People often struggle with the idea of Focus.
People generally don't intuitively understand why staying disciplined with a "Minimum Viable Problem" and a corresponding Minimum Viable Product is key to their growth and scale.
You'll hear phrases like this...
"Why can't we just support this extra use case?"
"Customers want our product to do X!"
"This is an important opportunity!"
"Isn't it easy to just..."
There isn't an industry, product category, or customer profile in the world where you won't be asked to handle more use cases.
Your customers will ALWAYS want to have more of their needs met across all their use cases.
This ALWAYS appears like a great opportunity. A no-brainer, right?
However, it's not necessarily the right opportunity, or in your startup's best interest, to solve these additional use cases. At least not right away.
Why?
The secret to scale is creating tight alignment from the very tippy top of your funnel all the way to the deepest part of your product so that you achieve real Product Market Fit (PMF) and corresponding rapid growth.
PMF is when a high percentage of users go through the ENTIRE funnel cheaply and easily: Awareness -> Interest -> Education -> Adoption -> Value Creation -> Uh-huh moment -> Retention -> Advocacy
If you carelessly stumble into new use cases, two bad things will happen.
Bad thing 1
1. At first, you will typically just add some features to the product and/or some messaging to your website.
You will typically NOT spend the time and money to create a solid funnel for the use-case from top to bottom (product marketing, product education, product support materials, product features, edge cases etc).
The customer will therefore fail to make it all the way to the bottom of the funnel (retention + advocacy).
This will result in either...
a) Produce high-churn customers who don't make it all the way through the full funnel OR
b) Access to a very shallow pool of customers who are willing to tolerate an incomplete funnel for that use case.
Bad thing 2
You will realize your mistake (hopefully) and work on creating such a funnel. However, this forced and premature effort will pancake the team.
Supporting a new use case is deceptively difficult and costly, cutting across all functions of the team, including marketing, sales, product, engineering, and customer support.
In summary
This is a counterintuitive mistake that diffuses focus too early for startups. A common mistake that many operators often fall into.
You want to nail your first Minimum Viable Product use case.
You want to scale it to everyone who will buy what you have.
You want to avoid stumbling into new use cases and instead make very intentional decisions about when to expand your focus area.
You can typically expand into new use cases only after you have nailed PMF (or decided to pivot) and secured or allocated fresh funding and resources to win in that additional use case.
Head vs. Body
This year's lesson
- Your head: For competence and control
- Your body: For calm and joy
Spend more time in the latter.
Do you deserve any credit?
As a leader, your job is to make your team look good in front of others.
That doesn’t mean lying, obfuscating or dissembling.
It means…
1. helping them to do the very best work
2. Letting them take the lime light and credit when presenting it
3. Clarifying or defending it when others underestimate or misunderstand it
When do you get your flowers?
Hopefully they take the time to give you a shoutout sometimes!
Signs and symptoms of misalignment
💥 Common causes of org dysfunction
Ever found yourself stuck in a dysfunctional part of the business and can’t quite figure out why?
One of the most likely reasons:
Everyone is making things up as they go—and squabbling all the way.
In other words: lack of alignment.
Here are some common (but not exhaustive) reasons why alignment fails 👇
🎯 Refusing to set one clear target
Someone in your chain of command won’t set a single clear focus. They hedge.
This breaks everyone downstream.
Companies need clear (often singular focus).
Without it it’s impossible for everyone to work together to achieve a goal.
🚫 No targets at the top
Leaders above you might WANT to set a target—but never actually do it.
No hard decisions. No documentation. No socialization. No team-wide alignment.
This failure often comes not just from the top (e.g. the CEO) but from a manager somewhere in your chain of command.
Leadership is both top-down and middle-out.
CEOs set high-level targets, but leaders at every layer in the business must define the details, push back where needed, and make sure traders are understood (managing up).
Otherwise, senior leaders are is flying blind.
🔄 Moving targets from the top
Someone in your chain of command sets a clear focus—then regularly changes their mind.
All leaders should be:
✅ Documenting a clear plan
✅ Anticipating and communicating change
✅ Shielding their team from thrash
✅ Defending the plan when leadership gets nervous
🧭 Confusion about what to align to
Focus areas might exist—but leadership hasn’t created or shared a canonical set of principles, assumptions, vision, or roadmap.
Maybe they think everyone “just gets it.”
Maybe they prioritize execution over documentation.
Maybe they keep re-documenting things with different words and diagrams.
Whatever the reason: no shared mental model = no alignment.
🙅♂️ Refusing to get aligned
Even with a clear plan in place, a leader (in your org or another) just… doesn’t align.
They ignore direction, pursue their own thing, and trigger constant re-litigation of previously settled decisions.
Sometimes this is subtle: They say they’re aligned but use vague or contradictory language.
Or they nod along—and then go rogue anyway.
🙃 Failing to say NO to distractions
This is a form of toxic niceness.
Everyone wants to be friendly. Collegial.
But even the most aligned leaders have:
A - Different tactical views day-to-day
B - Random off-strategy ideas
C - A tendency to drift from strategy over time
If your leadership (or YOU) don’t say NO to distractions, even the best-laid plans will crumble.
Plans are worthless unless everyone takes responsibility for sticking to them.
🧠 Complete failure of cognition
Sometimes someone in the chain just has no clue—and no path to figuring it out.
At that point—depending on your role—you have two choices:
Fire them. Or quit.
⸻
💬 Seen any of these firsthand?
Drop your story or advice in the comments 👇
Companies are like human bodies
Companies are like human bodies.
If every organ is working perfectly, except one, the patient will still die if left untreated.
You cannot have a strong product team and a weak marketing team. You cannot have a strong ops team but a weak sales team.
Just like an elite athlete, every organ needs to be operating at peak performance for the body to be able to deliver extraordinary outcomes.
This applies at every level of granularity in your company - from individual people, to functions, to entire squads or departments.
The easiest thing to do is to ignore mediocrity. It’s a form of beta region paradox where the dull pain you’re experiencing is not sufficient to motivate a change - so you end up just tolerating things for too long.
Stop tolerating dull pain.
The truth is the dull pain is -1, whereas your high-performing team should be operating at +10.
For product - “Usage is the highest form of positive feedback”
“Imitation is the highest form of flattery”
We all know that phrase.
There’s an equivalent that can expressed for product.
“Usage is the highest form of positive feedback”
Asking people to validate your ideas is often useful. But until they use it, it’s just lip service.
There are a lot of things
Overheard "Wow, there are a lot of things, aren't there!?"
While working with a designer and a founder to help them think through all the implications of a seemingly simple feature for their product...
Upon hitting about the 10th screen we needed to modify, he exclaimed:
"Wow, there are a lot of things to change, aren't there!?"
I replied:
"Absolutely! This is the difference between product and engineering. Product has to think through all the nuanced and essential details that turn a little checkbox into a delightful feature that delivers on its promise."
Remember:
1. Don't forget to think through all the upstream and downstream effects of your features.
2. When planning your roadmap (or distractions from your roadmap!), never underestimate the cost and complexity of even "simple" features.