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Businesses grow because people build them. For me, that’s been true across a bakery group, a publisher, and eighteen years in banking. But the same stretch kept showing the opposite too, mergers, acquisitions, market shifts that moved size faster than any team could build it. Building is not the whole story, and knowing the difference…
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A bank’s quiet decision to remove a feature sent me back to a general question: how do you decide when to cut something you’ve already built? The usual checklist, sunk cost, adoption, maintenance, misses the one cost that’s hard to undo. The signal.
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Most markets have one leader and many followers, and the leader gets to define what everyone competes on. Match them point for point and you lose slowly. The durable alternative is narrower than most strategy advice admits, and it usually means choosing to stay smaller on purpose.
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Asked once for the achievement I’m proudest of, I didn’t name a product or a title. I named the people. The method behind it was far less noble than that answer made it sound.
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Most marketing decisions that disappoint are clarity failures, not execution failures. They happen upstream, before the brief was written, before the budget was approved. Three questions, asked in order, every time, that’s where the clarity either gets built or gets lost.
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Forty-five years. A near-collapse. A comeback that pulled in a new generation that had never owned a cassette tape. Metallica survived by refusing to stop. Consistency had nothing to do with it. There’s a lesson in that about commitment. A real one. And about one cassette tape made by someone who wouldn’t lend me the…
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I am a customer of most of my competitors. I use their products, follow their updates, read every single one of their newsletters. It wasn’t always like that. There was a time when I relied on reports and secondhand analysis like everyone else.
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Most customer research captures what people intend to do. Most purchase decisions are made by someone in a completely different state of mind. Preference is just one layer. To get closer to the real decision, the one made under pressure, in a hurry, with incomplete information, you need to peel a little further.
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The email arrives on a Tuesday morning. A competitor has just announced a new feature. Someone forwards it to the group chat. Within the hour, someone asks: “are we building this?” And just like that, someone else’s product decision becomes yours.
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Some of the information you’re looking for doesn’t exist yet. Customers can describe their current frustrations accurately. They struggle to evaluate something they’ve never seen. The last stretch of market understanding is always on the other side of shipping something.
