The markets crash one day, surge the next, then crash again. Layoff announcements are becoming sadly common. Social media is a wave of triggering content. It’s a bull market for distractions.
What to do? Consider that there is a single thing that is your greatest impediment. That’s your constraint. Attack it!
This is the advice you’d get from applying the Theory of Constraints (TOC), which was discussed in this great podcast. It’s a theory conceived for optimizing manufacturing operations, but I think it has wide applicability. According to LeanProduction.com:
The Theory of Constraints is a methodology for identifying the most important limiting factor (i.e., constraint) that stands in the way of achieving a goal and then systematically improving that constraint until it is no longer the limiting factor…
[The TOC] hypothesizes that every complex system…consists of multiple linked activities, one of which acts as a constraint upon the entire system (i.e., the constraint activity is the “weakest link in the chain”)
Personally, the TOC resonates a lot. While there are always a lot of things on my to-do list, the TOC implies that there’s one constraint that is “the weakest link” - that’s where I need to focus!
For early stage software startups seeking to achieve a tight product-market-fit, the TOC can help. I would argue the key goal at this stage is having customers that are happy enough to refer their friends & colleagues.1 A customer’s happiness can be modeled as a “complex system” that consists of “multiple linked activities” with one acting as the constraint, such as:
On-boarding
Time-to-value
Scalability
The constraint isn’t always obvious, but searching for it will encourage a productive dialogue of exploration about the tradeoffs inherent in different product development decisions. The TOC is no panacea, but I do think it can help teams and individuals to become better at execution by focusing on the initiatives with the highest ROI.
In my experience, great execution at startups is typically observed in hindsight - but I don’t think it helps an early stage startup to hear “execute like Airbnb!” or “execute like Canva!” The TOC won’t turn a startup into an execution juggernaut like Canva overnight, but it can catalyze the development of individual & organizational muscles that go a long way towards great execution.
Once this is happening, you’ve got tight PMF.