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You dont need to pay such a big penalty for innovationPhoto by Jack Carter onUnsplashYour teammate rolls across the floor to yourdesk.They patiently wait for you to finish typing. No matter, youre already distracted. You dont work well when you can feel eyes uponyou.You turn to addressthem.A spiel begins: I was working through the requirements for microservice [X]you know, the one that handles API [Y], for feature [Z]. Well, I was in there, and I realized, why dont we just [A], because if we did that, then [B], [C], and if were lucky,[D]Youre not fully following along. Your brain is still trying to hold onto those last few thoughts you had, before you lose them completely and have to retrace your steps to figure out what you were thinking and why andhow. So yeah, that doesnt necessarily take into account [L] or [M], but if we[N]Youre barely holdingon [R] [S][T]Oh never mind. You might as well focus on this new thing. You apologize, say you missed a couple details and the story begins all overagain.And meanwhile, youve lost any stringified attachments to where you were in your brainspace.But then you get into it. Yeah! [A] through [T], that makes a lot of sense, plus [U], [V], and [W]. Lets see what Morgan thinks aboutthis(So much for anyone making progress today! But who doesnt love a shiny newthing?)/sadpandaThat idea might not have even been worth thinking about in the first placeor who knows, maybe its the next big thing thats going to push your startup into unicorntopia.All that you know at this point is it sounded like a decent idea, and it didnt hurt to put a little thought into. (Or didit?)And there it isthe moment that you realized your productivity was killed and your focus was derailed, all for an idea that probably wont matter in two weeks (if not two minutes). But youll do it again tomorrow, because thats what product teams do. We entertain ideas. We explore possibilities. We chase potential.And who can blameus?Well thats what were here to talk about. Take aseat!Good ideas are a dime a dozen. Theyre a lot like [checks metaphor list] potato chips. Everyone loves them, theyre addictively easy to consume, and before you know it, youve eaten the entire bag and feel slightly sick. But unlike potato chips, the consequences of gorging on good ideas last much longer than a bad case of indigestion.This is the idea taxthe hidden cost thats slowly bankrupting your product execution.The seductive dance ofideationWere all guilty of it. That rush of dopamine when we think weve cracked the code on the next big thing. That surge of excitement when we imagine the possibilities.It just feels so good to have goodideas.And thats exactly theproblem.While bad ideas are easy to shoot down (sorry Phil, were not adding a blockchain to our journaling app for cats), good ideas are insidious.They slip past our defenses with a wink and a smile (so flattering!).They sound reasonable.They feel achievable.They come with compelling user stories, undeniable pain points, intriguing solutions, and impressive slides about TAM, CAC, MRR, LTV, POC, MVP, PMF, and (dare I say it)IPO.But what everyone in the room fails to recognize or acknowledge is that every good idea you entertain comes with a tax bill. A very real drain on your very humanteam.The true cost of all thoseideas(Yes, even the good onesin fact, especially those.)Every time your team considers a new idea, youre spending more than just a little time to talk about it. The true expense starts the moment an idea enters your teams orbit (even just near one planetary team member), and you dont stop racking up bills until it gets absorbed into your sun (you build it) or it gets slingshotted back into outer space (you reject it). (Is this metaphor working?Anyway)All ideas, whether you ultimate execute against them or bail somewhere along the way, consume valuable resources. They affect your teams focus, clarity, and execution.Theyre more expensive than is apparent on thesurface.Strategic dilutionEvery good idea you pursue is a vote cast for a particular future. But when youre voting for everything, youre effectively voting for nothingboth because of the truth that if everything is a priority than nothing is, and also because, well, what exactly are you strategically building if youre building everything all atonce?Lets break this down with a realistic product scenario.You start with a clear vision: Were building the best AI sales call analyzer to train reps and level up their pitchgame.Then the good ideas start rollingin:Hey, what if we added real-time coaching duringcalls?You know whatd be cool? AI-generated discovery questions!Our enterprise customers really want pipeline management (or at least, thats what I imagine our enterprise customers would ask for, if we hadany).We should add our own video conferencingreps hate switching platforms.Have we considered adding follow-up email sequences?What about automated pitch deck creation?Wheres the prospect data enrichment?Buyer intent signals! We definitely need to show buying readiness scores!But look what happens to your strategynow youre competing with:GongZoomSalesforceHubSpotZoomInfoand every other tool (even merely tangentially) related to sales enablementAnd nobody knows what makes you specialanymore.Its like being at a restaurant with a 50-page menu. Sure, they can make sushi and pizza and tacos and curry but do you really trust them to do any of itwell?