How to prioritize features for your Product?

Anything a (paying) customer brings to my attention starts with extra points right out of the gate when I consider feature development. These are people who already bought into my product's promise and likely reflect the desires of other customers. I examine those ideas to see if they're bringing up something that's highly specific to them or not. If it just sounds like custom development work, that's kinda where it ends. Next step is to ignore the surrounding specifics of what the customer wants and trying to see if the root thought has multiple applications to it. A good, simplistic example would be a ride-sharing app hearing that a customer missed an appointment and then working that through to building our a reservation system.

There is a lot of nuance when it comes to prioritization, but I like to use ICE Framework: It's not an absolute oracle, but helps with taking different factors into account.

Some factors I consider when deciding which features to build first are user feedback, business goals, impact and complexity, competitor analysis and technical feasibility. It definitely is a complex task and involves a balancing act.

Creating a matrix of: customer happiness/pain vs. potential revenue vs. total developer hours.

Maybe it's not about balancing the needs and goals, but about matching those and meeting the user needs throughout feature building. Easier to say than to do, but honestly what I have seen - with the right marketing/ communication of the values of the features (even if they are not super user-friendly, like paid features), the users may click. Just work to got loyalty from the audience you work with. Hope it makes sense to you and answers the questions in a way :)