Getting a team to relentlessly focus on the highest impact and highest importance work should be the number one priority of any leader.
However, it sounds a lot easier than it actually is.
Product roadmaps tend to be large and ever-growing, and technical challenges pop up as we scale. Org structures take time to adapt, which in turn creates inefficiencies and bottlenecks.
With so much work to choose from, the tendency will be to work on the most urgent and tactical tasks at hand, instead of the most strategic ones.
Those who shout the loudest will win the argument.
But if we are not deliberate in the work we choose to do, how can we be successful?
Allocate scarce resources towards more productive use. Companies that are really successful internalize and operationalize this lesson.
David Collison from Stripe, Invest Like the Best podcast
So how do we get our teams to focus on what really matters?
First, focus on finding out what matters
Determining what is the highest impact and highest priority work takes a huge amount of effort. As a starting point, it’s important to recognize that there are different types of work items.
Some are feature requests that might have an explicit commercial value attached to them. Some are product bets that we want to try. Others relate to operational excellence and could be critical to enable scaling.
But they all should have one thing in common: what the expected outcome is. We need to know if we should allocate resources to do them, and how to measure success.
Organizations focus on different types of work at different times. In order to be deliberate about that choice, we need to know what we gain by doing certain work.
If we don’t know what we stand to gain from a piece of work, we will most certainly be focusing on the wrong thing.
Avoid getting into the business of manufacturing trombone oil. You may become the greatest trombone oil manufacturer in the world, but in the end, the world only consumes a few quartz of trombone oil a year.
Robert Iger in The Ride of a Lifetime
With the work items correctly categorized and with explicit success criteria attached to them, we can move on to the next important step: the prioritization algorithm.
Secondly, understand your prioritization algorithm
How do we compare an initiative around operational excellence with a new product bet or a feature with an explicit commercial value?
We need to know what our priorities are at a given moment. That is why we need a clear prioritization algorithm, that at a given time and a given focus, allows us to choose what to work on next.
But having a prioritization algorithm, by itself, isn’t enough. You need to communicate effectively.
You can do a lot for the morale of the people around you just by taking the guesswork out of their day-to-day life.
Robert Iger in The Ride of a Lifetime
Every team member should know how it works, so they can make decisions without you being around. That is how we foster a leader-leader culture.
Understand what you are optimizing for, and make sure everyone around you knows what that priority is.
Finally, cut out the noise aggressively
Now that you have categorized your initiatives, know their expected outcomes, and understand how to prioritize them, it’s time to focus.
At that moment, if something unexpected comes in, you can easily compare it with your initiatives and understand if you should do it or not.
With these tools, you will enable your team to make good decisions when something unexpected happens.
They will be able to reject work that has not been prioritized, or that hasn’t clear expected outcomes.
At every point, they will be able to ask themselves: should I stop what I am doing and do this instead? If so, why? Or why not?
Most importantly, it will allow you to create a culture of discipline, critical thinking, and focus. Slowly, your roadmap will become a lot clearer, focused, and with work that really moves the needle in the right direction.
A culture of focus
We all want to allocate time, energy, and resources to the projects of the highest importance. To do that, you need to empower your team to make good decisions when faced with choices.
Amazon are the tech company that are closest to being pure capital allocators in the way they work. They have a very strict and intellectually rigorous framework for finding new bets and allowing people to try out new things, and for the things that are working, pour gas on. The ones that don’t work are shut down.
David Collison from Stripe, Invest Like the Best podcast
In order to be successful, I believe we need an outcome-driven culture. A culture where people ask why. Where we don’t blindly accept work without understanding its impact. A culture that enables us to make the best possible decision about what to work on.
A culture of focus.
