Focusing on what truly moves the needle shines brightest when it’s paired with a clear sense of purpose, rapid execution, and a long‑term view. These three principles reinforce one another, turning “what matters” into decisive action that delivers lasting results.
Focus on What Matters Most
What moves the needle today?
Start every day by choosing the single thing that will have the biggest impact on our product, our customers, and our business.
- One clear focus, the rest can wait.
- Priorities are expressed as 70‑20‑10: main goal, secondary goal, stretch goal.
- If you can explain your top priority in a quick elevator pitch, you’re on track.
What It Means At Corporate Tools
“Focus on What Matters Most” is a discipline, not a restriction. It means looking at the flood of ideas, requests, and tasks and filtering them through the lens of impact. Only work that directly moves our key metrics forward gets the bulk of our time and energy.
We organize around product groups that each own a vision, strategy, tenets and a short‑term priority list. In a two‑week sprint the group commits to one primary objective that consumes roughly 70 % of effort, a secondary objective (20 %) and a small stretch goal (10 %). Anything outside those three slots is put on hold until the next planning cycle.
The goal is to eliminate endless planning meetings and “analysis paralysis.” By committing to a single, high‑impact target we can ship fast, learn quickly, and iterate without being derailed by every shiny new idea that crosses our path.
How This Shows Up In Your Day
You are living this when
- You spend the majority of your day on the primary sprint goal and can explain why it matters.
- You push lower‑impact tickets to the backlog without feeling guilty.
- You update the team daily on progress toward the 70‑20‑10 breakdown.
- You say “no” to new requests that don’t align with the current focus.
You are not living this when
- You jump from task to task, never finishing any one thing.
- You try to work on ten items in a sprint and end up with none delivering value.
- You cannot give a quick elevator‑pitch of your current priority.
- You overload yourself with meetings that distract from the main goal.
