Of all the business platitudes that I’ve seen over the years, the hardest one to actually do is probably “focus means saying no to good ideas”.
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There are variations to this that make it harder. Like: “I don’t have money and I need money so I’m going to do this extremely low leverage thing like charging people for access to my time, or starting this project that has high time maintenance cost.”
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And “I run a small business and I need to make payroll so I’m going to say yes to this product opportunity that has questionable returns and is going to lock up 40% of my engineering resources for the next 8 months and 20% forever (yay maintenance + support costs!)
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Guilty as charged on all counts, but slowly getting better at saying no.
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Also: I think this is one of those platitudes where it’s really easy to say, but then the way it’s expressed is so idiosyncratic and specific to the business situation that you really need to tell stories in order to drive the lesson home.
I’ll … probably write up a blog post.
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for example the above is, for many, hard to distinguish from “just listening to our customers and building what they want”
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+1 on a blog post. Curious to hear what, if anything, helped you move past the difficulty. Something I’ve struggled with too.
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"We should do X but can't afford an FTE for it, but one of our customers wants to do Y, which is adjacent enough to X that maybe we can hire someone for X+Y and hopefully later get rid of Y if X grows bigger."
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