In a political post on "Captains Quarters", I ran across a quote that applies equally well to product management decision making:

All elections are cost-benefit choices, at all levels.

The same holds true for product management decisions. In an ideal state of affairs, there's sufficient time and staff to fix all known problems with a product, and to build all the features that every customer and prospect you know would like to see. However, it's clear that we never have an ideal state of affairs. Time is finite - either a release ships within a reasonable timeframe, or its lateness makes people start to wonder (Vista, anyone?).

There's never really as much staff on hand as you might like - it's always the case that an extra person here or there could make a big difference. What that boils down to is the quote above, modified for product development:

All product development decisions are cost benefit choices

Since you never have the ideal, the best you can do is decide on what fits best with the time and staff you have: what will make the largest set of customers and/prospects the most happy. There's even something of an analogy to the way elections work: you can consider the primaries to be like your existing customer base: they want to see improvements in the existing system, while the general election is akin to prospects - you have to try and reach out beyond your base and appeal to new people.

It's not a perfect process in either case, and you always have people who are unhappy with the choices you make. The key thing to remember is that you can't escape that - any decision will upset some, and delight others. Sometimes you have no good choices, only least bad ones. Either way, you can't really escape by temporizing: failing to make a decision is itself a decision - in product terms, it usually means that you keep doing what you are doing right now.

Heck, that might even be the correct course - you often find out months or years later. Sometimes you never find out at all.

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