In life and work you can often find yourself at local maximums. You get to a place where you have plateaued, reached the peak of some smaller hill or mountain, and find yourself needing to make some changes to go find higher peaks.
In startups in particular it can be a helpful exercise to take a step back and assess which aspects of your product and business may be at a local maximum at varying scales. Below is a framework to help you identify local maximums, some strategies to get out of them, and a sense of what that process should look and feel like as you do it.
Step 1: Know you are in one
This can be a very hard and inconvenient fact. You've often done a lot of hard work to get to this point, but nonetheless you are here.
What do local maximums typically look and feel like?
Finely tuned
You've gone through a series of targeted and increasingly specific iterations around some core premise and feature. The scale and scope of these get increasingly small.
Increasingly competitive and crowded
There are an increasing number of competitors and people who are circling around the same thing. There is a decreasing amount of edge.
Certain and well understood
The problem space is well defined and legible. Also the solution space is well defined and legible. An increasing number of people can tell you what to avoid with cited examples and confidently and correctly point to what works.
Stagnant growth
Metrics are starting to flatten out compared to previous growth.
Well built and in refine and refactor mode
The roadmap now has space for increasingly minute refinements and even full refactors of parts of the codebase.
Step 2: Experiment your way out of the local maximum
To get out of local maximums you need to enter the following zone. Called the FAFO Zone.
Radical experimentation
a.k.a. fuck around and find out
a.a.k.a. just do some things that are fun
a.a.a.k.a. a little sprinkle of chaos.
This is basically where you do bold and new things at all scales that feel fun and ambitious.
There are two questions that may help you brainstorm in this mode.
- If I were to do this all again from scratch? What would I do?
- If I were to directly compete with myself? What would I do?
The first question is a more greenfield and imagination driven question. It lets you shed all of the baggage and weight you may have accumulated up until this point and lets you enter the idea maze from a different starting point with your earned knowledge.
The second question is more of a fear driven and utilitarian angle. It gets you sharp on your own exploitable weaknesses and deficiencies and lets you look at it from a perspective of opportunism and productive paranoia.
There's no reason you can't run an exercise around both of these questions and see what comes out of it.
I think an important constraint is to ensure that you do this from the main brand and app. Not a new brand or side project. The only way for you to escape this innovator's dilemma is to run this disruption on yourself and your core product, taking on the intentional short term dip for the long term gain to the next higher local max or, if you're lucky, the global max.
If a lot of options happen to come out of it and you're having a hard time choosing, I'd suggest picking the one that is most fun, obvious and exciting (there is wisdom in those feelings). At this point you may also be quite burned out and low on energy, so finding anything that gives you energy is going to perform better than low energy work.
Which importantly gets to the next point: doing something is better than doing nothing. You will learn something you wouldn't have otherwise learned and this will help you iterate closer to the correct outcome.
This stage feels like one big continuous blob of fun, scary, exciting, risky, chaotic, spicy, scrappy and full send. If you're feeling any or all of these things then congratulations, you are in the process of escaping a local maximum.
Step 3: Keep experimenting until something works. Double down on what works.
As you're experimenting, pay very close attention to what your customers are saying and doing, listen and learn and iterate rapidly. Don't hold onto them too tightly if they aren't showing signs of life. Keep going until you see signs of growth and life. When you see those signs of growth and life, continually focus in and double down on that until the metrics tell you otherwise. Reprioritize your resources that may have been on other flattening out parts of the product and business to the new growth area, focus the brand and messaging on it once you have the confidence it's working and has the trajectory to justify it.
One thing about this stage: there will likely be some kind of jump required that has uncertainty in terms of long term success but certainty that there will be some kind of negative hit in the short term as you move away from the old local max. This is definitionally true as you need to climb down off the local max into the valley to then start climbing up to the new and higher peak.
Step 4: Go to step 1
Congrats, you've been doubling down and successfully growing and climbing based on the new insights and experiments you did. Now it's time to look around and see if you're at another local max or not.
These are the slides from the original talk, October 2023. Click through the deck below.
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