I narrowed a company chasing every market to the one it could win.

I came in to take design work off a team that had too much of it. There was no product team and no plan for one. Within a couple of weeks they asked me to go to five days. A few weeks after that we agreed an equity share, and I took on design and product.

The questions that mattered, what we should build and why, had no owner, so I started answering them. A few months in the founder handed the rest over, and I have run product since.

The team were drowning in work and fighting on multiple fronts. Two of our customers were paying and growing. The other three were pilots, asking for features we had no realistic way of building, with no promise of ever turning into rollouts. With the team we had we could not serve both.

The numbers said the same thing about the pilots. Fewer than one in fifty of the end customers we needed were signing up, fewer than half the sites were profitable, customer service was killing us, and the rollout target the work was meant to unlock was out of reach.

So I chose. We doubled down on the two that were pulling us forward and finished the other three's pilots properly, final reports, forecast against realised savings and happy customers. We left that market with our reputation and relationships intact. It allowed a stretched team to focus on the one place we had traction, and it set up everything that followed.

A market you have chosen is still a guess, so I built the research to test the bet properly. It came back against me. The market was consolidating, the bigger players were building their own tools in house, and the pool of right-sized customers left over was too small to carry a venture-scale company.

So I made the case against the direction I had sold weeks earlier. Not to abandon the market, the customers we had there stayed and mattered, but to stop treating it as the only bet. We re-pointed the effort before it burnt runway, and turned the same research engine onto the bigger question of where this company could actually win.

I pulled together a working group, the founders and the heads of marketing and procurement in it, and stood up a five-week research programme against an investor deadline. I wrote the discussion guides and ran the interviews, 540 outreach messages narrowed to 26 conversations across nine countries.

The standing rule was that interest is not demand, so every conversation got pushed to what someone would actually pay for and when. The rule held even when it flattered us. A buyer told us they would buy it tomorrow, and it still counted as one signal, not proof, because their own plans pointed the other way.

What came back was a thesis. The tools this industry runs on were built for a few large assets, coordinated by people on calls and in spreadsheets. As assets get smaller, which is the space we operate in, the coordination work stays the same size. So below a certain point the overhead eats the value and the work does not get done.

The thesis, and the customer it defines, became the company strategy. I wrote it, the founders made their adjustments and took it to the investors, who had been pushing for a clearer direction. They backed it.

Underneath the company strategy I built the product strategy, and I reduced it to a single shape. One shared layer of data, the three stages of the operation it serves, and the insight on top that makes the whole thing legible. In our customers' worlds those stages run separately, every handover is manual, and the numbers degrade at each boundary. The shape is what joins them back up.

One object doing four jobs. My test for it is blunt. If you cannot sketch it in thirty seconds with a marker, it is not doing its job. And it gives the whole company something to say no with.

It did not stay a product artefact. Marketing writes positioning and messaging from the shape. Business development picks which customers to chase off the back of it, and I work that edge with them weekly, who is in, who is out, what we should charge. A forward-deployed engineering initiative rolled out from the same picture. The whole business runs from one page, and that page is the strategy.

None of the strategy work meant the product stood still. The research had shown three insight layers missing from the platform, so we built all three. Health monitoring gives customers a live read on how their sites are performing. They check it daily, and it became a selling point in demos. Visibility of platform actions lets customers find answers on their own, and the support load dropped with it. The third surfaces the value the platform has created, something real to stand on at renewal.

One customer liked a demo enough to tell us to quote them on our own website. When we asked why they had chosen us, the answer was the visibility and control.