Focus!

Don't spread your company thin. Instead, concentrate on the big bets.

When I joined Gatsby, I found a situation not uncommon in startups. There were a lot of different projects competing for not quite enough resources. All of the projects were interesting, but none were close to the finish line. The company was trying to do too much. There was a promising GUI builder proof-of-concept called Blocks, but it had stalled after one of the developers left. Other projects improving monitoring or developer productivity.  

We were spread too thin. Too many projects, not enough momentum.

Blocks was interesting and painted a picture of a future where Gatsby could provide a much broader solution than it did today as a front-end framework for developers. It pained me that we weren’t able to move forward on it. It was part of the founders overall vision, but it was still a long way away.

We had tens of thousands of Gatsby users out there, and their situation was more pressing. They loved Gatsby, but it was failing them. Our nascent cloud service offered faster build times, but it wasn’t scaling. The larger the site, the longer Gatsby took to build. And the more users we had, the more bugs we found. We had a growing backlog of high-priority bugs. And when customers were finally ready to deploy their Gatsby site, they had to find their own hosting plan on Amazon, Netlify or elsewhere.

Given our current situation, Blocks and the other engineering projects were beyond our current horizon. If we didn’t improve the quality and performance of our core product, nothing else mattered. You couldn’t paper over the current problems with a better UX.

 It was clear we couldn’t continue with all of these competing initiatives. I pulled together the founders and the executives and we focused on just three things that we knew mattered most to our customers:

• Improve Gatsby reliability 

• Increase Gatsby performance by 10x

• Relaunch Gatsby Cloud with a full-fledged hosting service

Many of the other projects that were under way were speculative. Maybe they would add value down the road, but if Gatsby itself didn’t improve, we might not live to see the day. 

So we shut down all of these projects and re-allocated resources to our top priorities. We explained in an all hands-meeting the need to focus. We might revisit some of these projects later on, but for now, it was all about reliability, performance and hosting. 

While a few people were disappointed that their pet project wasn’t going to continue, most people appreciated the renewed focus. It enabled people to see more clearly how their work impacted the company. And within just a few weeks, we could see progress. Bugs were fixed faster, there were regular performance improvements and within about 90 days we re-launched our cloud service with hosting, delivering a more complete solution. 

Focus Builds Momentum

Employees could see the benefits of focus and that gave us internal momentum. While people were skeptical of the initial goal of getting a 10x performance improvement, we managed to get there one step at a time. As customers tackled steadily larger sites with Gatsby, the pressure to increase performance continued.  Over time, we achieved more than 100x performance gains by re-architecting how Gatsby worked, streamlining it for the real world. 

None of us could have predicted we would be able to do that, but focus gave us steady progress and that gave us the encouragement to continue to squeeze out more gains. (Kudos to co-founder Kyle and engineers Abhi and Ward who led many of those improvements.) 

Over time that goal of 10x-ing something became a rally cry within the company.  Focusing talented resources on hard problems, sometimes led to significant breakthroughs. 

It’s not the first time a company has benefited from narrowing their focus. Most startup companies are wildly ambitious. So lots of projects get green-lighted. It’s not uncommon for people to feel stretched. Sometimes that’s a good thing. But it’s generally not sustainable over long periods of time. Better to focus on fewer things, done well.

You can sometimes see the symptoms of a lack of focus when employees complain of shifting priorities or a lack of coordination across teams. That might be a hint that you’re doing too much. 

Back to Basics

Every now and then, it’s good to take a step back and consider whether your company is doing too much. Are there lots of marketing projects, but pipeline has stayed flat? Engineering is shipping new features, but the competitive win rate hasn’t improved? Lots of new hires in sales, but no new deals? Sometimes as you continue to hire more people, you get more and more specialists doing interesting work that might be two or three steps removed from what matters most.

That’s when it’s time to get back to basics and focus on the essentials. What will drive the most growth? What will most improve efficiency? What will make you more competitive? Hopefully the answer isn’t “all the things.”

It’s better to be all-in on two or three big bets than spread yourself thin across too many initiatives, some of which may only have a tangential relationship to the goals at hand. Saying “no” (or at least “not now”) to lower impact projects is essential if you’re going to make the most of the resources you have. Focus on the big bets and make sure they have adequate staffing to succeed. Focus improves accountability because when there are only a couple of top priority items, there’s no distraction and there’s no wiggle room. You either got it done or you didn’t. If you can organize teams and reporting around the big objectives, so much the better.

Even if you have trouble ranking things by priority, you can improve execution by serializing some items. What you don’t tackle this quarter can be your focus next quarter. More singular focus can make the difference between doing many things poorly and a few things well. 

If you’re still wondering about the photo at the top, it’s an obscure Dutch prog rock band from the ‘70s called Focus that had a hit with the song Hocus Pocus.