Execution as Moat: The Forgotten Art of Product Building
When Ideas Aren't Enough to Create Lasting Impact
I have always loved the Army way of planning for things - at least the one I was trained in - always map out the worst case scenarios and be prepared for it. Because everything other than the worst case scenario is a bonus.
Some might call this pragmatic, some pessimistic, but this is just my default setting.
Came across this on my feed -
Apart from being howlarious (because it is true or at least in terms of the Obama Anger Translator skit), it got me wondering about the products that I am working on. Do they have the solid foundation to become a verb? What does it take for a product to become a verb?
Google, Xerox, are usually what comes to mind when people are thinking about products becoming verbs. And then there are actions, which are product adjacent like “swipe right”. But then there are things like Skype and Dunzo which became verbs but no longer exist.
So - what is really needed for a product to become a verb but not be ephemeral? It doesn’t hurt to be a first mover, but it needs to have such a strong game even in the face of competition it kills and that becomes the moat. Ideas are not moat. Execution and competence is.
And that is where the wheat and the chaff separate themselves. I am stuck in this deep seated anxious feeling at the pit of my stomach that I am not surrounded by people who are living and dying by the mantra of competence and execution.
I can see why competence and execution maybe considered as an coupled notion, the difference I want to highlight is potential and kineticism. Not all talented people get recognised. The future is distributed unevenly. And the realisation that I am in the sparse side of this distribution is making me itch. In a jittery 10 espresso shots and 3 energy drinks (I was going to say Red Bulls and the caught myself) sort of way.
Things need to change and they need to change fast.
Not really surprised with the whole Shopify CEOs take on layoffs and requests for more headcount without measuring AI impact. Why would you keep a player on your team who is not pulling in their weight.
An office job and the people in it are not a family. It is a sports team. And athletes (highly paid or not) are similar to highly paid tech workers. You are as good as your last outing, your last product release. You can get free drinks on the back of it, sure! But the question remains - for how long? And the answer is, not long enough.
Was watching #1 on the call sheet (Apple TV+), and one big takeaway was that when the environment doesn’t enable and empower you, you ought to become big enough and do things for yourself that the environment no longer is a significant variable.
Now I know the leadership BS that gets peddled around is that the ability to rally people around you to a shared vision is a way to highlight and showcase ones’ leadership but I fall back to my competence and execution argument.
The number of times I have allowed for a coin to dictate my next move is beyond measure. There is a process behind arriving at the final question that gets distilled and raised, but the trick is to accept the results of the coin toss. And if one chooses to go against the results of the coin toss then you always know what you wanted to do and one therefore relinquishes the power to wallow. The beauty of living life by the coin is that one often forgets what the opposite call was.
I continue to stay amazed at the behaviours exhibited on both sides of the research aisle. Stakeholders indulging in backseat driving (as in being prescriptive - “think we should do focus groups for this app experience”) and researchers thinking that stakeholders are going to be waiting around till the researchers are done with analysing and synthesising things and putting things in a neat little document for things to be socialised.
If ever there was a story which is the complete opposite of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” then the current situation with research is that story. Not sure if its the research circles I seem to be operating in, but this cogent line of thinking seems to be completely and utterly absent in the manner in which people seem to be operating in.
Sigh!
But obvious is seldom obvious till there is a change in tense.