Siddharth Saoji 
A war room. Whiteboard covered in Venn diagrams. Two product managers — ALICE and BOB — stare at it.
BOB: I’ve solved product strategy.
ALICE: Okay.
BOB: Single function. Deep expertise. One thing, done brilliantly. That’s the winner.
ALICE: Cool.
BOB: Multi-function products are mediocre by design. You can’t be great at everything. It’s physics.
ALICE: It’s not physics.
BOB: It’s basically physics.
BOB: Take the all-terrain shoe. Okay for the city. Okay for hiking. Okay for sport. Great at nothing. A tragedy in rubber and foam.
ALICE: Some people just want one shoe.
BOB: Those people are wrong.
Alice picks up her coffee.
ALICE: Do you have a smartphone.
BOB: That’s not relevant.
ALICE: It is.
BOB: It’s a special case.
BOB: Fine. But the electric shaver. If it doesn’t shave well, it doesn’t matter that it has a trimmer, a travel case, and a USB-C port. It fails. Single function excellence. I rest my case.
ALICE: You’ve been saying that for forty minutes.
BOB: Because I’m right.
Alice puts down her coffee. Walks to the whiteboard. Draws a large X through everything.
BOB: That took me three days.
ALICE: You were asking the wrong question.
She writes on the board: WHAT DOES YOUR CUSTOMER VALUE?
ALICE: It’s not single vs. multi. That’s your framework. Your customer doesn’t care about your framework.
BOB: …Go on.
ALICE: The smartphone buyer’s non-negotiable is portability. They want a camera, a map, a browser, and a phone in one pocket. The quality on each is good enough. They don’t care. Because it’s always with them. The delta is forgiven.
BOB: Okay.
ALICE: The shaver buyer’s non-negotiable is the shave. The trimmer is a bonus. If the shave is bad, it goes back in the box. That’s it.
BOB: So it’s not about how many functions.
ALICE: It’s about what the customer refuses to compromise on.
Long pause.
BOB: That’s what I was saying. Just from a different angle.
ALICE: It is not what you were saying.
BOB: It’s adjacent.
ALICE: It’s not adjacent.
Bob picks up a marker. Writes on the board:
1. Who is my customer?
2. What will they not forgive me for getting wrong?
BOB: And if we don’t know?
ALICE: Then we go talk to people.
BOB: Before we build anything?
ALICE: Yes.
BOB: That seems slow.
ALICE: Building the wrong thing is slower.
Bob stares at the erased whiteboard.
BOB: I really wish you’d told me this on day one.
ALICE: I did.
BOB: …
ALICE: You said it was basically physics.