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Focus – Essential ingredient for product success

As we enter 2020 and a new decade, I wanted to touch upon an essential ingredient for startup entrepreneurs and product managers – Focus.

In India, we all know about the great archer Arjuna. When asked by his guru Drona on what he sees during an archery session, he replies that he just sees the left eye of the bird – precisely his target. Arjuna had a laser focus on his target.  He was one of the greatest archers.

As a startup entrepreneur or a product manager – it’s very important to really have a clear focus on one product goal or idea, rather than spreading thin. I have seen many people struggle when they pursue parallel initiatives and pivot too much. While it’s fine to deviate a bit on the means to the end, without a focus on the goal and giving it the necessary time to accomplish, it’s going to be hard to succeed.

David Frey, a marketing thought leader lays out the below for FOCUS, which is a great one

F – follow

O – one

C – course

U – until

S – successful

Once you have identified the market potential for an idea, its important you focus your attention on achieving this precisely and not distribute your energy.

While you can get a lot of tips to keep the focus at a micro level, here are some thoughts related to building products or for a product company relating to focus.

Focus brings out the purpose of the company or the direction that they have to embark on. Often in building products – priority is the most critical decision point – where to prioritize. Focus drives priorities.

I did research on the word focus with some of the top companies and here are the results

  • Microsoft is focused squarely on turning every company into a tech company: Satya Nadella
  • I’m excited about Alphabet’s long term focus on tackling big challenges through technology: Sunder Pichai
  • Quality rooms at a low price: OYO Founder
  • We have been payments champion and will continue to focus on payments: paytm founder
  •  A privacy-focused vision for social networking: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder
  • Focus more on solving a specific problem that’s close to you. Paul Graham used to tell us, “Make something 100 people love, not something a million people kind of like.” So we did not go into this to start a business. We did not go into this to figure out travel distribution or this or that. We only tried to get into this to try and make something really great that we would want ourselves and for our friends. – Brian Chesky, Airbnb founder

So the message is simple :

Focus on one idea or use case, have the team align to the focus, give it the best shot & time and make the market love it

Wishing you a great new year and decade ahead!

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The curse of the horizontal solution or what to do when you think you have the product that can solve Global Warming?

There are many solutions that are targeted at a niche, that solve a specific problem. Selling these is relatively easy. You know the target, you know the problem. The challenge comes with the horizontal solutions, or ones that apply to wide variety of industries and business problems. There is tremendous potential opportunity there and yet they are devilishly difficult to sell for a small company. The problem is focus.

When you have a solution that you can sell to ten different types of companies, where do you start? If you have deep pockets, perhaps you go after every manner of opportunity, but if you are a small company, you neither have the resources nor the bandwidth to tackle all opportunities. So what does one do?

This is an issue I have dealt with in the past working with my clients, but it came to top of mind after a recent conversation with a company that has a horizontal solution. I have thought about this subject over many years and have a viewpoint on this. I thought I’d share my current thinking on this subject as it may be useful to some of you.

Think small – The solution has wide application but it helps to narrow the scope when you are starting. Figure out a specific business problem, in a specific industry, in a specific geography to address. Focus helps you with both your targeting as well as your messaging. In addition, it is an effective use of limited resources.

More cheetah, less monkey – Cheetahs need focus to survive. When you see them on a hunt, you can really see they are focused. Monkeys on the other hand, forage for food and are easily distracted. The tendency in startups is to go after everything – mostly through a combination of optimism and desperation. In addition, there are too many distractions when you are getting started. Be aware of that. Focus only on what is important.

Learn from Agile – The Agile software development methodology has a lesson for entrepreneurs. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Agile advocates breaking a large  project into smaller, bite-sized chunks. These chunks, called Sprints, deliver specific functionality in a very short period of time. The idea is to incrementally build the software solution with all stakeholders constantly aware of the value addition. This is in contrast to the monolithic model of software development where big projects were delivered after months of work and considerable expense, often to users who clearly did not want what they got. You should think of your go-to-market strategy as a series of Sprints. Identify a business problem/target audience, develop a tactical plan and test it out. If after putting in effort, it is not working, change. You should always be looking to fine-tune your go-to-market, but at the same time have the discipline to stick to a plan, for a period of time, before starting on something else.

Leverage your successes – I am a big believer in this and have harped about it at length. If you have a success with a client, see if you can approach similar companies with a similar proposition. Do it consciously, with a plan and a value proposition. Even though this may be obvious, many companies, especially ones with a broadly applicable solution, seem to ignore this.

After running my own consulting outfit for a couple of years, I have a newfound respect for entrepreneurs. Starting and running a company is not for the faint-hearted. It is very difficult to make money, contrary to the feeling one develops working in the corporate world, where big paychecks just happen if you are good. With all the stress and uncertainty of working in a startup, having some structure and discipline around sales is critical. Whether you like my approach or not, please do consciously think about what will make you more effective with limited resources. It will be well-worth the effort.

Agree. Disagree. Or have another viewpoint. Would love to hear your thoughts.