Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing (Part 3)
In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, Steven Covey states that “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” This sounds simple enough, but in my experience it’s far from easy.
Most people can identify what their main thing should be. There are plenty of tools and models for this: crafting a powerful mission statement, creating a north star metric, or writing a detailed vision of your dream life. The real challenge is avoiding all the distractions that pull you away from your main thing.
Over the years, I’ve noticed three common patterns that consistently derail successful businesses:
1. Non-ICP Customers
2. Small Fires
3. Shiny Object Syndrome
In this post we’ll look at why you might be suffering from the Shiny Object Syndrome.
Shiny Object Syndrome
My name is Viktor and I am an addict.
I am addicted to shiny objects.
I’ve worked on dozens of products, and I can tell you with embarrassing certainty that about half of them fell victim to the same pattern: we had something working (users were happy, metrics were solid, growth was steady) but instead of doubling down, we got bored and went chasing something grander.
If you’re a senior leader or business owner, I’d bet you’ve lived this story too. The product is humming along, customers are satisfied, but suddenly someone on your team has an idea that will “blow users’ minds” or open up an entirely new market segment. Before you know it, your best people are working on features nobody asked for while your core offering sits neglected.
What I’ve noticed makes Shiny Object Syndrome so insidious for successful leaders is the brilliant people you hire. You see, brilliant people tend to generate brilliant ideas. And every idea tends to sound reasonable when presented by someone smart with good data. It might even seem like “the thing that takes us to the next level.”™️
The root cause of this syndrome is that most people tend to evaluate ideas in isolation rather than against your core success measure. Not because they don’t know how, but because they don’t have a single most important metric to benchmark features against.
The Feature Factory High
As a recovering addict, I’ve been there many times. I’ve lost count of the number of roadmap reviews I’ve been in where features have been prioritized based on seventeen different metrics. It feels productive. It feels strategic. It feels like you’re staying ahead of the curve.
But just like any good addict would do, you’re just learning how to lie to yourself. Most of those metrics that you think are important, has zero business impact and the shiny new features that you think will take everything to the next level will probably be used by less than 10% of your users.
Meanwhile, your core value proposition (you know… the thing that made customers choose you in the first place?) gets neglected. And so, the foundation starts to crack while you’re busy building new rooms. The opportunity cost is staggering. Those engineering hours spent on the grand new initiative could have been used to make your core users 10x happier.
But the deeper cost is strategic confusion. When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Your team stops knowing what success looks like. Your customers stop understanding what you stand for. You become a company that does many things adequately instead of one thing exceptionally well.
The Recovery Program
The antidote to Shiny Object Syndrome isn’t saying no to every new idea. It’s having one crystal-clear north star metric that every idea must serve!
Not five metrics. Not fluffy quasi-metrics such as “engagement” or “user satisfaction.” One metric that, in itself tells a story about what it is that you and your core users value.
For example, I recently spoke with a founder who does this by the book. The one thing that they prioritized everything against this season is churn. This meant that 95% of everything that got built, either was explicitly requested by one of their core users or a bugfix for something that caused friction for that user. The result was a product that is now on track to do €500k MRR in just over 18 months.
Now, if you paid attention while reading the previous paragraph, you’ll have noted that I used the word season. This is because I believe that different seasons require different north star metrics. In a nutshell it should be derived directly from your current main strategic initiative.
A metric like churn worked great for the founder above, because they were trying to build a foundation for a product that people came back to over and over again. But once that foundation was in place it was time to find a north star metric that matches their next season.
Wrap up
So, if you’re an addict like me and you want to start you’re recovery, you know what to do the next time someone pitches you a Great Idea. Ask them: How will this directly improve our north star metric? If the answer is it doesn’t, just say no (or maybe not now).
Because Steven Covey was right: the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. In product development and in building a business, your main thing isn’t the coolest feature or the most comprehensive analytics suite. It’s the single metric that represents real value for your customers. Everything else is just a shiny object waiting to distract you from what actually matters.
The hardest part about recovery has been admitting that I have a problem in the first place. So here’s my challenge for you: look at your roadmap from the last six months. How much of it moved the needle on the one thing that matters most?
If you’re anything like me, the answer might be uncomfortable. But that discomfort is the first step toward keeping your main thing the main thing.