There is always waste

If I could give my 20-year-old self a lesson, it would be “don’t stop, there’s always waste.”

We know the next steps to grow our products, the constraint limiting our growth, and how to fix it.

But we don’t.

Instead, we take on unrelated tasks as requirements. We tell ourselves it’s not worth doing x until we have a, b, c.

We shouldn’t send the email until the homepage is touched up.

We shouldn’t publish that post until our email capture is perfect.

We shouldn’t launch the new feature until the signup screen has been redesigned.

At the core of this behavior is fear. It’s resource protection. We imagine a flood of interest in our products without results.

We try to figure out why someone wouldn’t convert and solve those problems. We aim for 100% efficiency and won’t stop until there’s zero wasted effort.

But we all know 100% efficiency is a myth.

There’s always room for improvement and points of slippage, where we’re losing customers. But we can’t pause all activity until it’s resolved.

We have to act with what we have.

I’m rarely jealous of sales professionals. But it must be nice knowing there’s nothing they can do to improve the product.

They might know the sign-up flow is janky, the product has bugs, and the website language isn’t perfect, but they can’t do anything about it. They need to sell, make calls, and send emails.

And you know what? They still manage to close. They know they’ll lose some people. It’s part of the job.

Part of what allows them to do this consistently is an inherent sense of abundance. They can always get another lead or warm up an old contact. They know that no one bats 1.000%.

They know there’s always effort that doesn’t pay off.

They view the process as a journey, wading through prospects that won’t buy to find the right ones. The rejections aren’t a loss, they lead to the right prospects.

To coders, this is like refactors. Rewriting code doesn’t mean wasted effort. It means the model was wrong. You had to get it wrong before getting it right.

Breaking the frame

This all sounds great, but I know you’re thinking about the one thing that should be done but isn’t because there’s another thing that should be done first.

How do you break out of this mindset?

Question the premise

Is this other task necessary? Does it solve a big, real problem?

Many tasks between us and the real work are based on assumptions.

Interrogate these assumptions, and you’ll find that the problem or solution isn’t as important as you think.

If you work on a team, having a devil’s advocate can be useful. With an alternate point of view, you can imagine a world where you don’t have to solve every problem.

Avoid the secondary but reasonable

We can trick ourselves into avoiding the one thing we should be doing. Many alternative tasks are reasonable.

Their reasonableness makes them dangerous.

Buffet’s 5/25 rule is an interesting antidote to this folly. Write down 25 goals, take the top 5, and cross out the remaining 20. Not only focus on the top 5, but actively avoid the other 20.

The other 20 are most likely to distract you because they are good goals. It’s not hard to avoid bad goals. It’s hard to avoid the reasonable ones.

The same can happen with your product roadmap. There are often dozens of features to add, but you typically know the handful that truly matter to the end user. Focus on those and actively avoid the ones that will take up your time.

Measure what works, then double down

If you gain traction, the waste problem changes. You start getting customer requests from a larger audience. The advice of “build what your customers want” becomes less clear.

Build everything they want? There’s a lot of bad feedback.

One way to clarify user needs is to start measuring feature impact. Gather information about why they’re signing up, track feature usage, and quantify support load.

Focus on the features that drive traction in your app. A few loud users don’t represent the wider user base.

How much progress could you make by putting 10x the effort into the thing that’s already working instead of getting distracted?

Focusing on what matters will take you further than perfection elsewhere.

That’s it. Thanks for reading.

Hunter