Focus on the 20% of work that directly impacts your immediate use case instead of solving problems from first principles. Concentrating on what's critical for launch in the next month lets you ship faster, learn more about the technology, and cut effort by five times.
What's the 20% that matters? I find often people are working on hard technical problems, especially when they're like trying to integrate something that's novel, at least novel to them. They start looking at it from first principles, starting to build up, and they ask questions like, what's the right way of using this tech, etc. And I find that that approach doesn't get you where you want to go very fast. Better is to ask, what is the 20% of this that really matters for my particular use case? And when I say use case, I mean the use case you're going to do, say, in the next month. That focus allows you to work with the tech in a way that's going to drive a lot more progress, a lot more shipping in a shorter period of time. And also at the same time, drive more learning about how that tech works, which will set you up even better for later when you're coming back to build it again. So what is the most important 20%? How well do you understand the job to be done in terms of how your product is going to interact with the market? Because that is going to decrease your work by a factor of 5.
