Over the past decade, I have run into what I like to call the “completeness paradigm” over and over again. It is best described as our desire to cover “everything” and “everyone”. As opposed to focusing on that subset of insights that is most performance relevant, everything is covered. As opposed to starting with those individuals in the organization that will benefit most (e.g. sales), we cover everyone (sales, service, specialists, etc).

New product introductions are a beautiful example in which a Product Manager often makes the desperate attempt to tell sales everything about a new product in 90 minutes at a launch event. We all know what that looks like: death by PowerPoint. In a time when human attention is the scarcest resource we have, the completeness paradigm kills performance.

I have found that two ingredients more than anything else help avoid the trap:1. Think in terms of outcomes as opposed to deliverables2. Have the courage to leave things out