The Power of Focus

Why Doing One Thing Exceptionally Well Beats Doing Many Things Average

In 2011, I co-founded a startup called Arvossa. Our product, Tailrd, was designed to make online fashion shopping easier. We identified two compelling value propositions that seemed like natural complements: personalized shopping using AI to help users find clothes in their size and style across the entire internet, and social shopping through a network where users could get feedback on items and shop for each other more easily.

Both ideas had merit. Both addressed real pain points. And doing both is one of my key mistakes.

Trying to deliver two distinct value propositions simultaneously increased our scope of work exponentially. We burned through resources faster than anticipated and delayed our time to market significantly. Instead of focusing on one value proposition—accepting that this would decrease our total addressable market initially—we should have identified whether one approach had product-market fit before exploring the other.

That experience taught me one of the most crucial lessons in product management: it's better to do one thing exceptionally well than many things average.

Focus Increases Your Chances of Success

The core thesis is straightforward, but the implications run deep. When you have the courage to pick one topic and execute it extremely well, you set your organization up for significantly better success. Here's why focus consistently wins:

Clarity of positioning becomes your competitive advantage. When you try to solve multiple problems, your product's positioning becomes unclear to the market. Users struggle to understand what you do and why they need you. A focused product creates a clear mental model that resonates with your target audience and drives word-of-mouth growth.

Depth over breadth drives real user stickiness. Success isn't just feature delivery—it's solving a user's pain point so effectively that they can't imagine going back to their old way of working. Stickiness is a crucial indicator that you're truly solving their problem. When you spread resources across multiple value propositions, each gets delivered superficially, reducing the likelihood of achieving that deep problem-solution fit.

Speed to market compounds your advantages. Focused teams ship faster, learn faster, and iterate faster. Every additional feature area you pursue adds complexity to your development process, testing requirements, and go-to-market strategy. Focus eliminates this overhead and accelerates your path to market feedback.

The Success Stories: When Focus Transforms Companies

The most compelling evidence for focus comes from companies that struggled broadly, then thrived after narrowing their scope.

Clay transformed from a "programming tool for everyone" into a focused data enrichment platform. This shift in focus helped them scale from zero to $30M+ in annual recurring revenue within just two years. By eliminating the complexity of serving every possible programming use case, they could perfect their core data enrichment capabilities and become indispensable to their target market.

GoPro began with general camera aspirations but achieved 89% market share by focusing exclusively on action cameras. Nick Woodman's 2002 vision was specific: help athletes and outdoor enthusiasts capture their experiences from a first-person perspective. This wasn't just market positioning—it was a fundamental product decision that shaped every feature, design choice, and marketing message.

Slack emerged from the ashes of Tiny Speck's failed online game "Glitch." When Stewart Butterfield's team recognized their game wasn't viable, they made a dramatic pivot. Instead of trying to salvage multiple aspects of their platform, they focused entirely on the internal communication tool they'd built for their distributed development team. That focus ultimately led to a $27.7 billion valuation.

Instagram started as "Burbn," a cluttered app combining check-in features, photo-posting, gaming elements, and social planning. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger analyzed their user behavior data and discovered photo-sharing was the dominant engagement driver. They made the difficult decision to strip away everything else and focus purely on photo-sharing.

The pattern is consistent across these success stories: each company found their core value proposition and ruthlessly eliminated everything that didn't directly serve that mission.

How Spray-and-Pray Manifests in Organizations

Understanding why teams resist focus helps explain how unfocused execution typically manifests. The root cause is fear—fear that the market won't respond to your product, fear that you'll run out of money or opportunity before gaining traction.

This fear drives organizations to hedge their bets by delivering anything that provides value related to their general area rather than aligning behind a single, important value proposition. While this might seem like smart risk management, it ignores the opportunity cost created by diversifying your focus. More features mean slower time to market and disjointed product positioning.

Another common manifestation is not committing to a chosen path. Often, the first release won't perfectly hit the mark, and organizations pivot to another direction before collecting sufficient feedback to assess the situation properly. This creates a cycle of half-executed ideas rather than one well-executed solution.

I've observed this pattern particularly in early-stage companies that don't yet know how their product will resonate with the market. Instead of sticking to their best hypothesis based on user and market research, defining what success means, building and launching with that value proposition, and measuring performance against their success metrics, they continuously add features serving different use cases before even going live with their initial offering.

A Framework for Maintaining Focus

The goal is to mitigate fear of the unknown by creating a system for gathering feedback quickly. This requires focus, and it begins with alignment on a singular core value.

Step 1: Align on Singular Core Value

I recommend the voting method from AJ&Smart's Design Sprint methodology, which includes selecting a decider at the start of the process. The process begins by interviewing industry experts to understand their pain points, with team members taking detailed notes of every challenge mentioned. Once you've gathered comprehensive input from experts, the team reviews all documented pain points and votes on which ones they believe are most critical to address. However, this isn't decision by consensus—the designated decider uses the team's votes as input but has final authority to choose which pain point becomes your core focus. Any process that surfaces the key pain points you're addressing and aligns behind the most impactful one will work, but having a clear decision-maker prevents endless debates and ensures forward momentum.