(In full transparency, my wife loves The Cheesecake Factory, but thats neither here northere.)And the truly insidious part? This dilution happens gradually. You dont wake up one morning and decide to completely abandon your strategy. Noit erodes one reasonable decision at atime.Well, were already analyzing pitch performance, so real-time coaching isnt that big a stretchSince were tracking sales conversations, we might as well predict their outcomesEveryone loves tool consolidation because it saves them money, so maybe we should just build our ownCRMAnd on andonBefore you know it, your product strategy resembles a Jackson Pollock paintinglots of activity, but good luck finding the focus. Your simple pitch improvement tool is now yet another all-in-one revenue acceleration platform (whatever thatmeans).Strategy is as much about what you say NO to as what you say YES to. When you try to be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing to anyone. Youre not making strategic choices; youre just accumulating features.Context switchingEvery time your team pivots to explore a new idea, theyre paying a mental toll. Research shows it takes 23 minutes to fully regain focus after a disruption. And in product development, were not just talking about a quick chat by the water cooler (or perhaps more aptly, by the robot barista).Were talkingabout:Engineers mentally unravelling complex technical architectures and keeping it all magically together in their braincachePMs juggling roadmap plans three years out, yesterdays sudden escalation, unrealistic stakeholder expectations, and overall death-by-meetingDesigners deep in user research, user interviews, user personas, user stories, and use casesall in the name of design exploration for a feature that may never see the light ofdayAnd this isnt happening just occasionally (as much as managers may pretend it is). Its happening many times per day, across the entire team, org, andcompany.For some roles, this can indeed be a quick side convo. Not in product development, though. There, each context switch requires rebuilding complicated mental models, understanding intricate system interactions, and maintaining consistent product vision across an ever-growing list of features.Yeah, that 23 minutes doesnt hold water for this team. Say goodbye to any semblance of productivity for the rest of theday.Decision fatigueYour brain has a finite amount of decision-making energy each day. Its like your phone batteryeach choice drains a little more juice, although unlike your phone, theres no quick-charge solution (unless you have time to sneak in a nap between meetings).Every good idea that simply must be discussed demands its fair share of your brainpower:Should we prioritize this now? (And if not now,when?)How does it fit within our strategy? (Or does it just seem to fit because we want itto?)Whats the opportunity cost? (And are we being honest with ourselves about those tradeoffs?)Should we build, buy, or partner? (And do we have bandwidth for any ofthose?)Who should be the owner of this effort? (And do they actually have capacity to take thison?)How will this impact our existing roadmap? (And all the promises weve already made, including last quarters bigideas?)Whats the minimum viable version? (And how are we defining viable in the grand scheme of MLP/MMP/MUP/MSP/MDP/MAP/MTP/etc.?)Before you know it, youre making your most important product decisions with the mental equivalent of 2% batterylife.And the other half of the equation isnt prettyeither.Youre working hard at all this, burning mental calories deciding what to do about that game-changing AI-powered feature to automatically post pictures of users pets to their personal social media pages (the pets pages, not the users) by taking advantage of the blockchain and Dogecoins impending moonshot sorry, where was I? OhyeahMeanwhile, youre not thinkingabout:How to improve your core product experienceWays to reduce customerchurnHow to give your users more Aha!momentsWhy onboarding seems to be taking too long for all newusersThose critical security updates your engineering team has been warning you not toignoreThe growing technical debt thats slowly-but-surely turning your codebase into spaghettiIts like spending all your energy choosing breakfast, and having nothing left for dinner. Except in this case, breakfast was deciding whether to add dark mode to your B2B enterprise software, and dinner was supposed to be figuring out why 10% of your user base left for your competitor lastmonth.Feature BloatEach feature you add is like buying propertyyoure not just paying the upfront cost, youre also signing up for the ongoing maintenance. The work on your residencethats just the cost of business (/living). But the work on your second and third home, vacation lakehouse, and rental propertiesthose are all a bit distracting and expensive so expensive.Youve got to constantly dealwith:Code that needs updatingsecurity vulnerability patches, third-party API changes, performance optimizations, bug fixes,Documentation that needs maintaininguser guides, API documentation, internal wiki knowledge base articles, onboarding docs, release notes,Support tickets that need answeringwhy doesnt this work like it used to?, I cant find the option for, is this a bug or a feature?, a myriad of edge cases you never could have imagined,Training that needs deliveringSales needs new demo scripts, Support requires new troubleshooting steps, Success needs new implementation playbooks, new hires need deeper onboarding, partners need capability briefings,The worst part? This tax increases over time. That simple feature you added two years ago? Its now critical to three of your biggest customers workflows, tightly integrated with five other features, andyou guessed itall that time spent ignoring it hasnt left it in very good shape but at the same time, any minor change requires a full regression testing cycle that makes your QA team break out in coldsweats.Of course, some of those features are worth the extra expenses. But that doesnt mean