In this article, Gerry Katz discusses one of the most common traps in all of New Product Development: the conflict between responsiveness to your biggest and most important customers versus the need to address the wider needs of the market-at-large. Katz observes that, in too many cases, companies’ product development pipelines are clogged with projects to develop custom products for key accounts, and that this diverts time, attention, and resources from longer term projects that might result in far more innovative and profitable products. At the conclusion, he offers a sobering set of recommendations to avoid this trap.