In order to successfully build a product, you need to constantly move the needle. Large companies build SWAT teams that are made for this purpose. As a startup, you are your own SWAT team. Your competitive advantage comes from your ability to attack one problem at a time.

A focus in developing products doesn't mean exchanging long-term product vision for short-term thinking. It means setting meaningful goals that allow you to track your success, adjust, and iterate.

(source: Coelevate)

Startups operate under conditions of extreme uncertainty, and it's tempting to try a lot of different things rather than put all your eggs in one basket. Trying too many things at the same time, however, means that you'll do none of them well.

By focusing on one goal and one metric at a time, you can constantly adjust to circumstances and change course, while learning quickly enough to grow.

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Former HubSpot VP of Growth, Brian Balfour, gives a 4-step process for building focus:

1. Identify one long-term meaningful goal: This might mean boosting the single metric we discussed in the last chapter. The alternative to focusing on one goal that matters is to spread yourself thin on short-term optimizations in order to hedge your bets.
2. Distill the most important thing to make progress toward that goal. Say that tour goal is to increase inside sales revenue by 40%. Using data has shown you that users integrating other services increases free trial conversions by 3x. You could then focus on getting these trial users on a call with a sales rep.
3. Create a timeline for making progress long enough to gather data. All product initiatives need to have a clear goal, a measuring stick for what success looks like, and enough time to measure. For small teams, this should range from 30-60 days. Sticking to a timeline ensures that you don't sink too many resources into a product goal that you can't achieve. It allows you to move on and focus on the next thing.
4. Editing your longer-term goal according to data. The fourth step is why it's so important to set a single measurable goal in the first place. It's what allows you to figure out what you're doing right and wrong, and improve. Making mistakes is forgivable and inevitable in product, but failing to learn from them is wasteful.