“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” — Michael Porter
Split Brains and Shiny Objects: The Hidden Cost of Focus Dilution in Product Strategy
There’s a moment in every company’s life when opportunity and ambition outpace clarity. Maybe it’s when a team is deciding which product to take to market first. Maybe it’s when an executive leadership team, fresh off a funding round or a good quarter, starts spinning up five different initiatives without finishing the first. Or maybe it’s when a portfolio of products, once coherent, becomes a collection of half-baked ideas managed by teams unsure where to invest their time, energy, and resources. This is the moment when split-brain decision-making and focus dilution creep in—and the real cost begins to compound.
The Historical Lens: From Xerox PARC to Amazon
In the 1970s, Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) invented many of the foundational technologies we now take for granted—graphical user interfaces, Ethernet, and the computer mouse, among others. But Xerox, as a corporation, lacked a clear product focus. Management failed to align their innovation engine with market entry strategy. The result? Other companies—Apple, Microsoft—took those innovations to market and built empires. Xerox’s brain was split: one part obsessed with cutting-edge research, the other focused on the copier business. Neither won.
Contrast this with Amazon. Under Jeff Bezos’s leadership, Amazon operated with clarity of focus and ruthless prioritization. Their “flywheel” model—the strategic loop where lower prices lead to more customers, which leads to more sellers, which leads to better selection and economies of scale—provided a simple but powerful focus. When they diversified, it was always with a clear tie to their existing advantage (e.g., Amazon Web Services grew out of the internal need to support Amazon.com). This was not a split-brain—it was a unified cortex with disciplined expansion.
Split-Brain Decision Making: What It Looks Like
The term “split-brain” comes from neuroscience, referring to patients whose corpus callosum—the connection between the brain’s two hemispheres—has been severed. These individuals struggle to coordinate behavior and information across the two sides of their brain. In business, the same thing happens when functions or leaders act on conflicting priorities without an integrated decision-making framework.
For example, a product team wants to launch a niche tool tailored to a specific vertical. Meanwhile, the sales team pushes for a broad-based platform play that promises larger deal sizes. Leadership tries to appease both by greenlighting both initiatives without adjusting resources. The result? Two underfunded products, unclear messaging, and a demoralized team.
Split-brain decisions often emerge when:
- There is no single source of truth for product strategy.
- Roadmaps are influenced by the loudest voice rather than data.
- Teams chase multiple markets without validating a wedge or beachhead.
- KPIs conflict across departments (e.g., product wants usage; sales wants revenue).
Focus Dilution: Death by a Thousand Pivots
Focus dilution doesn’t usually happen in one sweeping mistake. It creeps in slowly. One small project spins up “just to test the waters.” Another team starts a skunkworks initiative “to stay ahead of the curve.” Before long, leadership is attending six standups a week and nothing is making it across the finish line.
One of the most cited frameworks here is Ries’s Lean Startup, which encourages rapid iteration, MVPs, and pivoting. But the spirit of the Lean methodology is often misinterpreted. It’s not about spinning up endless experiments—it’s about validated learning and structured hypothesis testing, with discipline.
A great example of this discipline is Figma. Before going to market, Figma spent years quietly building a multiplayer design engine in the browser—a technically audacious idea. They didn’t ship five tools to see what would stick. They focused. They built a wedge. And when they launched, they hit hard with product-market fit in a well-defined audience.
Compare that to Quibi, the much-hyped short-form video platform. Despite raising nearly $2 billion, Quibi failed to focus. It tried to be Netflix and TikTok and HBO all at once, with no clear user, no product-market fit, and an executive team chasing shiny objects. It shuttered in less than a year.
Thought Leaders and Frameworks to Align the Brain
Great product leadership isn’t just about having good ideas—it’s about making hard choices. Thought leaders like Marty Cagan (Inspired, Empowered) and Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things) emphasize this often. Strategy, they remind us, is as much about what you don’t do as what you do.
To combat focus dilution and split-brain dynamics, here are a few frameworks that have stood the test:
- RICE or ICE Scoring – Use a clear scoring model to prioritize features or products based on reach, impact, confidence, and effort.
- Portfolio Mapping (McKinsey Matrix) – Classify products as stars, cash cows, question marks, or dogs—and invest accordingly.
- North Star Metrics – Define a single, guiding metric that ties every decision back to long-term value.
- Opportunity Solution Trees (Teresa Torres) – Visualize the relationship between outcomes, opportunities, and solutions so that teams make tradeoffs intentionally.
- Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) – Avoid the feature trap. Focus on the core “job” your product is being hired to do.
What Good Looks Like
When it’s done well, the decision of which product to enter a market with—or how to invest in a portfolio—feels less like guessing and more like orchestration. Teams move with clarity. Executives say “no” more than “yes.” A roadmap is not a wishlist; it’s a sequence of bets tied to a theory of the market.
In high-functioning organizations:
- The product vision is aligned across the executive team.
- Investment decisions are tied to clear ROI models, not pet projects.
- Resourcing follows focus—there are no “stealth” teams draining engineering time.
- Strategy is shared, not siloed.
Wrapping up…
Split-brain decision-making and focus dilution are not symptoms of stupidity or poor leadership. They’re symptoms of misalignment, often born from too many good ideas and not enough prioritization. But companies don’t scale by chasing every opportunity—they scale by committing to the right ones.
In an age where execution speed is everything and product lifecycles are shorter than ever, clarity isn’t just nice—it’s non-negotiable. You don’t need a bigger brain. You need one brain, pointed in one direction.
