Do you feel like your team is continuously in firefighting mode? Are your customers always unhappy because you're not delivering on the promises your sales team has made? Is your app crashing all the time? Does it feel like weeks and months pass by but no meaningful progress gets made?

These are usually symptoms of a lack of proper product discipline and focus within your company. A wide range of reasons might cause this kind of problem.

A common reason I've come across a lot lately is that your team might be conflating multiple different use-cases together.

For example, you might be in the "widget" business. If any customer asks for widgets, your sales team jumps on the opportunity, sells a big account, and then hands it off to the product and engineering team to customize your widgets to handle the customer's needs.

The problem is there are many kinds of widgets. Small widgets, medium widgets, and large widgets. Widgets for lawn mowers and widgets for sports cars. Widgets for ceiling fans and widgets for windmills.

If your company is responding to everyone who wants a widget, then you're never going to be able to specialize and scale. And. Specializing and scaling is the only way to capture a market and, when you're ready, introduce new categories of widgets to expand your way to world domination.

If you can't tell the differences between the use-cases (widgets) you're selling, then you need to dig deeper into the details. The details matter a lot.

The chances are high that you will find differences and distinctions in those details.

If not, dig deeper until you do. Then...

1. Pick one of the use-cases. Typically one that is easy and simple to start with and can that be expanded into logical adjacencies over time.

2. Help create the space for your product and engineering team to build it in small but meaningful iterations.

3. Insist that your sales and marketing team sells nothing else until there is an intentional decision to support new use-cases over time.

If you don't do this, you risk building a messy tech stack that does nothing very well. Worse, you might end up selling a broad vision to a lot of big customers who will demand that you deliver on your promises - pancaking your team and choking off possibilities to scale your business with a polished self-serve product.