Built to Last
THE BLOG

Prioritising Productivity Over Reactivity

It’s Tuesday.

Your calendar shows your morning is mostly filled with meetings. First things first though. The Task needs to get done before you go into the first meeting of the day.

You just need to check your email quickly. You open the inbox. 132 new emails. Before you have time to reply to any of them you get a notification from Slack. It’s Carl. “Hey, do you have a minute?”.

You really don’t, but you also don’t want to leave Carl hanging. “Sure! What’s up, Carl?”

The rest of the day is an endless series of trying to catch up and The Task never gets done.….

Why forcing a choice is better than making a comparison

There are two ways to build a company.

You can build something incrementally better, such as a slightly better window cleaning company. Or you can try to build something that is different different.

I have no problem with building something incrementally better, such as an IT consulting company.1 It is a great way to go about building a great life for yourself.

In fact, if you are a first-time entrepreneur it’s probably the best way to start! However, if you are aiming for the stars. If you want to build something that lasts generations, possibly impacting the lives of millions.

Then it’s not enough to build something slightly better. Then you have to build something truly different…

Every. Single. Time.

I’ve seen founders of all backgrounds try to reach for the stars. Many fail. And most people who succeed take a long time to do so.

Usually with a lot of failures along the way.

Yet, every so often I come across someone who looks at other people’s success and claims that there is some external factor that made them succeed in their venture.

They claim that something like having a large salary at a big-name company before going out on their own is what gave them the unfair advantage to succeed over regular folk. Whatever regular folk means.

If you ask me, this is pure…

Who are you selling to?

Who is your customer? 🧐

If your answer is an enthusiastic “everyone!” I can tell you two things.

You have high ambitions! 🚀

You’re in for a world of trouble! 😳

The trouble comes from a lack of focus. If you’re trying to serve everyone, you’re implicitly serving no one. You have nothing to make you stand out. This is where the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) comes in. The ICP is one tool you can use to hone in on exactly who would benefit the most from your services. As you might already have realised, this is not only useful to the sales team.

It can also inform product decisions, being used when choosing which features you should build next.

Or help Marketing find the right channel and message.
Or help Customer Success anticipate customer issues.

With me so far? 😇 Good!

So how do you create…

Should you ever rewrite your software from scratch?

As a technical advisor (1), there is one question that I get asked by clients every so often. Is the state of the software so bad that it needs to be rewritten from scratch?

It’s easy to fool oneself into thinking it might be a simple task. Just build a new thing that does what the old one did, right? Wrong. If you Joel Spolsky’s legendary essay Things You Should Never Do (2), you get the sense that you should never do a complete rewrite.

However, if you’ve been working with mobile apps long enough, you will most likely have heard something completely different. “Always Rewrite the App Every 3-5 years”, was a common mantra in the mobile world.

As you might have guessed by now, the answer is…

They Stop You from Figuring out How to Grow

Whenever I am told that a company has under 20% market share of any market, I am skeptical. That is why my 3rd Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights piece is on Why I am Skeptical of Low Market Shares.

The low purported share may be factual based on the company’s generic definition of the market in which it operates. But I don’t take 8% share or 11% share or 17% share as helpful in any strategic sense. A company should have a definition of market share that helps it grow. These low shares don’t help, even though the sentiment is typically that with only 8% share, there are 92 points-of-share available, so growth opportunities are virtually limitless.

For the market in question to be validly defined and the 8% share to be a representative measure, the company needs to