Concentrate overwhelming force to make victory inevitable
Why Focus is the cornerstone of Product Strategy.
Much of the modern language of strategy comes from military thought. In classical societies, rulers were educated in the practices of war, power, and command. By the nineteenth century, Napoleon’s campaigns had transformed warfare so profoundly that Prussia formalised the study of strategy through institutions such as its War Academy, treating it not as instinct or inherited tradition, but as a serious discipline. Carl von Clausewitz’s On War became the most influential text in that tradition. Its ideas shaped generations of military thinking and later doctrine. The point is not that business is war: customers are not enemies, and product teams are not armies. The useful analogy concerns the allocation of scarce resources. When the outcome matters, equal effort everywhere is inferior to concentrated effort at the point of greatest leverage.
“There is no more imperative and no simpler law for strategy than to keep the forces concentrated.”
Carl von Clausewitz
Focus is the cornerstone of strategy. Military doctrine expresses it through two paired principles: mass and economy of force.
A commander looks for a decisive point: a weakness or opportunity that, if exploited, could determine the outcome of the battle. Once that point is found, the principle of mass comes into play. The aim is to concentrate enough force there to overwhelm resistance and make success inevitable. Military planners use three-to-one superiority as a rule of thumb: enough numbers, firepower, and momentum to win the chosen part of the battlefield.
But where does that force come from? This is where economy of force matters. It means applying only the minimum necessary resources to secondary objectives. Those areas receive enough support to avoid failure, but no more. Everything else is redirected towards the decisive effort.
Mass: Concentrate the effects of your resources at the decisive place and time.
Economy of force: Allocate only the minimum essential resources to secondary efforts.
U.S. Army doctrine
For a product team, that means identifying the opportunity that matters most, committing sufficient force to it, and containing every other demand without allowing the product to become unsafe, unreliable, or commercially untenable.
This military logic offers a useful lens for product strategy. The goal is not equal progress everywhere, but concentrated progress at the decisive point.
Mass: Concentration of Force
Product strategy is resource reallocation. Once the highest-leverage opportunity has been selected, the task is to move enough scarce time, talent, and attention behind it to change the odds.
Focus is stronger than prioritisation. Prioritisation can still leave you trying to do everything, only in a different order. Strategy determines what will not be done, so the chosen priority has enough force behind it to succeed.
Once you have chosen the leverage point, concentrate. In practice, this means setting one primary outcome for a product team. But one outcome does not mean one bet. Run several coherent bets against it.
Most ideas will not have the impact you first expect, so the aim is more bets on fewer targets. No individual initiative is certain, but a coherent portfolio of efforts is more likely to shift the outcome. Pool discovery resources in the same problem space so that every bet is informed by real insight. Experiments may need careful coordination, but what you lose in clean attribution you can gain in coherence: every intervention pulls in the same direction on the behaviour you want to change.
Many hard problems display threshold effects: below a critical level of investment, progress remains flat; above it, results begin to compound. This pattern is common in adoption, ecosystems, and network effects. Small reallocations therefore rarely change the outcome. Concentrate enough resources to clear the threshold. A smaller company can create local superiority by focusing where a larger rival is spread thin.
How much concentration is enough? Enough that it feels uncomfortable. One priority, if possible; otherwise, one per product team or one for a defined period. The aim is not to move every available person, but to allocate enough talent, time, and attention to change the probability of success. Adding people to complex work can create training and communication costs (the lesson of The Mythical Man-Month) but that should not become an excuse for preserving the existing allocation.
“I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. I hate peanut butter. We all should…”
Brad Garlinghouse, SVP Yahoo!
The opposite is a peanut-butter strategy: so many strategic initiatives that each is starved of the resources required to make meaningful progress. It feels prudent because it hedges risk, preserves optionality, and gives every stakeholder something. In practice, it often creates the worst of both worlds: too little progress to produce impact and too little evidence to guide the next decision.
Redirecting meaningful resources can dramatically increase the chance of success in the decisive area while costing less elsewhere than might appear. Those secondary efforts were often already too thinly funded to overcome their constraints. A concentrated team can go deep, run several bets, learn quickly, and double down on what works. Even when it fails, it is more likely to understand why.
Frameworks that help you concentrate:
Limit objectives structurally. Use OKRs to constrain the number of outcomes, not merely to catalogue existing work.
