[revvx]

IME the thing that matters the most is focus, both on the micro and macro level. It's way too easy to get caught on things that won't make an iota of difference in your future. Focus is the first thing that goes out the window as soon a a company reach just a bit of momentum.

I've seen several startups suffering from not being able to decide what they were. Engineering teams fractured because the company wanted half of them working on their bottom line and the other half working in some offshoot product.

Even gigantic companies need that: notice how people criticize Google for creating and killing way too many products, and at the same time praising their minimalist webpage (since 1998), early GMail, etc. Same with Apple when Jobs returned to Apple and streamlined their product line, etc.

[mikekchar]

I agree with this but want to add prioritisation is key. As per Fred Brooks, there is no silver bullet. What he meant by that is that you can't get an order of magnitude more work done using a tool or process because in programming, 25% of your time is spent doing analysis and there is no way to reduce that (To me, that's only if you are executing well!). This generalises to a lot of other pursuits.

Prioritisation is about deciding what not to do. Forget the BS story about putting rocks and sand in a jar, where the secret is to put the big rocks in first so that everything fits. That's not how you need to do prioritisation, because order does not appreciable change the amount of time something takes. The secret is to put only the big rocks in. Period. You go 6 times faster because you have 6 things you could do, but you only do one of them.

Now the real kicker is that the only way to determine which one thing to do is to do analysis on all 6. An HN post is not really a reasonable way to describe this. However, consider a requirements discovery to be like a tree. Requirements are discovered at a particular rate, as you work on something. Discovery of one requirement leads to discovery of new requirements. It's a feedback loop. Pruning the tree as early as you can leads to significant gains later on. So while you can't actually get the 6x development time by avoiding 5/6ths of the requirements, you can pretty easily get 2-3x gains.

BTW, for anyone interested in a more rigorous approach, consider taking something like Littlewood's model of defect discovery and assuming that requirements discovery has a similar curve. Littlewood's model is very naive, but I've found that it still has a lot of value. Again, sorry for cryptic hints here, but I don't have time to write a book on it (which it would certainly take...)

[retreatguru]

The parent comment on focus and this comment on extreme prioritization are so helpful.

Recently we are focused on just one objective and key result - it took years to get that far - we used to have so many. But even now with just one objective we still picked 25 initiatives to attempt to reach our goal. In retrospect it was an obvious fail because we only executed on a few well. We did some initial analysis but considering your comment I think we could have done much more analysis and cut much deeper and picked just a few or even just one. This is radical thinking!

Thank you for getting deeper into this. Do you have any other hints on where I could learn more about the approach you are describing?