Hocus, pocus.... focus!

Center. Concentrate. Core. Heart. Nucleus. Rallying point around which a business must congregate in mind and effort in order to succeed. Sports teams and athletes know about focus. They talk about it regularly. They “focus” on it. Why is it that businesses find focus so easy to forget or disregard?

Over the years, PM’ing away, I’ve seen and been a part of organizations which lose focus. They scatter their precious efforts and personnel across a swath of programs looking for that magic bullet, killer app, or market disrupting offering. It can be a little ridiculous to be truthful. It’s as if they take to heart the investor’s mantra…. diversify!

Diversifying your investments can be a good thing. It may reduce risk, particularly if you’re not an artful investor. But if you’re running a business or product, you have to establish business focus. Else your product may wander like a rudderless ship in a storm. The ride may be exciting, but the ending isn’t likely to be pleasant.

Management teams are often afraid that not pursuing all opportunities may mean missing the one big thing. Hence, they try to be all things to all markets. Doing so results in being little to any. Yet, executives frequently like to follow this shotgun approach despite less than noteworthy results yielded time and again.

Warren Buffet tells his investment partners (shareholders) to put big bets on sure things. He has little trouble in putting most of his eggs in a single basket – well understood of course – and reaping big benefits. He’s proven remarkably adept at it.

His big bets are chosen on the basis of value, not popularity. And he keeps a keen eye on limiting risk to his capital. You can’t invest in this manner unless you are focused. As product managers, it is our job to make decisions based upon the value-add of our products, not industry fad or “follow me” decision making. And we should make those decisions in a risk averse manner to the best of our abilities. Thus, we need focus.

PM’s should make every effort to prevent products from wandering due to strict adherence to executive scatter-gunning dictums. This means educating, advocating, persisting, and above all focusing on the interests of the business. Our business. We own it. We are responsible for it. We must direct it.

Otherwise, the alternative for our products is chance, fate, or whatever hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo that can be ginned up. Consequently, the business becomes little more than speculative in which case, close up the shop, head for the casinos, and bet it all on black. At least that may be entertaining.