Saying no is the key to strategy: Cut distractions, focus on value, and build what matters. The past is a bad guide for the future.

We are living in challenging times. Geopolitics, inflation, pandemics, and climate change have a significant impact on our companies, societies, and governments. Budgets are tight everywhere, and there is no way near enough money to keep doing what we always did.

Time to strategize.

Strategizing in our times doesn’t mean sitting in an armchair and producing bloated prose about values, culture, or vision. Rather, it means defining what you will do with your limited resources, and therefore also what you will not do. There is nothing more important to strategy than focus, and having focus means having the courage to let go of everything that’s not relevant.

Let’s look at a few examples from my experience as Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company.

Feature Requests

When you build a new SaaS product out of nothing, the first product is more of an MVP than a real product. Therefore, your first customers naturally have many feature requests.

Fast-forward a few years. Your first customers are still your customers. Even though your product left the MVP stadium a long time ago, your first customers keep raising feature requests like machine guns. On top, your new customers have new requirements. And finally, the market has evolved, bringing about another set of new requirements.

And here you are, with a huge list of unprioritized feature requests. Some make sense, some don’t. Some are well-formulated, others are difficult to understand.

How can you consolidate an unprioritized feature request list into a roadmap that reflects your product strategy?

It starts with saying no.

There is a saying that those who scream loudest get served first. It’s the same for feature requests and noisy passengers at the airport gate. But those who scream loudest do not necessarily request those features that reflect your product strategy best. So you will have to say no to some feature requests.

It continues with consolidation.

A feature request is not the same as a feature. You will need to consolidate similar feature requests into a feature. In contrast to a feature request, a feature needs to reflect your product strategy. And it needs to cover a business use case — something end-users are notoriously bad at formulating. That’s the moment for your product team. Instead of working on individual feature requests, your product team should synthesize them into features serving a business use case.

And here is the danger: Product managers and developers are mostly engineers. They love complex problems. But the complex problems are not necessarily the ones that reflect your product strategy best. Always remember that you need to make money with your software product, and surprisingly often, it’s small and easy features that make customers happiest.

That’s my moment.

As the tech founder, it’s often my (ungrateful) role to say no to the product and development teams. I say no when they want to work on exciting technical problems instead of simple features that the majority of our customer base is waiting for.

Standardization

When you start a business, everything is non-standard by default. It’s the first time you do each task, and you have no reference points and no experience on how to increase efficiency.

Fast-forward a few years. You will have amassed a customer base and built a team. You can no longer work the way you did in the early days. To scale efficiently, you will need to standardize everything you do.

Let’s start with your product. Your first customers had a heavy influence on your product. That doesn’t necessarily mean that their ideas were super-scalable. Although you still highly esteem your first customers, you will have to tell them that your product has evolved. Some things will not work the same way as they used to five years ago. You can convince most customers about the benefits of such changes with more automation, less interaction with your support team, and fewer bugs.

Let’s continue with your processes. Getting ISO 9001 certified is a start, but it’s not the end. We’ve been ISO 9001 certified for 5 years, but standardization of internal processes is a never-ending endeavor. Onboarding new customers. Preparing training materials. Maintaining the knowledge base. Invoicing. Handling customer tickets. The list is endless.

The key thing about process standardization is to place efficiency above history and individual ways of work. That’s not always easy to communicate to your team, but it’s needed. And it’s yet another (ungrateful) role a founder must fill.

Abstention

In today’s world, there is a tool for everything. Not enough, there are thousands of tools for every problem. And all those tools fight for your attention through digital marketing, social media ads, and super-positive user reviews.

No wonder the problem resolution cycle often starts with “we need this tool to solve that problem.”

Wrong.

Tools are tactical elements. Strategy is about what you do, not about how you do things.

Strategically solving a problem in today’s world starts with figuring out a solution with the tools, the team, and the product you have.