Impact over Activity

Being busy is not the same as being effective.

It’s easy to fill a calendar, answer every Slack, and ship feature after feature — yet somehow never move the needle. Activity feels productive. Impact actually is.

The hardest part isn’t finding opportunities. It’s ignoring them. Every feature request, every market trend, every stakeholder idea — they all sound reasonable. And that’s exactly the problem. A product that tries to be everything becomes nothing. Strategy isn’t what you choose to do. It’s what you choose not to do.

What This Means in Practice

• Measure outcomes, not outputs
• Say no to meetings that don’t need you
• Treat every “yes” as a “no” to something else
• Ask “will this move the metric?” before saying yes
• Have a clear, stated reason for what you won’t build
• Protect your time for high-impact work
• Revisit priorities regularly — but don’t change them constantly

Common Traps

• Filling your calendar to feel productive
• Measuring success by features shipped, not problems solved
• Chasing every new opportunity because it “could be big”
• Adding “just one more thing” to every release
• Letting stakeholder volume determine priority
• Doing work that feels urgent but isn’t important

Remember

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” — Peter Drucker

A focused product beats a feature factory. Every time.