Focus on Impacts, not Efforts

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What does it mean to focus on impacts and not efforts? Work and professional life are essentially a marathon, not a sprint. So we should focus on outcomes and not outputs. This is particularly important with small teams and startups, where resources are scarce. Leaders should be frugal with our people’s time to focus on meaningful work, streamline processes, and remove as many roadblocks as possible. Therefore, we should optimize for the highest overall impacts and not the highest amount of work. This will allow a decent work-life balance for everyone on the team.

Here are a few tips to help you move your team to focus and optimize impactful work.

Define Simple Core Metrics

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The key is to keep core metrics simple to simplify the prioritization process and communication among team members. Identify precisely what you want to optimize for using one or two metrics at most; this will make everyone clear on the organization’s goal and what the main focus is. A few examples:

• User satisfaction and retention (near zero churns, high NPS score)
• Customer acquisitions (lead generations, new paying customers)