How to Prioritize Feature Requests Without Losing Focus (or Users)

Getting your first batch of user feedback is exciting. You’ve put something out into the world, and people care enough to respond. But once the feedback starts rolling in — via emails, support tickets, DMs, sales calls, even random tweets — you quickly realize: it’s overwhelming.

Not because it’s negative. But because it’s unstructured.

One user wants dark mode.
Another wants custom fields in exports.
Someone else wants “AI integration,” whatever that means.

Everyone has an opinion, and they’re often conflicting. What’s worse: every feature request feels important — especially early on, when you’re still trying to find product-market fit and every user matters.

This is the floodgate problem. The requests pile up, and without a system, you end up either ignoring users or building reactively. Neither of those ends well.

2. The Common Mistakes

Let’s talk about how most teams mess this up.

❌ Prioritizing the Loudest Voice

Maybe it’s your biggest customer. Or a VC on your cap table. Or a colleague who’s “just trying to help.” The danger here is that loud ≠ important. Prioritizing based on volume or seniority often leads to features that don’t scale, don’t align with your roadmap, or worse — don’t even get used.

❌ Building Every Request

It’s tempting to be the “yes” product team. After all, feedback is a gift, right? But blindly building everything turns your product into Frankenstein. A dozen half-baked ideas stitched together that nobody really loves.

❌ Acting Too Early

Especially in the early days, one passionate user might convince you their request is urgent. But with a small sample size, it’s easy to misread one-off suggestions as trends. You end up overfitting your product to edge cases instead of solving broadly valuable problems.

These aren’t just bad habits. They slow you down, increase tech debt, and confuse your long-term strategy.

3. What Makes a Request Valuable?

So how do you separate signal from noise?

Here’s a better way to think about feature requests: each one is a data point. You’re not judging the person who sent it — you’re evaluating the underlying idea.

Start with a few key questions:

How many people have asked for this?
Volume matters — if 10 users mention the same issue unprompted, that’s probably worth a closer look.
Who’s asking?
A request from a power user with deep context carries a different weight than one from a drive-by free user.
Is it a must-have or a nice-to-have?
Some requests are about actual pain. Others are just preferences. Learn to spot the difference.
Does it align with our product vision?
If you’re building a focused tool for small teams, and someone wants you to turn it into an enterprise behemoth, that’s a red flag.
What’s the opportunity cost?
Every “yes” to a new feature is a “no” to something else — shipping bug fixes, polishing existing UX, or keeping the product simple.

Evaluating feature requests is about asking: Would this make the product better for the right users, in the right way, at the right time?

4. Build a Simple Scoring System

You need a framework that helps your team prioritize consistently — even if they’re looking at different requests, at different times.

You don’t have to adopt some MBA-style system with a 12-point rubric. But you do need a shared language for weighing options.

Here’s one lightweight way to score requests:

Criteria	Explanation
Frequency	How many users have requested this (or similar)?
Customer Type	Are they active? Are they paying? Are they your ideal customer?
Impact	How much value will this add, either by solving pain or unlocking new use cases?
Effort	What’s the time and complexity required to build this well?
Strategic Fit	Does this align with your core vision or take you off track?

You can normalize these into a score (e.g., 1–5 for each), or keep it qualitative. The point isn’t to overengineer — it’s to make decisions less emotional and more deliberate.

And this works at any scale. Even if you’re a solo founder, writing down why you’re choosing to build X instead of Y keeps your thinking clear — and helps you explain that thinking to your users.

5. Listen, But Don’t Obey

There’s a huge difference between listening to users and letting them dictate your roadmap.

Your users are not designers. They’re not architects. They’re experts on their problems, not your product.

Your job is to be the editor — not the scribe. You decide what goes in and what gets left out.

That doesn’t mean ignoring people. In fact, you should close the loop even when the answer is “not now” or “probably never.”

Examples:

“Thanks for the suggestion. We’ve heard this a few times and we’re keeping an eye on it, but it’s not something we’re prioritizing right now.”

Or:

“Appreciate you sharing this — it’s a cool idea, but a bit outside the scope of what we want this product to be. If we see more demand for it, we’ll revisit.”

You’d be surprised how many users stay loyal even after a no — as long as you’re honest and respectful.

6. Feedback Is Data, Not Direction

Feedback is not a checklist. It’s not a to-do list. It’s a source of insight — not a set of instructions.

Here’s how great teams treat feedback:

They group similar feedback together. One person asking is a thought. Five is a trend. Twenty is a fire.
They dig deeper. Is the request the real issue, or just a symptom? A request for “tags” might actually be a deeper issue about organization or search.
They test before building. Add a “Coming Soon” tag or a prototype to gauge interest. Sometimes people don’t actually want what they asked for — they just thought they did.

Patterns matter more than individual requests. Direction matters more than detail.

7. Show Your Work

One of the most underrated parts of good product development is transparency.

You don’t need to build in public to benefit from showing your thinking. You just need a way to:

Let users see which ideas you’re considering
Show which ones are in progress or done
Explain what didn’t make the cut — and why

This creates trust. It turns your users into partners, not just requesters.

At the very least, your users deserve to know:

“We heard you.”
“Here’s what we’re doing about it.”
“Here’s why we’re not building that right now.”

You can do this with a public feedback board, roadmap, and changelog — which, yes, is exactly what UserJot was built to help you with.

8. How We Handle It at UserJot

We built UserJot because we were feeling the exact pain we’re describing here.

Too many requests. No structure. A backlog full of random ideas and no clarity on what to build next.

Here’s how we handle it now:

Every piece of feedback goes into UserJot — whether it comes from a support ticket, a user interview, or a Slack message.
We group feedback by topic, so we can see what’s gaining momentum.
We tie requests to actual users, so we can follow up later, or understand context.
We use status tags, like “In review,” “Planned,” and “Declined” to communicate back to users what’s happening.
We update our public board, so even if we say no, users know they were heard.

This doesn’t just help us prioritize — it helps us build relationships with our users. That’s way more valuable than just shipping the next shiny feature.

9. You Can’t Build It All

At some point, you’ll realize that the hardest part of building a great product isn’t writing code or designing the UI.

It’s saying no.

No to good ideas. No to exciting opportunities. No to nice people with legitimate pain.

Because if you try to build everything, you’ll end up with nothing users truly love.

The best products have a clear shape. A focused scope. An opinion. Prioritization is how you protect that.

If you’re struggling to stay organized, communicate clearly, and make better product decisions, we built UserJot for exactly that. It’s not just a feedback board — it’s a system for collecting, sorting, prioritizing, and closing the loop. And it’s dead simple to use.