Focus on the Right Things

May I have your attention, please?

May I have your attention, please?

Will the real Import Projects please stand up?

I repeat, Will the real Important Projects please stand up?

We're gonna have a problem here

- A Slightly modified version from Eminem?

I’ve been at many organizations now where the number of projects for the organization was an order of magnitude too many.? Yes you heard this right, an order of magnitude.? When I started at one of my previous organisations, it had 56 ongoing projects, it should have had 5 at most.? Many organizations have 20 to 30 important ongoing projects and they should only have 2 or 3.?

This is why I say that your organization / team should Focus like a Software Performance Profiler.?

For those of you not familiar with performance profilers, they are software development tools designed to help you analyze the performance of your applications and improve poorly performing sections of code. They provide measurements of how long a routine takes to execute, how often it is called, where it is called from, and how much of total time at some spot is spent executing that routine. It essentially tells you where you have your performance bottlenecks in your application.?

So you’re probably asking yourself at this point, what the heck does this have to do with Focus for the organization.?

The reason why I bring up a performance profiler is that if we try and focus on too many things, we don’t end up focusing on the right things.??

Let me break this down…

I remember several years back, we were having critical performance related issues with our application.? We needed to improve the footprint of our application so that it would consume less compute resources in the cloud.? As part of the performance initiatives put forward by one of the teams, they discovered a way to improve our parsing efficiency by 400%.? Sounds tempting to work on this right! The problem was that this parsing was only used at startup time, mostly for configuration and was rarely called according to the profiler (the application spent less than 1% of its time parsing).? So the team proposed an amazing optimization, but even if we implemented it, it would not have mattered. It would have only improved performance by a negligible amount.??

On the other hand, the profiler showed a transcoding function where the application spent close to 70% of its time.? Even minor optimizations to this function showed huge performance gains;

we were focusing on the right thing.?

That’s why I say you should be focussing like a performance profiler so you focus on the right things.? The things that yield the biggest impact for your organisation.??

With this said, it’s important to note that prioritization is not the same as focus.? Stay tuned for another post on some techniques to use to remain focussed on the right stuff.?

If you liked this post, I invite you to spend one of those Audible credits and listen to the book Empowered by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones.? In particular, part 6 focuses on Product Strategy and has a lot of excellent chapters.? Although this book focuses on Empowered Product teams, it is not just for Product people.? Engineering and design teams can benefit a lot from this book since they’re part of an empowered product team.?