You don’t need to pay such a big penalty for innovation
Photo by Jack Carter on Unsplash
Your teammate rolls across the floor to your desk.
They patiently wait for you to finish typing. No matter, you’re already distracted. You don’t work well when you can feel eyes upon you.
You turn to address them.
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 don’t we just [A], because if we did that, then [B], [C], and if we’re lucky, [D]…”
You’re 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 and how.
“… So yeah, that doesn’t necessarily take into account [L] or [M], but if we [N]…”
You’re barely holding on…
“… [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 over again.
And meanwhile, you’ve 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]. Let’s see what Morgan thinks about this…
(So much for anyone making progress today! But who doesn’t love a shiny new thing?)
/sadpanda
That idea might not have even been worth thinking about in the first place — or who knows, maybe it’s the next big thing that’s going to push your startup into unicorntopia.
All that you know at this point is it sounded like a decent idea, and it didn’t hurt to put a little thought into. (Or did it?…)
And there it is — the moment that you realized your productivity was killed and your focus was derailed, all for an idea that probably won’t matter in two weeks (if not two minutes). But you’ll do it again tomorrow, because that’s what product teams do. We entertain ideas. We explore possibilities. We chase potential.
And who can blame us?
Well… that’s what we’re here to talk about. Take a seat!
Good ideas are a dime a dozen. They’re a lot like [checks metaphor list] potato chips. Everyone loves them, they’re addictively easy to consume, and before you know it, you’ve 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 tax — the hidden cost that’s slowly bankrupting your product execution.
The seductive dance of ideation
We’re all guilty of it. That rush of dopamine when we think we’ve cracked the code on the next big thing. That surge of excitement when we imagine the possibilities.
It just feels so good to have good ideas.
And that’s exactly the problem.
While bad ideas are easy to shoot down (sorry Phil, we’re 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 human team.
The true cost of all those ideas
(Yes, even the good ones — in fact, especially those.)
Every time your team considers a new idea, you’re spending more than just a little time to talk about it. The true expense starts the moment an idea enters your team’s orbit (even just near one planetary team member), and you don’t 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 team’s focus, clarity, and execution.
They’re more expensive than is apparent on the surface.
Strategic dilution
Every good idea you pursue is a vote cast for a particular future. But when you’re voting for everything, you’re effectively voting for nothing — both because of the truth that “if everything is a priority than nothing is”, and also because, well, what exactly are you “strategically” building if you’re building everything all at once?
Let’s break this down with a realistic product scenario.
You start with a clear vision: “We’re building the best AI sales call analyzer to train reps and level up their pitch game.”
Then the “good ideas” start rolling in:
“Hey, what if we added real-time coaching during calls?”“You know what’d be cool? AI-generated discovery questions!”“Our enterprise customers really want pipeline management (or at least, that’s what I imagine our enterprise customers would ask for, if we had any).”“We should add our own video conferencing — reps hate switching platforms.”“Have we considered adding follow-up email sequences?”“What about automated pitch deck creation?”“Where’s the prospect data enrichment?”“Buyer intent signals! We definitely need to show buying readiness scores!”
But look what happens to your strategy — now you’re competing with:
GongZoomSalesforceHubSpotZoomInfoand every other tool (even merely tangentially) related to sales enablement
And nobody knows what makes you special anymore.
It’s 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 it well?
(In full transparency, my wife loves The Cheesecake Factory, but that’s neither here nor there.)
And the truly insidious part? This dilution happens gradually. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to completely abandon your strategy. No — it erodes one “reasonable” decision at a time.
“Well, we’re already analyzing pitch performance, so real-time coaching isn’t that big a stretch…”“Since we’re tracking sales conversations, we might as well predict their outcomes…”“Everyone loves tool consolidation because it saves them money, so maybe we should just build our own CRM…”And on and on
Before you know it, your product strategy resembles a Jackson Pollock painting — lots of activity, but good luck finding the focus. Your simple pitch improvement tool is now yet another “all-in-one revenue acceleration platform” (whatever that means).
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. You’re not making strategic choices; you’re just accumulating features.
Context switching
Every time your team pivots to explore a new idea, they’re paying a mental toll. Research shows it takes 23 minutes to fully regain focus after a disruption. And in product development, we’re not just talking about a quick chat by the water cooler (or perhaps more aptly, by the robot barista).
We’re talking about:
Engineers mentally unravelling complex technical architectures and keeping it all magically together in their brain cachePMs juggling roadmap plans three years out, yesterday’s sudden escalation, unrealistic stakeholder expectations, and overall death-by-meetingDesigners deep in user research, user interviews, user personas, user stories, and use cases — all in the name of design exploration for a feature that may never see the light of day
And this isn’t happening just “occasionally” (as much as managers may pretend it is). It’s happening many times per day, across the entire team, org, and company.
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” doesn’t hold water for this team. Say goodbye to any semblance of productivity for the rest of the day.
