The myth of narrowing focus in product success

Over the weekend, the former CFO of Oura Daniel Welch posted about the success of narrowing the product focus to a subset of women’s health. And one of the comments, from Diana Torgersen, caught my eye:

“Wonderful – but still wondering how Women’s health is a “narrow focus”? By focusing on women you’re focusing on 51-52% of the population so it seems it’s not that narrow, merely the other half of the population.”

The reason it perked me up is because a) that math is wrong when you’re talking about product narrowing and b) it is a mistake that tons of product people make, resulting in insufficient levels of focus.

Take Fitbit as a representative of the default mainstream wearable device (you could insert Apple, Samsung, or dozens of others in here if you want). Torgersen is right: they generally try to target 100% of the market, with an implicit focus on men (because the patriarchy sucks).

But they do more than that: they try to target 100% of the market across multiple features, including sleep, nutrition, exercise, stress, etc. That is 100% x 5 categories, or 500 product points.

If Oura had taken that approach, they would simply have halved the population but kept the same features; a Fitbit Fem that exclusively focused on women would still have 50% x 5, or 250 product points.

But Oura didn’t just narrow the population: they also narrowed the features by focusing on just fertility, pregnancy, and menopause. That’s 50% x 3, or 150 product points. And in reality, because fertility, pregnancy, and menopause are non-overlapping, it is actually just 50 product points: 50%/3 (each member of the population is in only one of the three states) x 3.

I suspect that Torgersen was really just trying to use a rhetorical question to make the point that focusing on women isn’t narrow and more people should see women as an important market; a true statement, for sure.

But it inadvertently also made a point about how people conflate population and features. When seeking product focus, many product folks will narrow population OR features, instead of population AND features. And the “and” is where all the magic happens.

Now to be fair, Welch’s post was really about expansion; Oura had already done 100 products points of everyone x sleep. But you could argue they started with 50 product points, by doing men x sleep; Welcome acknowledges that in the beginning, it was seen as a very masculine device. They could (and perhaps should) have started with women x sleep, but would still be 50 product points. And that was with a $2.3m seed.

Every product starts by changing one behavior for one person. Over time, you’ll remove Limitations and add Populations and Motivations as you expand. But start with one.