Decision Compass: How to Choose What to Work On Next

📌 decision framework

What to work on next?

A field guide to choosing your next move — based on customer signals, mission, and honest bottlenecks.

⚡ Core insight

“If everything’s important, nothing is.” — The Incredibles syndrome

The most reliable compass: customer interviews, mission focus, and feedback loops. Listen to what people struggle with, filter through your mission, and pick the lowest hanging fruit that moves the needle.

“When they tell you something’s wrong, they’re always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they’re always wrong.”
— Bill Hader

“Mission is like the lens that focuses the energy of the organization.”
— Opulo

“You get to decide when customers can buy something, but you don’t get to decide when they stop.”
— Max Lobovsky, Formlabs

🧭 Key principles

Customer pain is truth. If a customer says something is wrong, believe them. But their proposed solution is often limited by context. Dig deeper.

Feedback loop = compound improvement. Q1: collect → Q2: invest → Q3: improve → Q4: issue vanishes. Repeat.

Make big calls and commit. Constant reassessment kills momentum. Pivot only if you spot a critical mistake.

Assume problems are 5× bigger than reported. Survivorship bias hides silent customers.

Mission as filter. “Help people manufacture their products” — every feature passes through this lens.

⚙️ The three machines (Brad Feld)

🏢 Company machine Finance, HR, operations

📦 Product machine Engineering, manufacturing, logistics

🤝 Customer machine Marketing, sales, support

Reduce customer “pokes” (complaints) — each poke represents ~5 silent sufferers.

🧰 Methods & tools

📋 Friction log

Have a new user (or a non-expert) run through your product. Record every moment of confusion. Then fix them one by one.

Case: Mitchell’s wife (a novice) calibrated Lumen from scratch. Every friction was logged → docs rewritten → support tickets nearly vanished.

📊 Eisenhower matrix

Urgent / Important grid.

🔥 Urgent + Important → do now 📌 Important, not urgent → schedule ⏳ Urgent, not important → delegate 🗑️ Neither → drop

Market expansion is “important, not urgent” — do it before it becomes a crisis.

📡 Observation beats surveys

Watch what users do, not just what they say. Opulo noticed people putting labels on feeders → productized feeder labels. Community mods became V3.1 features.

📐 Decision steps

Collect signals — interviews, support tickets, community (Discord, forums), sales conversations, usage data.

Aggregate into “big problems” — how many people mentioned X? Stack rank by frequency & impact.

Filter through mission — “Does solving this advance our mission?” If yes, it’s a candidate.

Find the lowest hanging fruit — biggest impact for effort. Solve that.

Commit & execute — resist pivoting. Measure if the problem fades in 2–3 quarters.

Watch for silent signals — unexpected use cases (e.g., Lumen used for prototyping by universities) → explore new markets.

📌 Real cases

🎓 University market pivot

Opulo noticed a high % of education customers. Analyzed vertical data → decided to focus on education. Strong signal from unexpected users.

📹 Content as growth engine

Opulo exists because of YouTube. 10 TB of raw footage. “If you have a perfect product and no one knows, it doesn’t matter. Content is your megaphone.”

🔧 Film extensions (feeder waste)

Customers complained about 140mm tape waste on feeders. No existing solution. Opulo built cheap film extensions → problem solved, satisfaction up.

🔄 Friction log → docs rewrite

Mitchell’s wife tried to calibrate Lumen. Every pain point recorded → documentation overhauled → support tickets dropped to near zero.

🧩 BYOP kit evolution

Top 3 requests: 1) fully assembled unit, 2) better feeders, 3) software improvements. Opulo delivered assembled version in 3 months.

📊 Data worth noting

Customer problem multiplier Assume 5× reported

Feedback loop cadence Q1 → Q3 to resolve

Feeder tape waste 140mm per feeder

BYOP assembled version 3 months from request

Recon Tools growth 0 → 1M followers, 18 months

Community mod → product V3.1 from Discord mod

⚠️ Watch out for

Survivorship bias — only hearing from those who speak up. The silent majority may have different problems.
“Everything’s important” — without a mission lens, you’ll drown in priorities.
Feature requests ≠ purchase intent — many people ask for a powered feeder but buy the manual one.
Constant pivoting — make big calls up front and commit. Reassess only if new evidence says you’re wrong.

✅ Action recommendations

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Start a friction log — have someone new use your product this week. Fix the top 3 friction points.

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Map your three machines — which one has the most pokes? That’s your bottleneck.

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Write down your mission and use it as a filter for every feature request this month.

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Check your content engine — if you’re doing “none” on content, change that. It’s your megaphone.

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Identify one “lowest hanging fruit” that’s on mission, and ship it this quarter.

        🧭 The compass in one sentence

        Listen to what breaks for customers, filter through your mission, pick the smallest high-impact fix, commit, and repeat. Content is your amplifier. Operations are your governor — unblock it to grow.