Laser Focus: Lessons from Building Product
attention is all you need
👋 Hey there, my name is Paulo.
Welcome to my blog where I write about AI, Security, and Product.
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Having gone from 0 to 1 in various industries (media, marketing, B2B SaaS, enterprise AI), I've learned that laser focus is one of a startup or early stage product team's greatest advantages.
When building out a product, being able to define something small and very specific that you are going to execute on is extremely important. It's easy to get carried away and start listing out product requirements that include nice-to-have features with GenAI (talking about scenarios where AI is not absolutely required).
Imagine your market as a floorboard with several loose nails. Each nail represents an unaddressed customer pain point. Your early product should focus on hammering down just one of these nails exceptionally well.
Everything that is not in service of directly contributing to hammering that specific nail in place is a disservice to the product and team you are building.
Why focus?
The purpose of focus is to be able to accomplish an objective.
In the case of building a startup or product, that focus is to serve a market's need.
How do you practice and stay focused?
What focus means is saying ‘no’ to something that you believe with every bone in your body is a phenomenal idea. You wake up thinking about it, but you say ‘no’ to it because you’re focusing on something else. — Jony Ive
Focus means saying no to anything that is not in direct service of your objective.
When building a product, it's tempting to brainstorm future features. However, it's crucial to ruthlessly prioritize and focus on solving today's specific problem. Ideas are cheap. Focused execution matters.
For example, when I launched a product for a paying customer a few years ago, I could have implemented multi-tenant architecture support and SSO from day one. Instead, I chose to provide the customer with a single account and standard login credentials. Ultimately, having SSO wasn't directly going to determine whether my product solved their needs or not. I implemented the bare-minimum login system so I could focus on what truly mattered for that product: searching for insights in audio content.
If a feature doesn't directly advance your core objective, it's just a nice-to-have. Anything that doesn't serve your product's primary function shouldn't be there. Everyone has ideas. Focus on executing what matters now.
To focus is to respect. It is a prerequisite for getting the job done.
We might’ve thought this would be a cool new area of functionality, whereas a lot of our users are saying this core thing is broken— ‘please focus on that before moving to this new shiny thing’ — Vlad Magdalin, CEO, Webflow
Trying to solve other problems before completely solving the core problem, likely means that there is a gap between the understanding of your customers' current state and where they actually want to be (the "gap", in reference to "Gap Selling" by Jim Keenan).
Misaligned priorities can derail product development. A bad UI won't be fixed by adding a flashy GenAI feature. I've made this mistake before, wasting time on new features that didn't address core user needs. These additions didn't improve key metrics or drive product usage. Address core problems before expanding.
Moving forward
Building products is fun. But next time, when you’re considering to build, ask: 'Is this feature essential to achieving our core objective?' If not, it's likely a nice-to-have and should be deprioritized.
Cheers,
Paulo