Step 2: Break Down Into Feature Areas

Once you've identified your core value, break it down into feature areas—critical user flows, authentication, administration, and so on. For each area, identify the requirements using this simple heuristic: if it helps resolve your key pain point, it's included; if it doesn't directly contribute, it's excluded.

Step 3: Define Success Metrics and Targets

Establish metrics that signal whether you've developed an effective solution to your core problem. These will vary based on your problem space and solution, but you need measurable indicators of success before you start building. This creates objective criteria for evaluating your approach rather than relying on subjective assessments.

Step 4: Resist Premature Pivoting

Everything described above takes time to realize, and during that period, there will be temptation to try something different or pivot. While you shouldn't never pivot before getting market feedback—Apple famously redesigned their Apple Store concept based on better execution ideas—do reassess your success metrics and targets to ensure any new path is worth pursuing. For valuable ideas that aren't aligned with your core value, document them and start building a strategy for product extensions or pivots should your original path not deliver results.

Handling Stakeholder Pressure

Managing stakeholder pressure to add features outside your focus area is often the hardest part of maintaining discipline. The reality is that if you're fairly junior in the organization, there's only limited pushback you can provide to senior leaders.

Ultimately, success comes down to having open discussions about priorities. I've found that presenting options and the consequences of each path forward is the most effective approach for gaining alignment. When a new feature request comes in, I call a meeting with relevant stakeholders, present our current roadmap and the reasoning behind it—for example, "this track focuses on reducing time to value because reducing time to value is a leading indicator for retention"—and then facilitate a frank discussion about what value the new feature will deliver. We can then debate which value is more important to pursue.

The key is making the person making the request feel heard while maintaining focus on your core objectives.

Timeline management becomes crucial for features that don't align with current priorities. These requests typically fall into two categories. The easier category includes requests where you can provide a specific timeframe—"we'll address that next cycle" or "in two months when we start our retention-focused sprint." The more challenging category involves requests that must go into a backlog.

I structure my backlogs differently by creating targets for the team to achieve, then prioritizing features until we hit those targets. If a request fits neatly into one of our target areas, it can be prioritized quickly when we begin addressing that focus area. If it doesn't align with any current targets, the best approach is providing an estimate of when we'll address the metrics that the new initiative would impact.

Measuring the Impact of Focus

The impact of maintaining focus can be measured through two primary indicators: improvements in time to market and clear alignment between your target market's understanding of your product and your actual feature set.

For measuring market understanding, you can use AJ&Smart's approach from their workshops. Ask expert panelists—or existing users and prospects in your sales pipeline—to describe what your platform does. Qualitatively measure the variability in their responses and how closely they align with your intended value proposition. Consistent, accurate descriptions indicate that your focus is translating into clear market positioning.

Time to market improvements become evident as you compare focused development cycles to previous scattered approaches. Focused teams consistently deliver faster because they eliminate the overhead of context-switching between different problem spaces, reduce the complexity of testing and integration, and streamline their go-to-market messaging.

Getting Started: First Steps for Scattered Teams

If you recognize that your team's efforts are too scattered, start by taking a step back and revisiting your core value. Ask whether it's still the right core value or whether it needs to evolve based on what you've learned about your market and users.

Once you've confirmed or redefined your core value, realign your roadmap with initiatives that directly deliver on this value proposition. Remove or postpone everything that doesn't contribute to your primary objective. This methodology can be applied at either the organizational level or the team level, depending on your scope of influence.

The key is being honest about what you're trying to achieve and ruthlessly prioritizing efforts that move you toward that goal.

Key Insights: The Focus Advantage

Several crucial insights emerge from examining focus as a competitive strategy:

The psychological challenge of narrowing feels "claustrophobic" but consistently leads to exponential growth. Teams worry that focusing means missing opportunities or limiting their potential market. In reality, the companies that achieve breakthrough growth do so by dominating a focused area first, then expanding from a position of strength.

Focused companies achieve 3-10x better performance metrics than their broad predecessors. Whether measuring revenue growth, user engagement, or market penetration, companies consistently see dramatic improvements after narrowing their focus. The examples of Clay, GoPro, Slack, and Instagram demonstrate this pattern repeatedly.

Specialization enables premium pricing, category leadership, and sustainable competitive advantages. When you solve a specific problem exceptionally well, customers will pay more for your solution and recommend it to others facing the same challenge. Generalist solutions compete primarily on price; specialist solutions compete on value delivered.

The success pattern is consistent: struggle broadly → focus narrowly → dominate niche → expand from strength. This isn't about permanently limiting your ambitions—it's about sequencing your growth strategically. Build an unassailable position in one area before expanding to adjacent opportunities.

Focus isn't just a product strategy—it's a competitive advantage that compounds over time. The courage to say no to good opportunities in service of great ones separates successful products from those that remain perpetually promising but never breakthrough. In a world full of distractions and feature requests, the discipline to do one thing exceptionally well might be your most valuable capability.