Product Strategy: The Discipline of Focus
Summary
A defining element of effective product strategy is focus—the ability for an organization to deliberately pick its battles and concentrate on the few problems that can truly move the needle.
Most leaders believe their organizations are reasonably good at focus. In practice, however, many confuse prioritization with focus. Instead of committing to 2–3 critical objectives, they attempt to pursue 20–30 initiatives at once. While each initiative may seem justified, the collective result is diluted impact and wasted effort.
This behavior is understandable. Leaders fear missing opportunities, failing to respond to competitors, losing deals, or ignoring customer requests. As a result, they place many small bets instead of a few decisive ones. But without an intentional reset, this approach prevents meaningful progress.
Prioritization Is Not Focus
Many organizations rely on stakeholder-driven roadmaps that attempt to “fairly” divide engineering capacity across business demands. This creates feature teams focused on output rather than product teams focused on outcomes.
The result is predictable:
- High activity but low impact
- Many features shipped, little innovation
- Teams stretched thin with no clear ownership
As Stephen Bungay notes:
“Generating activity is not a problem… The problem is getting the right things done.”
True focus is about choosing what matters most, not distributing effort evenly.
The Power of Concentrated Effort
A useful analogy comes from performance optimization in software engineering. While many parts of a system could be improved, only a few areas actually matter. Improving those few areas creates real user impact; spreading effort everywhere creates none.
This same principle applies to product strategy. When organizations fail to concentrate attention on the most critical problems:
- Most work has no measurable impact
- Truly important problems never receive enough focus
Focus and Work-in-Progress Limits
Product teams often understand WIP (Work In Progress) limits: limiting active work increases throughput and reduces context switching. What is less appreciated is that this concept becomes even more critical at the organizational level.
When a company runs dozens of “high-priority” initiatives simultaneously:
- Teams are overwhelmed and distracted from customer needs
- Leadership time is consumed by tracking, staffing, and decision-making
- Bottlenecks multiply and progress slows
Organizations consistently deliver better results by focusing on a small number of critical problems at a time.
The Core Principle of Product Strategy
Every strong product strategy begins with disciplined focus:
“Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.” — Richard Rumelt
If leaders are unwilling or unable to make these hard choices, the product strategy will fail before execution even begins.
The next step—once focus is established—is learning how to identify and leverage insights around these few critical problems.