I am not sure what are you balancing. To me, these are two independent work-streams contributing to each other’s outcome. Prioritizing between apples and oranges depends on the budget. Prioritizing among apples is your market demand. Don’t stop innovation on behalf of the customers.

We're long past the days where a key part of making a great game was having the greatest new renderer and graphics possible, or having the largest open world ever seen, or other things you could showcase on the back of the box. Yes, people love things like that, but it's important to continuously focus the team around "what's the impact to the PLAYER?", versus what's a box we want to check just to say we did it. Build in iteration time to allow the team to find solutions to gameplay or technology or workflow problems as they arise, but also keep deadlines front and center, and remind folks that "good enough" is often a better outcome than "perfect", when you're not doing pure research and actually have to sell what you're building.

If I had to choose between creativity and market expectations under a tight deadline, I would focus on market expectations. After all, if you can't meet market expectations and satisfy your customers, you won't have a place to use your creativity. Meeting market expectations and having financial stability comes first. You can spend time on creativity afterward. In the meantime, you should regularly tell a story of your creativity, such as your innovation ideas and their roadmap. It's important to give exciting stories and a clear path forward to your employees, customers, and stakeholders, which will give hope for the future. Otherwise, they will lose motivation to endure the tough work they are doing now.

Having the marketing team and the production team sit together, discussing milestones and marketable items is a good start while going through the target audience happens before production and marketing happens after the launch. It is always good to place market demands first and slowly match the innovation of the product. It is a hard fact that even if you produced the best game yet the market demand isn't there, the product won't be able to sell well, hence identity your target first will be crucial to assist on the creative direction of the production, gearing it towards the market demands.