Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/s/9YoqUas8r1
This is where a strong prioritization framework that you adhere to is helpful. And one that is transparent to your stakeholders.

Requested features, like features I or the team come up with are rated against others based on value and the most valuable things get looked at.

This raises the question: what is value? It differs depending on the organizations goals at the time but usually it's going to be, at its fundamentals, along the lines of: make money, save money, make customers happier, make things suck less. If you can put a score on how requests impact these goals they're laddering up to, you've got a nice system that everyone understands: high score gets done, low score doesn't.

The ultimate goal is not to be getting the data to generate these relative scores yourself, but for the usual requesters to be trained to come to you with it.

When Jeff needs XYZ done because it 'saves the business money', ask him to estimate how much - this might require you to brush up on your own modeling skills so you can guide people at first, but eventually Jeff should be able to tell you his request helps 100 people do something that costs us $1 each usually, so we save roughly $100.

This enables you to either go, that's great Jeff, everything else l've got only saves us $50, or the inverse where you have a position grounded in data to have the conversation about other items taking priority due to their higher value.

This is usually enough of a system to handle 80% of requests when you get everyone on the same page that value generation is the name of the game, l've gotten to points in departments where someone comes to me with no or low defined value and you can basically tap the sign and they'll know it's not getting up in its current state. Using a system like this also makes your decision making a bit more bulletproof. When Jeff complains to your mutual boss 3 levels up, you can explain to them how you come to your conclusions easily.

Side notes:
- the type of value you can assess for can be anything. I use 4 value quadrants: business value, customer value, risk mitigation, future enablement.
- this has worked for me in larger digital forward companies, but for startups the structure sometimes won't allow this systematic approach (say for example the owner is your stakeholder so you just have to do what you're told). In that case you're out of luck.
- there's a degree of subjectivity and experienced people would use a process like this as a guide. You might pick the feature that saves you $90 over the one saving you $100 for other intrinsic return it provides, but the idea is to have an easily observable order in how you value things that you can then use as your cornerstone of what gets done conversations. 

[[Product_Management_Prioritisation_Frameworks_1719877489.pdf]]
2x2 metrics for prioritization depending on what we want to prioritize.

- Problem prioritization - based on frequency vs intensity of pain point
- Solution prioritization - based on impact to customer and business vs efforts (easy to deliver)
- Assumption prioritization - based on 'something that could kill the solution' vs 'know less about'
![[Prioritization types.png]]