We're always limited by attention

Kadhir Manickam

(4 minutes)

<section data-section-id='5d4a4ac5-feb2-450a-b090-405ce9046385'>Feels like everyone is obsessed with speeding up software engineering wherever I look these days. But I think expediting software development in isolation is misguided. Engineering has already been pretty well augmented by AI so far. What's left is rolling these tools out and getting everyone to understand how to work with them. What I think really matters is understanding that we are limited by human attention across the board. </section> <section data-section-id='b0d513ab-e614-4804-bbc1-10ba5fe47e24'><h3 id="why-we-re-limited-by-human-attention">Why we're limited by human attention</h3>Let's do a hypothetical. Let's say you could release 10 brand new features on your platform every week - in perpetuity. Would that be a good thing? Honestly, my reaction as someone who's been building product for a decade now is hell no! You're putting the business in a tough situation. It means your people are not really doing the hard work of figuring out why users are coming to your platform and where your value add is. Hell, most platforms run on one or two core features that drive adoption and usage, and spend years hunting for the next neighboring thing to add that'll keep the business growing - let alone 10 every week! Instead, you're majorly risking that users come to you for a splattering of features. That's dangerous, because it's pretty easy for those users to churn. There may be only a few things they really like, and they may churn to a different platform that just does those few things better. What you're limited by is your team's ability to pay attention to so many different things. A competitor who focuses on just a few things, does those few things really well, understands their user definition super well, and channels the whole business into capturing that user base will win. Think about it from your perspective as a consumer. Would you really care if every piece of software you use releases new features a week? Or are you more likely to keep doing whatever you're comfortable with because you don't have the capacity to pay attention and learn new features constantly? This is why I think the bottleneck everywhere is human attention. Whether you are a business or a potential buyer or consumer of a product, you are constrained by how much attention you are willing to give to it. </section> <section data-section-id='e32e6991-0d1f-4a12-9547-25e1efc3210c'><h3 id="how-to-funnel-the-business-around-attention">How to funnel the business around attention</h3>I think the whole business needs to speed up together, because we're going to be continually limited by what our buyers can pay attention to. What matters is how the whole organization works together to cleanly identify:<ul><li value="1">a potentially valuable feature that we can build</li><li value="2">how we're going to validate that it's valuable</li><li value="3">iterate on it until it's valuable</li><li value="4">convince existing users to try it out</li><li value="5">identify and capture new users</li><li value="6">price it</li><li value="7">anything and everything legal</li><li value="8">and more</li></ul> There's so much that goes into a feature to drive business outcomes! Now the dumb rebuttal is well, you know, AI. Just put more AI in there. That'll solve it. Well, hang on a second, this isn't a technical problem. This is a business and process problem: what do we want to sell, and how do we execute? There are no right or wrong answers here, it's all trade-offs. And we all understand not to apply technical solutions to non-technical problems, right? Right?! <a href="https://gilescrouch.substack.com/p/technology-doesnt-solve-problems" rel="noreferrer">1</a>, <a href="https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/SocialProblemsAndTechnicalDecisions" rel="noreferrer">2</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/technology/tech-solutions.html" rel="noreferrer">3</a>, <a href="https://joshuaspodek.com/technical-solutions-generally-dont-solve-social-problems" rel="noreferrer">4</a> The coherent platform matters because engineering alone doesn't run a business. Quite frankly, it was true before, and it's especially true now. What actually truly matters is: did you build something that is valuable, and do you understand why it's valuable? <h3 id="why-so-focused-on-engineering">Why are we so focused on engineering?</h3>Okay, but the question that bugs me is why are so many people obsessed with increasing engineering speed? Just a thought: it's much easier to criticize and try to fix something that's there and working than to identify something that's not there and not working. Why grapple with the hard, nebulous problem of moving the needle in a business when you can focus instead on generating more PRs? That's a simpler problem with a shorter feedback loop. And more PRs = more $$ right? <h3 id="what-to-do-about-it">What to do about it, my two cents</h3>What we should be doing is spending time thinking critically about how much attention we can get from our potential users and which high-conviction bets we should take to maximize the ROI of that attention. Then backtrack that into: okay, great, what does every department in this business need to deliver to make that happen? That is the pace at which the business can actually run. Trying to exceed it in any one department in isolation doesn't make sense to me. So when I think about the future work, this is what I think about. How do you cleanly and carefully spend attention? From your team and your customers. The organizations that can figure out how to channel attention to the most critical, needle-moving aspects of their business will be the ones that thrive. </section>