Whales can have a huge effect on your company. One effect is derailing your product development. If you have one client bringing in millions of dollars a year,

Whales can have a huge effect on your company. One effect is derailing your product development. If you have one client bringing in millions of dollars a year, their feature requests, tweaks and bug fixes end up crowding out others. Features also end up getting shipped before they're ready, resulting in a shoddy product. Pressure to keep the client happy also results in promising unrealistic things, or letting the customer dictate the design. And they can hijack your support staff and developers to fix minor issues. Another, less well known effect, is pressure on staff. This ranges from unrealistic workloads and deadlines causing stress at work, to outright harassment being ignored. If a client doesn't like someone who works for your company, your executives may decide that keeping the contract is worth more than the employee. Whales can also get you through funding crunches and be the difference between staying afloat or collapsing. They can also help you test your product in environments you could never afford to simulate on your own, weeding out strange bugs and one offs, and tweaking for performance. They can also be a great source of insight into how to improve the product for other users.