The Bottleneck Framework
One day this year I walked into a conference room to meet with Highfive’s CEO, Shan Sinha. I was distressed. For the previous 3 weeks I had grown my marketing program 100%. But that week it looked like those 100% figures would not only fall but actually dip into the negatives. That wasn’t the problem though. The real issue was that I had no idea what was wrong.
I met with Shan for an hour that day and by the end of the meeting I knew exactly what the solution to my problem was. In 60 minutes Shan picked apart the problem I had been struggling with for 3 days. And he did it with a simple question that has become a framework for how I look at most areas of my life now.
During the first two minutes of the meeting I confessed that growth was slowing and that I didn’t have a clue what to do about it. I told him that I was stuck.
Shan looked at me and said, “I don’t get it.” He asked, “What’s the bottleneck?”
I stammered over a some incoherent words and thought about it for a couple seconds. “Well, first there’s the leads. We need more leads at the top of the funnel. But, it’s not just that. There’s the emails as well. And then there’s the…” I went on for a couple minutes explaining all the thoughts that had swirled around my head for the last 3 days. I can’t imagine listening to that chaos.
Shan cut me off. “What’s the bottleneck, MT?”
I stumbled over a few more sentences before he got up and walked to the whiteboard. Over the course of the next hour we mapped out the entire funnel of my marketing program. We started with the goal of the program that quarter and worked backwards to understand how many opportunities were needed to hit the goal. From that number we determined how many leads we needed. And so on. This is classic funnel marketing. But there was something more to it.
When I walked in the conference room that day I didn’t know what problem to solve. This is common in business and in life. Humans are great problem solvers. We’re resilient and so we solve the problem at hand because for 10,000 years our lives depended on it. It’s in our DNA. But we’re not good problem outliners. In other words, we can almost always solve a problem. But we don’t always know which problem to solve. The world is a complex place and there are many problems. Often times, the question is which one to solve.
That day I had a problem problem. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to optimize a given part of the funnel. I’m good at that. It was that I didn’t know what part of the funnel to focus my time on. And so I was focusing on all of them. I was doing a lot of things. And I was doing them all very poorly. I needed to focus.
This concept goes beyond just business. It’s a framework that can be used in every area of life. Now, when I’m unhappy I know how to break down the problem and then solve it. I feel overworked and I’m burning out. Easy, I need to work less and go out more. This is a hyper rational way of looking at life, but it’s helping me grow professionally and personally.
The Bottleneck framework is nothing revolutionary, but it is undeniably powerful. It is a better way to prioritize. It is a way to improve efficiency. It is a way to focus. But most importantly it’s a way to keep moving forward. The worst thing you can do is nothing at all, and this framework is defense against paralysis.
Thank you, Shan.