And whatever you pick, six months later your triage still happens in a spreadsheet.
The heavyweight platforms are the obvious trap. Gainsight's median contract is about $50,000 a year in Vendr's purchase data. The pitch says you'll be live in 8 to 12 weeks. Reviewers keep reporting five or six months. My favorite G2 review says it straight. "Implementation took us a good 6 months, and now we cannot consider switching because of how entrenched we are with it, even though it is obscenely expensive." Planhat doesn't even publish pricing, and its own reviewers say you basically need a dedicated admin to run it. These tools come with their own workflow and you pay to adopt it.
The flexible ones look like the way out and land you in the same place. Attio can model anything you want. Sounds great, until you realize someone on your team now owns the field structure and the tagging conventions and has to keep the lists from rotting. One Aha! reviewer called it "flexibility has a tax," and honestly that's the whole category in four words. What you actually bought is a part time job for whoever owns the setup.
And after all that adapting, the fit never shows up. Pendo measured feature usage across 615 software products and found that teams rarely or never use 80 percent of the features they get. That's software in general, not just PM tools, but it's the same disease. You spend months buying and configuring something and then nobody touches it.
Software can finally learn how your team works. It can read your calls and tickets and see how requests turn into decisions, then fit itself to that instead of handing you a settings page and a consultant. Customization is a fine goal, it just shouldn't take a six month rollout to get there. The tools that replace these will do the adapting themselves. That's the bet we're making.