Decision fatigue
Your brain has a finite amount of decision-making energy each day. It’s like your phone battery — each choice drains a little more juice, although unlike your phone, there’s 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 it to?)What’s 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 of those?)Who should be the owner of this effort? (And do they actually have capacity to take this on?)How will this impact our existing roadmap? (And all the promises we’ve already made, including last quarter’s big ideas?)What’s 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, you’re making your most important product decisions with the mental equivalent of 2% battery life.
And the other half of the equation isn’t pretty either.
You’re 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 Dogecoin’s impending moonshot… sorry, where was I? Oh yeah…
Meanwhile, you’re not thinking about:
How to improve your core product experienceWays to reduce customer churnHow to give your users more “Aha!” momentsWhy onboarding seems to be taking too long for all new usersThose critical security updates your engineering team has been warning you not to ignoreThe growing technical debt that’s slowly-but-surely turning your codebase into spaghetti
It’s 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 last month.
Feature Bloat
Each feature you add is like buying property — you’re not just paying the upfront cost, you’re also signing up for the ongoing maintenance. The work on your residence — that’s just the cost of business (/living). But the work on your second and third home, vacation lakehouse, and rental properties — those are all a bit… distracting… and expensive… so expensive.
You’ve got to constantly deal with:
Code that needs updating — security vulnerability patches, third-party API changes, performance optimizations, bug fixes, …Documentation that needs maintaining — user guides, API documentation, internal wiki knowledge base articles, onboarding docs, release notes, …Support tickets that need answering — “why doesn’t this work like it used to?”, “I can’t find the option for…”, “is this a bug or a feature?”, a myriad of edge cases you never could have imagined, …Training that needs delivering — Sales 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? It’s now critical to three of your biggest customers’ workflows, tightly integrated with five other features, and — you guessed it — all that time spent ignoring it hasn’t 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 cold sweats.
Of course, some of those features are worth the extra expenses. But that doesn’t mean every “brilliant” idea is worth pursuing. You need to pick your battles wisely. There’s 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 after that…
An idea tax avoidance strategy
Don’t worry, I’m 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 time — stay focused
First off, you need to make sure that “big ideas” aren’t getting in the way of doing good work and delivering customer value. So, create uninterruptible space for your product development team to actually, y’know, develop the product:
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 you’ll need to plan them better)Discuss ideas during dedicated discussion times (yes, even if that’s a meeting — but put those either at the beginning of the day, end of the day, or during lunch)Create explicit processes and allowances for the handling of “emergency” ideas (true emergencies are rare, but I’m not trying to pretend that they don’t exist)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 it’s really that good (many will dissipate into the ether just from this — time saved!), and 2) formalize their thoughts on it (shower thoughts not-so-welcome, they need more meat)
Ideas without execution are just daydreams. And if you don’t give your team space to execute, they won’t build anything — big idea or otherwise.
2. Assess value — is it worth it?
For the ideas that still make it to your desk, make sure they’re fully vetted. It’s easy to get all starry-eyed at the prospects of a brighter future — it’s way more fun that the grind, anyway — but you’ve 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 core users?How does this amplify (or dilute) our key differentiators?What’s the true engineering cost?Which strategic opportunities will we sacrifice?What’s 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 everyone — Sales, 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 you’ll chase mirages. Your product’s success depends not only on the ideas you accept, but also on the ones you reject.
3. Plan — changing course every day isn’t pivoting, it’s chaos
Just because a decent idea indeed turned out to be a great idea, that doesn’t mean you should pivot straight to building it. There are real implications for dropping what you’re doing in the middle of doing it.
Ruthlessly protect committed work — you committed for a reason, it should be rare to change course in the middleCreate space for strategic bets (and build in check-in points so you can bow out if it’s not working out the way you dreamed)Balance core improvements with new capabilities — you can’t move on all ideas, but you will need to move on some; even if you managed to create a moat, it won’t survive forever unless you keep digging it
Planning isn’t about predicting the future, it’s 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 beginning
This isn’t really step 4, it’s back to step 1.
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 big thing.
This is the past you giving a gift to the current you. (But also, the current you giving a gift to the future you — now’s not the time to break the cycle!)
The cold, hard truth
Look, I get it. Believe me I get it. Saying “no” (or “la la I’m not listening” while covering your ears) to good ideas feels wrong. It goes against our instincts as product people. We’re builders, creators, innovators. Our natural state is to see the art of the possible everywhere we look.
But (and this is the big “but”) — your capacity to execute will always be smaller than your capacity to ideate. Always. It’s like trying to drink from a fire hose — no matter how thirsty you are, you’ll only be able to swallow so much at once.
So:
Protect the ever-loving heck out of your ability to do — don’t let big ideas get in the way of thatBe sure that you want to move forward — this doesn’t mean you have to sign up for everything about everything about the idea (in fact, purposefully don’t do that, give yourself outs along the way), but do your due diligence before you beginMake a game plan — just because you decided you will execute doesn’t mean you have to start right now (i.e., remember step 1)Keep the cycle going
The most successful product development teams aren’t the ones with the most good ideas. They’re the ones who are ruthlessly efficient at executing on the right ideas.
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 a time.
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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.
