Your Product Development Is Too Scattered. Here's What Focus Actually Looks Like.

You're doing ten things at once. Or twenty. You've got a roadmap that looks more like a buffet line than a strategy. You're hiring smart people and somehow still feeling like you're slower than the scrappy startup trying to eat your lunch. And you've convinced yourself the problem is process, or tools, or team size.

The real problem is much simpler. You're trying to be good at everything. And that means you're actually good at nothing.

I recently talked with John Carter, who worked under Dr. Amar Bose—the legendary acoustic engineer who created an industry—and later brought his approach to Apple. And what strikes me about John's story is how radically different it is from how most product organizations work.

Here's the uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to hear: The constraint isn't resources. It's focus.

The Master And The Problem He Solved

John describes working with Dr. Bose as transformative. And one pattern stands out above everything else: Dr. Bose was ruthlessly, almost pathologically focused.

He taught only one class. One. In acoustics. For one term per year. When he wasn't teaching that class, he had almost no interest in how the company was run. Finance? Didn't care. Operations? Couldn't tell you. Other industries? Completely irrelevant to him.

He cared about two things: Engineering and marketing. That's it. Everything else he delegated to capable people who could handle it. But his attention, his energy, his genius—that went to two things.

And when he was innovating on a specific problem, that was all he did. John watched him work on active noise cancellation for headphones. Dr. Bose was obsessed. They had another problem he was also working on—measuring sound output in speaker systems. Same company, same time period.

Which one got the resources? The one that was working. The one showing progress. They killed the other project without ceremony. No regret. No "let's revisit this in six months." They recognized it wasn't going anywhere, so they focused everything on what was actually working.

And that focus produced the active noise cancelling headphone technology that eventually generated billions in value.

This is not how modern product organizations work. Modern product organizations are afraid to kill anything. What if we need it later? What if the founder had a vision for it? What if it's a "strategic option"?

So it sits there, half-staffed, making slow progress, consuming resources, and diverting attention from the things that could actually move the needle.

The Context Switching Tax You're Not Measuring

John mentions something that most organizations never quantify: context switching time.

When you move from one project to another, you're not just switching tasks. You're shifting your entire mental model. You have to get back into the deep thought you abandoned. This takes time. For creative work—product design, engineering, strategy—this is expensive.

The math is brutal. If you've got 40 hours a week to work, and you're splitting your attention across five projects, you're not giving each project 8 hours of good work. You're giving them maybe 4-5 hours of actual deep work, plus 3-4 hours of switching cost and context rebuilding.

So you look productive—"I worked on all five projects this week"—while actually being productive on none of them.

The companies that move fastest aren't the ones with the most resources. They're the ones where individuals can go deep on single problems and stay there long enough to reach breakthrough thinking.

This is true in physics. It's true in engineering. It's true in product design. It's true in strategy. The complexity of the problem you're solving requires sustained cognitive focus. You can't phone it in.

The Bifurcation Pattern Nobody Talks About

Here's something John noticed working at both Bose and Apple: Both companies operated with two distinct innovation modes, and they were careful not to confuse them.

Mode one: Visionary innovation. The leader—Dr. Bose, Steve Jobs—had an insight about what the world needed that didn't yet exist. They couldn't ask customers for feedback because the thing didn't exist yet. They relied on deep intuition and mastery of their craft.

Mode two: Execution and refinement. Once the vision started to firm up, they brought in product managers, implementers, engineers, and tested it with customers. They took care of the details that the visionary couldn't be bothered with.

Most organizations try to do both at the same time. They want customer feedback on unformed ideas (which is useless—you're asking someone to comment on something they can't imagine). And they want visionary breakthrough thinking from teams that are also responsible for shipping features on schedule (which is impossible).

The organizations that work separate these modes. They let the visionaries be visionary without having to justify every decision to committees. And they let the implementers focus on getting the details right without trying to also be pioneers.

Confusing these two modes is why most product innovation fails. You're asking the wrong people to do the wrong things at the wrong time.

The Brutal Prioritization Framework

Here's what John learned that stuck with him: Focus has a cost. And you have to be willing to pay it.

You can't be working on the speaker measurement problem and the noise cancellation problem with equal resources. You pick the one that's working and you go all-in. The other one goes to zero.

This feels irresponsible to most product leaders. What about portfolio balance? What about optionality? What about the founder's pet projects?

Forget all of it. If you're not willing to commit resources to win, don't start the project. And if you are willing to commit, don't split your focus.

The organizations that move fastest have a simple rule: We're working on X. We're working on Y. We're not working on anything else. When X is done (or dead), we move to what's next.

This requires discipline. It requires saying no. And it requires having the data to know when something is working vs. when it's consuming resources while going nowhere.

Why This Actually Matters

You're not as constrained as you think you are. You're not waiting for smarter people or more budget or better tools. You're waiting for focus.

And focus is a leadership decision. It's deciding what you care about. It's having the courage to kill projects that looked good six months ago but aren't moving now. It's resisting the urge to do ten things moderately well instead of doing one thing exceptionally well.

The products that win don't win because they had more resources. They win because they stayed focused longer. Because when everyone else was diversifying, they went deeper.

This is hard because it feels like you're leaving money on the table. Maybe you are. But the money you'd have made by staying focused is bigger.

What This Actually Looks Like

If you want to accelerate product development, here's what you actually need to do:

First, identify your two things. What are you genuinely good at? What do you actually care about? Everything else is a distraction.

Second, kill everything else. Not "put it on pause." Kill it. It's consuming energy even when it's not actively staffed.

Third, give people permission to go deep. Don't rotate your best people across projects. Don't measure their productivity by how many meetings they attend. Measure it by whether the thing they're focused on is moving.

Fourth, have two modes. One for breakthrough thinking (small group, high autonomy, vision-driven). One for execution (customer feedback, detailed planning, shipping on time). Don't ask the same people to do both.

Fifth, measure focus, not activity. How many projects is each person focused on? How long are they in focus before switching? What's the ratio of deep work to context switching? These are the metrics that matter.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Your product development isn't slow because you don't have enough time or people or money. It's slow because you're trying to do too much.

And you know it. You've known it for a while. But admitting it means making decisions that feel risky. It means killing projects. It means telling people no.

That's the cost of focus. Most organizations won't pay it.

The ones that do? They win.

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Want the Full Story?

If you want to dive deeper into how legendary product developers actually think about focus, simplicity, and execution—and hear the story of how John Carter worked with both Dr. Amar Bose and Steve Jobs to develop breakthrough products—listen to Yaniv Corem's full conversation with John Carter on The School of Innovation podcast.

It's a masterclass in how the best product minds in the world approach the fundamental question: What are we actually trying to do here?

Because here's the thing about product development: Everyone thinks the bottleneck is resources. Almost nobody realizes the bottleneck is discipline.