Why it's so hard for founders to stop focusing on the product

If you’re like most of the CEO/founders I work with, product is what you know. You’re probably an engineer — a very, very good engineer. You’ve probably worked at some of the most prestigious companies, software-engineering-wise, that exist. You know how to fix problems with software. You know how to add more features. You know how to make your product more reliable, make it work in multiple cloud environments and make it play nicely with standard tools and popular open source projects.

There is obviously nothing wrong with this. You want your product to be great, and I want it to be great, too. But as a result, many founders I work with have trouble addressing aspects of running a business that don’t involve editing YAML files. Things like:

• How do we talk about this product?

• Who should we even be talking to?

• What are the real competitive alternatives to using our product ? (ok, you probably know this one, since it’s a trick question. The answer is usually ‘do nothing’)

• What does the larger ecosystem look like and how does our product fit into it?

We all tend to focus on the things we know how to control. For most of the founders / CEOs I work with, that means focusing on the product. Too often, that means neglecting to think about things like positioning and messaging that can ultimately have a major impact on whether or not anyone ever discovers how amazing the product is.