A founder I advise asked me last week: “Should we go wide or should we go deep?”
She runs an AI startup. Two big incumbents had just announced they were entering her space. The team was anxious about this. Hence their question: do we expand the surface area of the product, or sharpen what we already have?
It’s a perfectly rational question. It’s also the wrong question.
Here is what I told the founder: reframe that question. Completely. Get rid of it.
Because the moment you ask “wide or deep” in a room full of smart people, the next 40 minutes will be spent debating “wide or deep”. Someone will pull up a doc. Someone will reference what Stripe did. Someone will share a sexy framework (“well, according to the Kano model…”). Someone will impress everyone with an evocative sports analogy. Someone will say, smugly, “well, it depends”.
And at the end of it, you will feel like you had a strategic conversation. You did not. You have wasted your time because your entire framing was wrong.
In every product conversation, the framing decides the discussion. People rise to whatever level of abstraction the question opens up. Board conversations especially. But it’s the same with executive staff conversations and team conversations.
The reason is simple: at that altitude, everyone gets to sound smart.
Wide vs. deep.
Platform vs. point solution.
Horizontal vs. vertical.
Should we reduce CAC or should we increase LTV.
These framings are universally seductive because they make everyone in the room feel clever and sound smart, without requiring deep knowledge of your customers or creativity. You get the social status and the brownie points while avoiding the actually hard thinking of what are your specific bets on specific features.
The truth is one level down. Always.
The real question is not “wide or deep.” The real question is: what is going to work? What feature is going to resonate? What capability will get this person, the one whose call you took yesterday, whose frustration you can still hear, to actually buy, and to actually stay with your product?