Project Management Blog

The shiny object distraction is only one form of dilution of focus that can undermine a company. Making the next sale, regardless of the cost of the sale is another risk. While I am focused on small companies, there is no doubt this form of dilution of focus can impact any size organization.

I worked for a small company, many years ago, that suffered the pain of such distraction. While the ultimate demise of the company was more likely the advent of a venture funded competitor with significantly more resources, the cost of chasing the next sale was a major problem. At the time, commercial, proprietary versions of Unix were numerous. A software product vendor with a Unix based product faced the prospect of developing, testing, and supporting a different version of the product for each version of Unix. Some Unix platforms were truly small fractions of the market.

For the company at which I worked, the prospect of the next sale, regardless of sale size, was the primary if not sole determinant. No consideration was given to the cost of the sale, including:
- Gaining access to a development and support environment for the specific flavor of Unix. In many cases, booking time with a local office of the Unix vendor and traveling to that office, was the only recourse to accessing such systems.
- The time needed to bring up that environment, understand the nuances as they would impact the product.
- The time needed to modify and test the modified product.
- The time needed to train customer support.
- The time needed to actually support the product including accessing the environment, reproducing problems, recoding, retesting, and redeploying the updated product.

In this particular company’s case, rarely did another sale on the Unix flavor of the month take place. The company was left with a highly fractured product line, and the limited development, test, and support resources were kept busy with the niche customizations instead of extending the product features and capabilities. Sadly, the company ceased to be able to make payroll.

The lesson I draw from this experience is that a sale is another form of shiny object. A sale should not only provide short term revenue but should, in aggregate, be of net benefit to the business. A new version, a variant on a product, a one-off instance … these are sales that may make sense but must be assessed not only from the benefit of short term revenues, but from the full life-cycle of the product. The costs include:
- creation of the variant.
- support of the variant.
- distraction of resources and impacts on other strategic initiatives.