The most important product decision is what you don't build

The better way is to never have those features in your pipeline already.

I worked with a guy who specialized in custom reporting tools and pipelines. He said that a majority of the time people are asking for custom reporting tools, it’s because the app’s built-in tools for sorting/filtering/aggregating data aren’t answering the questions they are asking.

Now whenever someone brings that up, I ask “What question are they wanting the answer to?”. It usually leads to either a new feature or just clarifying where that question can be answered. Looks like you’ve caught onto that same school of thought.

Sometimes people just want to feed data into their own warehouse so they can query data across different pieces of software, or they are too stubborn to get to the bottom of what question they’re trying to answer.

I thought "custom reporting" was code for "our in-house dev team is slow".

I see this all the time... custom reporting, reports... I have seen this so many times in so many places and I wonder why the fuck are people asking about it. Most of the time they have little clue of what they want reported, or how they want the data to look like. Nearly 100% of the time what they mean by reporting is "join all the tables that have a foreign key, force join all the ones that do not have a foreign key by using a union against some arbitrary value picked at most-likely-to-be-the-right-one and dump everything on an "excel spreadsheet". This is the golden standard most people go by.

Give them an API with the data so they can get create their own reports. Maybe even charge them per hour to create the custom reports.