Get to the Core of the Thing

Skip the comfortable abstract stuff and get to the hard specifics

A founder I advise asked me last week: “Should we go wide or should we go deep?”

She runs an AI startup. Two big incumbents had just announced they were entering her space. The team was anxious about this. Hence their question: do we expand the surface area of the product, or sharpen what we already have?

It’s a perfectly rational question. It’s also the wrong question.

Here is what I told the founder: reframe that question. Completely. Get rid of it.

Because the moment you ask “wide or deep” in a room full of smart people, the next 40 minutes will be spent debating “wide or deep”. Someone will pull up a doc. Someone will reference what Stripe did. Someone will share a sexy framework (“well, according to the Kano model…”). Someone will impress everyone with an evocative sports analogy. Someone will say, smugly, “well, it depends”.

And at the end of it, you will feel like you had a strategic conversation. You did not. You have wasted your time because your entire framing was wrong.

In every product conversation, the framing decides the discussion. People rise to whatever level of abstraction the question opens up. Board conversations especially. But it’s the same with executive staff conversations and team conversations.

The reason is simple: at that altitude, everyone gets to sound smart.

Wide vs. deep.

Platform vs. point solution.

Horizontal vs. vertical.

Should we reduce CAC or should we increase LTV.

These framings are universally seductive because they make everyone in the room feel clever and sound smart, without requiring deep knowledge of your customers or creativity. You get the social status and the brownie points while avoiding the actually hard thinking of what are your specific bets on specific features.

The truth is one level down. Always.

The real question is not “wide or deep.” The real question is: what is going to work? What feature is going to resonate? What capability will get this person, the one whose call you took yesterday, whose frustration you can still hear, to actually buy, and to actually stay with your product?

That is the question worth your time.

I know how this sounds. It sounds like product 101. It is product 101. And it is unsatisfying, because it forces you to give up the comfort of strategic-sounding language and stand in front of a much harder question, which is: do you actually know what your customers need, can you conceive real differentiation in the face of stiff competition, and can you build that differentiation creatively (and quickly)?

If the answer is yes, the wide/deep debate becomes entirely unnecessary. You’ll go a little wide where it serves the bet. A little deep where it serves the bet. The shape of your product follows from the specific bets driven by keen customer insight and market understanding. It does not follow from an hour-long discussion (or God forbid: a day-long L-team strategy offsite) on wide/deep, CAC/LTV, platform/point, etc. etc.

If the answer is no, if you can’t articulate the specific features that would matter, then no framework, sports metaphor, latest podcast anecdote, or Anthropic case study will save you. Deciding to go “deep” on the wrong thing because someone in the room used a great-sounding analogy (“we want to be Lovable for the construction supply chain”) is just a slow, painful way to be wrong in product work.

So whenever someone hands you a binary at altitude dressed up in clever business-speak, whether it’s wide vs. deep, or CAC vs. LTV, or any of the others, your job is to refuse it. Get to the core of the thing. Then talk about that.

Everything else is theater.