Welcome back to Forests Over Trees, your weekly tech strategy newsletter. It’s time to zoom-out, connect dots, and (try to) predict the future.
This week I’m reposting something I wrote for a different newsletter — Improving the Startup Ecosystem. Founders, check them out!
Focus is a Superpower
I’m a big fan of the f-word.
No! Not that f-word…
I’m talking about the more pesky, more controversial, more difficult one. Focus.
This isn’t just a tech problem
Before starting at Amazon, I spent 7 years in consulting.
And even though the symptoms were different, the disease most of my clients suffered from was a lack of focus.
I’d hear them say, “X isn’t working, so we’re doing these 5 things to try to fix X.”
And at first glance, it all made sense. What the hell did they need us for!?
But then they’d mention they also had Y and Z problems, with another 10 ideas for how to fix those. And the real issue, they’d tell me confidently, is that they “just don’t have time to get all these fixes done!”
Sound familiar?
Lack of Focus for Airbnb
Here’s an example from the tech world.
In 2019, Airbnb was cooking with gas. They had a 2nd year of profitability and crossed 500M stays since founding. But they wanted more.
So… they launched a shiny new team to attack air travel. They created Airbnb Studios to try to mimic Red Bull’s viral content growth. They bought HotelTonight to try to steal more share from the hotel industry.
Notice anything in common with those ideas?
I don’t either!
And the lack of focus backfired on them. The core experience (aka the main business) suffered, negative reviews spiked, and then COVID hit.
Ouch.
In May 2020, they were forced to do a massive layoff. Here’s an excerpt from CEO Brian Chesky’s announcement:
While we know Airbnb’s business will fully recover, the changes it will undergo are not temporary or short-lived. Because of this, we need to make more fundamental changes to Airbnb by reducing the size of our workforce around a more focused business strategy.
Out of our 7,500 Airbnb employees, nearly 1,900 teammates will have to leave Airbnb, comprising around 25% of our company. Since we cannot afford to do everything that we used to, these cuts had to be mapped to a more focused business.
Those are the stakes. That’s the risk if you don’t stay focused.
So how do we do it?
Focus 101
Start with reminding yourself why you’re here. What’s the north star? What’s the reason your company (or idea, or whatever) has to exist?
It should be one thing. And it can take the form of:
This is [our thing]. We [do something] for [our customers], because [one emphatic reason that matters!].
That’s the easy part. Then it gets harder.
You have to take an inventory of all your projects, current and future. And for each of them, be ruthless about categorizing them as aligned, or not aligned, with that north star.
Here’s a visual:
Then, when you know what’s in (green) and what’s out (red), you can get into prioritization.
Take each “in” project and give it an impact score and an effort score. Impact could be for your business, for your customers, etc. Effort could be dev weeks, sleepless nights, whatever’s appropriate for your team. Then, chart it.
If it’s high impact and high-effort, plan it! If it’s high impact and low-effort, start it! If it’s low impact and low-effort, skip it.
And if it’s low impact and high-effort… curse it, scowl at it, and leave it behind.
This is a version of the BCG growth share matrix. Trust me, this stuff works.
But… blah blah consultant-babble! Give us more tech examples!
Aye-aye, captain.
Designing for Focus
Remember when Adobe tried to buy Figma a few years ago?
Adobe had it all… a globally recognized brand, tens of thousands of employees, and industry leading tools, etc. So why did they want Figma?
Sure, Figma’s revenue had doubled that year, and gross margins were an eye-popping ~90%...
But I think the core driver of those metrics – and the reason Adobe couldn’t look away – was because of Figma’s focus.
With their deep pockets and smart, design-conscious teams, Adobe could do pretty much anything. So they did pretty much everything. As of today, they have 56 products compared to Figma’s TWO products.
Figma, on the other hand, was among the first to launch “multiplayer” design tools, and compared to Adobe, they moved at lightspeed. They focused their energy on making their two products as customer-centric and powerful as possible.
Limitless Focus
Another great example of focus in action comes from the recent Limitless device.
It’s an AI-powered gadget that does one thing and one thing only – it records and summarizes calls. Other AI gadgets (cough, Humane!) flopped trying to do too much.
As I wrote about when the Limitless pendant first came out, producing a hardware device customers love, in a field moving as quickly as AI, is no small feat:
The best hardware companies in the world (think Apple, Samsung) put out new hardware once a year-ish, and their lead time to design those is 3+ years. Think about how long that is… three years ago, nobody had even heard of ChatGPT!
So yeah. Building an AI device is like landing a plane on top of a racecar. Sounds cool, but also impossible. Focus is what makes it work.
Wrapping Up
Speaking of landing planes… let me land this one here, with the perfect quote:
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
That’s from Steve Jobs. You might have heard of him.
As he points out – the hard part is saying no to good, tempting ideas.
But you can do it! Stay focused people!