Filter opportunities before ranking initiatives. Decide which problems deserve attention before comparing possible solutions.
Keep bets coherent. Use Opportunity Solution Trees to organise several experiments behind one desired outcome.
Find the governing constraint. Theory of Constraints directs effort towards the bottleneck that limits overall performance.
Win a narrow beachhead first. Dominate a defined segment before expanding into adjacent markets.
Economy of Force
Concentration has to be paid for. Economy of force pays for it by applying the minimum necessary resources to secondary objectives and no more. The difficult part of focus is economising elsewhere: sustaining essential operations while freeing capacity for the decisive effort.
Not everything needs to support the strategic priority directly. Some product work is simply business as usual, and it does not need a strategic justification. Hygiene work that protects the value the product already creates often has to continue — but it tends to expand until it is stopped, so set guardrails and stick to them. The aim is not to neglect the rest of the product; it is to create space to improve it.
Be wary of team members rebranding new requests or work they already wanted to do as “in service of the new strategy”. This is pet work dressed in the language of priority. Don’t bend to it. Once you’ve set a direction, fund the initiatives most likely to improve the chosen outcome—not those that only fit if you squint. The real question is whether the work is essential to product health or more likely to shift the outcome than the bets already in flight. If not, defer it, reduce it to the smallest sufficient response, or stop it.
Economising therefore means choosing the minimum sufficient response to secondary demands. Sometimes that is a narrow fix rather than a platform, a manual workaround rather than automation, a temporary operational process rather than a new product capability, or a short discovery spike rather than a new roadmap stream. These are not poor-quality compromises. They are deliberate ways to protect the product while preserving force for the priority.
As Roger Martin argues in Playing to Win, strategy requires real choices. A strategy that leaves every stakeholder satisfied has probably postponed its hardest decisions. There is also an advantage hidden in the discomfort: choices that require genuine sacrifice can be harder for competitors to imitate.
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
Michael Porter
You can soften the politics without softening the strategy. Priority shifts create disappointment and perceived losers, so involve stakeholders in diagnosing the opportunity, ground the choices in evidence from discovery, and make the trade-offs explicit. Set the expectation that initiatives, teams, and budgets may change as you reorient towards higher-value opportunities. The practical goal is to make reallocation a product team capability rather than a one-off crisis.
Finally, recognise that focus decays. Strategy has a natural entropy: without daily reinforcement, the product team’s attention dissolves into clutter, while business-as-usual work expands until it crowds out ambition. Focus is not a state achieved once, but a discipline of elimination practised repeatedly. The critical managerial muscle is not adding priorities; it is removing non-essentials so the essential can be done well.
“The goal is less, but better.”
Greg McKeown
Frameworks that help you economise and hold focus:
Publish a product stop-doing list. Pair the roadmap with a visible list of work the team has stopped, deferred, or declined.
Set guardrails for hygiene. Define service levels and capacity limits for bugs, reliability, support, security, compliance, and technical maintenance.
Use the outcome as an admission test. Ask whether new work is essential to product health or materially improves the chosen customer behaviour and business outcome.
Choose the minimum sufficient response. Meet secondary needs with the narrowest intervention that protects customers and the product without opening a competing workstream.
Make product capacity inspectable. Track where discovery, design, engineering, and analytics effort are actually going, not just how roadmap items are labelled.
Practise systematic abandonment. Ask regularly: “Had we not already started this, would we choose to start it now?”
A Practical Test
After you’ve created your product strategy, ask how much of the product team’s capacity it actually diverts from the status quo, and how much that diversion increases the probability of achieving the chosen outcome.
A strong product strategy redirects enough discovery and delivery capacity towards an ambitious outcome to change the odds of success. A weak strategy spreads the team across numerous goals and barely changes the probability of any of them. Strategy should shift probability, not merely rearrange roadmap priorities.
You can measure this. Look at where discovery time, design and engineering effort, analytics support, and product leadership attention are actually deployed. Then inspect what remains. Is secondary work contained by explicit guardrails, or is it quietly consuming the roadmap?
Find the decisive point. Concentrate your resources there. Economise everywhere else. Choose fewer strategic targets, run several coherent bets against them, and fund those bets handsomely. The aim is not certainty; it is to raise the odds of winning decisively.