Sometimes, you should talk to fewer customers

The behaviors that scale average performance inside big companies quietly hold back their best product people. That is why top performers have to bend some corporate rituals and rules to make impact.

You need to understand that every activity that a big company & its CEO encourages — answer support tickets, talk to customers, respond immediately to email/Slack, etc. — is intended to push this now-large company’s average & below-average employees to perform better, to get them to meet the now-lower bar of what the company expects from its median employee.

Corporate best practices are designed to raise the floor, not the ceiling.

While these activities and best practices will no doubt provide positive ROI for everyone, they do have significantly diminishing returns for the already high-performing product people.

And when you are already performing at the top 10% level, you don’t merely want positive ROI from your time & energy — you want to minimize opportunity cost.

At this level, it is no longer sufficient to ask:

“Is this a good use of my time & energy?”
(This is ROI thinking.)

You must make a habit of asking:

“Is this the very best use of my time & energy?”
(This is opportunity cost thinking.)¹

As a top 10% performer, when you aim to minimize opportunity cost, you realize that it isn’t about how many times a week you talk to customers.

It isn’t about how quickly you respond to x-fn teams’ pings & @mentions on Slack.

It isn’t about how enthusiastic you come across in your immersion in the company’s now-nonsensical two-month-long annual planning process.

Instead, it is about:

• Identifying actual customer needs

• Bringing unique market insights

• Making some risky product bets

• Creatively executing on tough problems

• Influencing with ideas, not just power

• Shielding your team from nonsense

• Being correct in most of the above

Notice how each of these things is not fundamentally about the volume of your activity.

It is about the quality of your thinking.

I know many otherwise-talented people who’ve spent their entire careers believing that they must answer many support tickets to feel the pain of users, talk to N customers per week to walk in customers’ shoes, respond immediately to every email/Slack message to keep execution going, etc., etc.

And unfortunately, despite their talent and the resources they were given — and the brand + distribution of their company — their products never won in the market, never made a big difference in the industry.

It isn’t their fault per se.

It’s what they were told they must do to be highly successful, by CEOs/founders they looked up to and, in some cases, worshipped.

But no CEO/founder of a now larger company, no matter how talented, is going to be able to say the following:

“I want our below-average product people to talk to more customers.
But I want our top product people to talk to fewer customers than they currently do, and instead spend that time & energy just sitting at their desk thinking harder about what customers really need and how we can destroy our competition.”

And so it goes…

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Past posts you can catch up on:

1. Advanced time management (audio deep dive)

2. Everything isn’t meant for everyone

3. 10 ideas for 2026

4. On the confusion between writing and thinking

5. On beating procrastination

1. For further reading on ROI Thinking vs. Opportunity Cost Thinking, check out this Twitter thread of mine from 2021.