EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 48Focus

The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.

—Jim Barksdale

To continue with our series on product strategy, in this chapter I focus on, well, focus. The importance of truly picking your battles as an organization.

And I don't just mean deciding what to work on and not work on, but picking the few things that can truly make an impact.

This is another one of those topics, like whether a company cares about their customers. In pretty much every company I meet, the leaders already believe they are reasonably good at focus.

But, often, the company's leaders need a reality check on this topic.

The sheer number of things they believe are critically important, and that need to happen this quarter, or this year, are often an order of magnitude too many. I mean that literally. Instead of 2–3 truly important things, they have at least 20–30.

Now, in fairness, I understand why the key leaders believe they are reasonably good at focus.

They have already had countless meetings where they agreed to so many things they really want to do this year, yet won't be able to. So from their perspective, they think they already know what it means to say no and sacrifice.

In large part, this is a reflection of leaders feeling the need to place a lot of bets—versus the best or most impactful bets—the fear of missing out, and the need to respond to every competitor, every lost deal, every customer request. These are all understandable reactions.

But in this case, they need ...