When have you had to make feature trade offs? What happened as a result?

Seems like the need to make feature trade offs always happens!

It was particularly painful once when the business wanted to cut probably the most important and simple data input feature to get the product launched before the competition (based on faulty competitive research), but as expected the customers complained about the lack.

The product went back into dev for a revision immediately, meanwhile the competition did not even release a similar version for more than a year.

So while we got the product out the door, it was not nearly as robust as it could have been, on the other hand, the group looked very responsive to our customer base because we could make the changes so quickly, in the face of no competition at all.