sbensu: Lieutenants are the limiting reagent
The statement "this company lacks focus" confuses me. Don't companies hire more people in order to do more things? Shouldn’t the number of things the company can "focus" on expand as you hire?
Clearly that is the case: Google has 100 products more than any new startup could have. But if anything, 100 products seems too few; after all, they have 200k employees! For reference, Instagram launched with less than 13 people. If Google were as efficient as Instagram was, they "should have" 150x more products.
Most people don’t realize it is their job to unblock themselves and that they don’t need permission to do it. You need people who act even when they hit “extraordinary blockers”.
Imagine the company wants to launch the product in India. The team soon discovers that India requires user data to be stored in Indian servers. But today all data is stored in the US. Suddenly, launching India is equivalent to migrating the infrastructure to be multi-region.
Sadly, most projects have an "extraordinary" blocker that transcend job descriptions. And few people see it as their job to transcend their job description.
