In a recent conversation with the leadership team at Intercom, a live chat startup, Hunter Walk, partner at venture investor Homebrew and former YouTube product head, highlighted how fundamental it is to avoid “low-impact” work - or more colloquially speaking, “lots of movement with little value.” We couldn’t agree more, and would like to share his insight and helpful framework, which we’re implementing at TheBlaze. The following is an excerpt from that conversation, and the full post is here.
To explain, Walk drew a simple yet effective 2×2 graph:
The high-effort, high-impact work reflects the strategy you’re deliberately deploying. Everyone’s favorite quadrant is the low-effort, high-impact stuff. But when you continually pick the low-hanging fruit, the branches will stop growing, so this work dries up quickly as your product and team matures. Most startups are sensible enough to avoid the high-effort, low-impact work, so it’s the last quadrant that’s worth talking about.
It’s the low-effort, low-impact work that can kill you, because it’s so attractive. Hunter refers to it as “snacking”. It feels rewarding and can solve a short term problem, but if you never eat anything of substance you’ll suffer.
This work is easy to justify because “it only took 30 minutes”. And when it achieves nothing useful, it’s easy to excuse because it “took us so little time”. This is not strategy — this is flapping. Do this enough times and you’ll grow a low impact team that doesn’t achieve anything.
The default position for a smart team without a clear plan is to snack.
When I see teams at startups rushing to copycat the latest feature of the day, or swapping “Sign up now” with “Sign up for free”, I’m always reminded of this lower left. Snacks. Even in their best case, these projects are low impact for the absolute majority of companies.
If you want to have a high impact team, stay away from low impact work. Eat, don’t snack.
Beginning this week, our valued subscribers will be the first to see the initial fruit of our labor as we roll out our new and enhanced “TheBlaze TV SVOD Experience” for desktop. This is the first of many innovations to come throughout the end of 2016 and beyond. Stay tuned!
