Finding Your Focus Pt. 1: Why It’s Hard

On the surface, the concept of focus is super simple and makes total sense. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone with a little bit of business experience argue that focus isn’t of paramount importance to success. So, why is it so hard to do and why are so many SaaS companies suffering from fuzzy focus? There are a few different reasons that we’ll throw out there that are unique to SaaS companies.

1) It’s cheap and easy to create software

It’s relatively cheap and easy to create marginally impactful software features that some customers start using. In SaaS, unlike more capitally intensive, physical product industries like construction or manufacturing, the variable costs of developing one feature vs. another is relatively low. Costs to create software are mostly fixed (salaries, technology, office space, etc.). So, the cost implications of building a certain feature don’t typically get the same scrutiny as say, a potential initiative for a new bridge, building or 100,000 widgets. In other words, it’s a lot easier to use existing resources in a sub-optimal way than having to make a case to invest in the resources needed for a particular outcome. And, once people start using a certain feature, there’s the overhead of support and improvement requests. The emotional baggage of taking it away and upsetting the smallest population of users can be a strong deterrent. Slowly you’ve waded into functional areas that are distracting you from the most important stuff.

2) Founder or Engineering led product strategy

Early stage founder / co-founder or engineering led product strategy can lead to feature bloat for different reasons.

Founders are typically great at having big, bold, instinctive visions of success…but often not great at staying focused along the way. The same gifts that make them strong entrepreneurs, can sometimes result in going broad before going deep, producing a semi-successful product that doesn’t do anything exceptionally well over time.

Engineering led product strategy often suffers from the same result for different reasons. Inherently, engineers love to build cool and clever software. The problem is, sometimes what’s cool and clever competes with what’s best for the target customer…as simple and boring as it might be. Left unchecked, a series of suboptimal product strategy decisions for the sake of cool and interesting can produce a really shiny product that doesn’t appeal to any one customer segment particularly well.

3) Chasing the competition

It’s really easy, especially in highly competitive SaaS markets, to get caught up in a distracting feature war with competitors. Along the lines of reason #1 above, in SaaS it doesn’t take much to let the Type A personality take over and dedicate valuable, fixed cost resources to creating a “me too” feature for the sake of a few short-term sales wins. Too many of these knee jerk reactions and you’ll find yourself moving sideways, away from “special” towards “just another face in the crowd”.

4) Over sensitivity to customer feedback

One of the great things about SaaS is the ability to capture real-time feedback from users while they’re using your product. In other industries, it can take weeks and months to get valuable customer feedback. But, on the flip side, this constant stream of feedback can be a huge distraction if you’re not careful. As high volumes of feedback come in, it’s tempting to be reactive to requests without applying the proper prioritization. This can be exacerbated with Engineering-led product strategy where there’s an inherently strong desire to bulletproof current features and build cool new features. Those are great traits on their own, but distracting to focus if they are the strongest drivers of prioritization.

5) An underdeveloped Product discipline

This one kinda speaks for the preceding four reasons, and having a clear picture of your target customer / problems in the first place. If you don’t have a strong product management and strategy discipline embedded within the organization…whether you haven’t gotten there yet or it’s weakened over time…then you don’t have the expertise in place to create proper focus and ensure you’re staying true to it. Strong Product leadership is crucial at every stage of the journey for continued success and growth.

So, what’s the path forward?

Isn’t the answer; “just get more focused”? Well, that’s easy to say and do when you have nothing to lose (i.e., you’re just starting out or you’re already a failing business). But, what if you’ve grown to a certain level with just enough un-focus to have something to lose (customers, revenue, etc.) but not enough focus to drive future, sustainable success and growth? You’re basically trapped in mediocrity. In other words, you’ve found yourself at a crossroads; figure out where to go deep and where to cut your losses, or accept a middling (and possibly failing) future. The hard part about the former is that there will be winners and losers inside and outside the company. Going deep in a certain area will delight a good portion of your customer and employee base. On the flip side, divesting in certain areas will likely be painful to an extent, both internally and externally.

Given the human emotion wrapped up in an initiative like this, it’s super important to take a data informed approach to defining your focus. And, once you define it, don’t delay. It will take courage and decisiveness to pull off, and there will likely be customer churn up front. But, its well worth the future upside.

If your company finds itself in this position, moderate but plateaued success with a fuzzy focus issue, then there’s some great news! You have an existing product and customer base that can light the way to finding your longer term focus.

There are 2 main questions that need to be answered; 1) who will you focus on (customer focus), and 2) how will you focus on them (functional focus).

In our next two posts, we’ll provide some proven tactics for examining your existing product and customer base to identify a clear customer and functional focus going forward.

Stay tuned!