Why strategy is more important than ever
When your throughput is limited, you are forced to prioritise. This makes you pause and think back to the value equation: create value → capture value.
This limited throughput is a constant reminder to think about your users and what you can do to provide the most value. You are thinking about what will move the lever the most - and this takes time to think about. It is too tempting to say “let’s pull all the levers and one will work”. This is the founder trap. The problem with this approach is adding multiple features at once means you cannot say with confidence which feature was causal to the output you wanted.
Adding some features might improve one metric and detract from another - but adding many features all at once you will not know what caused what.
In an AI driven world where work throughput is no longer limited you can do everything at once. Every feature, every backlog item, all simultaneously. This might seem good at an initial glance, but it has negative effects on products.
For example, as a user if every time I login to a product there are 100s of new features all doing different things it will confuse the value proposition.
I don’t want a three-quarter inch drill, I want a three-quarter inch hole. And I certainly don’t want a three-quarter inch drill that is also a sander, a polishing machine and a vacuum cleaner!
This is where strategic discipline comes in. The power of the tools we use has increased but good strategy remains the same.
Postscript
There are areas where having maximum capacity makes sense - such as fixing bugs in a product. But this strategy makes sense as removing bugs can only lead to product improvement.