every brilliant idea is worth pursuing. You need to pick your battles wisely. Theres no such thing as set it and forget it in product development. Everything you build today is a commitment to maintain it tomorrow and the month after that and the year afterthatAn idea tax avoidance strategyDont worry, Im not suggesting you become a product development hermit, rejecting all new ideas at the door. But there are some things you can do to help yourself avoid the very painful costs of all those brilliant ideas.1. Protect your execution timestayfocusedFirst off, you need to make sure that big ideas arent getting in the way of doing good work and delivering customer value. So, create uninterruptible space for your product development team to actually, yknow, develop theproduct:Fix your calendaring woes and block off entire days to give your team time to truly focus purely on executionMake sprints actually sacred instead of allowing them to be blown up all the time (although first youll need to plan thembetter)Discuss ideas during dedicated discussion times (yes, even if thats a meetingbut put those either at the beginning of the day, end of the day, or duringlunch)Create explicit processes and allowances for the handling of emergency ideas (true emergencies are rare, but Im not trying to pretend that they dontexist)Encourage (force?) people to sit on their idea for a hot second (or really, a hot day or week)that gives them time to 1) sleep on it to see if its really that good (many will dissipate into the ether just from thistime saved!), and 2) formalize their thoughts on it (shower thoughts not-so-welcome, they need moremeat)Ideas without execution are just daydreams. And if you dont give your team space to execute, they wont build anythingbig idea or otherwise.2. Assess valueis it worthit?For the ideas that still make it to your desk, make sure theyre fully vetted. Its easy to get all starry-eyed at the prospects of a brighter futureits way more fun that the grind, anywaybut youve got to know the difference between a pipe dream and an honest-to-goodness executable game-changer.What specific problem does this solve for our coreusers?How does this amplify (or dilute) our key differentiators?Whats the true engineering cost?Which strategic opportunities will we sacrifice?Whats the downstream impact on product complexity?How will this affect other teams? And will that be in a good way or a bad way? (This is everyoneSales, Support, Success, Marketing, other Engineering teams, other Product teams, everyone)Ideas are easy; execution is hard. The more rigorous your assessment process, the less likely youll chase mirages. Your products success depends not only on the ideas you accept, but also on the ones youreject.3. Planchanging course every day isnt pivoting, itschaosJust because a decent idea indeed turned out to be a great idea, that doesnt mean you should pivot straight to building it. There are real implications for dropping what youre doing in the middle of doingit.Ruthlessly protect committed workyou committed for a reason, it should be rare to change course in themiddleCreate space for strategic bets (and build in check-in points so you can bow out if its not working out the way youdreamed)Balance core improvements with new capabilitiesyou cant move on all ideas, but you will need to move on some; even if you managed to create a moat, it wont survive forever unless you keep diggingitPlanning isnt about predicting the future, its about preparing for it. Your roadmap needs to be firm enough to execute against, but flexible enough to adapt. The best plans enable focus for today while maintaining optionality for tomorrow.4. Back to the beginningThis isnt really step 4, its back to step1.Now that you know the ideas actually worth pursuing, and have a reasonable and realistic plan to move forward with them, you can utilize all that time you freed up to focus on execution to build the next bigthing.This is the past you giving a gift to the current you. (But also, the current you giving a gift to the future younows not the time to break thecycle!)The cold, hardtruthLook, I get it. Believe me I get it. Saying no (or la la Im not listening while covering your ears) to good ideas feels wrong. It goes against our instincts as product people. Were builders, creators, innovators. Our natural state is to see the art of the possible everywhere welook.But (and this is the big but)your capacity to execute will always be smaller than your capacity to ideate. Always. Its like trying to drink from a fire hoseno matter how thirsty you are, youll only be able to swallow so much atonce.So:Protect the ever-loving heck out of your ability to dodont let big ideas get in the way ofthatBe sure that you want to move forwardthis doesnt mean you have to sign up for everything about everything about the idea (in fact, purposefully dont do that, give yourself outs along the way), but do your due diligence before youbeginMake a game planjust because you decided you will execute doesnt mean you have to start right now (i.e., remember step1)Keep the cyclegoingThe most successful product development teams arent the ones with the most good ideas. Theyre the ones who are ruthlessly efficient at executing on the rightideas.The payoff for skillfully managing your idea tax will be a team that can actually execute, features that actually ship, and a product that actually evolves one deliberate idea at atime.Speaking of good ideas Are you tired of fighting with Jiras UI? I get it. Thats why were building Momentumits Jira on the backend, but with a UX that actually helps you do agile. No migration necessary. Curious? Join the waitlist.The not-so-hidden tax of good ideas was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
