Do you feel like your team is continuously in firefighting mode?
Are your customers always unhappy and/or demanding more?
Is your app plagued by bugs or incomplete features?
Does it feel like weeks and months pass by, but no meaningful progress is made on your product or growth rate?
In other words, are you failing to achieve exponential growth?
These are usually symptoms of a lack of proper product leadership and discipline within your company.
One of the many results of poor product leadership is that your company will regularly and incorrectly conflate 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 engineering team to customize your widgets to satisfy the customer's needs.
The problem is that 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. Different widgets for every kind of device.
If your company is responding to everyone who wants any kind of widget, then you're never going to be able to specialize. And specialization is the only way to build an effective product and go-to-market engine. And building an effective product and go-to-market engine is the only way to drive exponential growth and scale.
Why?
Because specializing allows you to build a killer product in a niche market.
Having a killer product in a niche market allows you to win that market with ease.
Then, and only then, will you be ready to introduce new categories of products to expand into logical adjacencies on your way to world domination.
How do you specialize when all the widget deals look the same?
If you can't tell the difference between the widgets (use-cases) 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 surprising but essential differences and distinctions in those details.
If the differences don't reveal themselves at first glance, then dig deeper until they do because they are ALWAYS there.
Once you find the differences, then...
Pick one of the use cases. Typically, one that is easy to start with and requires the fewest features. What I like to call a "Minimum Viable Problem".
Create the space for your product and engineering team to properly build and polish your product to fully and delightfully solve for the use case. It will take time and many small but meaningful iterations.
Insist that your sales and marketing team only sell to customers who have this very specific use case. Do not allow them to accidentally stray into other use cases just because they might spot a "big opportunity". This is typically a big opportunity for distraction.
There is no reason to switch to new use-cases until you have properly polished your product for the given use-case and saturated the global market.
Switching or thrashing between use cases before you have polished and massively scaled your product is typically a sign of an undisciplined team running a company destined for failure.
Why does focusing on one use case solve all the problems I described at the top? Because...
It ensures that all your customers need and want the same things, which in turn keeps your product requirements within a tight cluster around a central axis.
Having similar customers who want the same thing allows your team to focus, polish, and succeed at meeting your customers' needs (across all functions of your business - from product to marketing and customer support) - accelerating sales and reducing churn.
Your new, very happy customers will start recommending you and supporting you - you will earn a global reputation as the category killer.
This will give you a strong install base from which to a) raise capital and b) expand into other use-cases and customer types that are logically adjacent to the one you've already won.
In short:
You want to sell what you've already built. Not build what you've sold.
You want to sell 1 thing, 1 million times.