Week 38, 2025—Issue #378

🤕 Agility Fails Without Focus

File this under #businessresilience

Photo by Jean-Frederic Fortier on Unsplash

I once had two customer meetings that left me confused. One customer thought working with MAQE was great, but expensive. The other thought we were great and cheap.

Same service. Same quality. Opposite feedback.

The difference: one customer was a pre-seed startup, the other an enterprise client. Different contexts. Completely different definitions of value.

Everything to Everyone

By attempting to serve startups, enterprises, and everything in between, I exposed MAQE to enormous complexity. Startup customers came looking for lean, fast solutions. Enterprise customers required documentation, compliance, and stakeholder management.

This complexity showed up everywhere. No sales conversation was like the other. Project scoping became guesswork. Quality standards varied by context. We couldn’t standardize anything.

For the longest time, I tried agility improvements: better processes, new technologies, more training.

But it didn’t work. Not really.

We got marginally better at adapting to chaos, but we were still dealing with chaos.

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It isn’t until later that I realize we’d gotten the sequence wrong. You can’t optimize what you haven’t defined.

Focus Enables Agility

This is when we decided to reposition MAQE as a commerce specialist.

We had done different work in the past, but commerce was a through line. So we doubled down and honed in on established players looking to scale their commerce operations. And we deprioritized everyone else.

This was scary at first, but the immediate wins were clear. Writing marketing copy became much easier. Customer conversations started following predictable patterns. We could apply standards and frameworks to our scoping work. And quality expectations became clearer over time.

The same efforts that failed before now delivered results.

Most companies handle complexity the way we initially did — by trying to become more agile. But this rarely works. When you optimize for everything, you optimize for nothing.

The alternative: focus first. Reduce complexity by serving fewer customer types with fewer solutions. Then and only then do you implement agility improvements.

/Andreas

Sidenotes

🔮 Corporate Astrology

Quartz reports that psychometric testing has become a $2B industry, despite little evidence that tools like MBTI, DISC, or CliftonStrengths predict anything meaningful. At best, they are icebreakers; at worst, corporate astrology. Fun for a laugh, but not a basis for decisions.

📝 A Guide to CRISP Writing

CRISP is Dan Hockenmeier’s framework for better business writing. It stands for Context, Requirements, Insights, Solution, and Proof. Built on methods like Amazon’s 6-Page Memos (#126) and Minto’s Pyramid Principle (#77), CRISP offers a practical structure for strategy docs.

How can we build better organizations? That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer for the past 10 years. Each week, I share some of what I’ve learned in a weekly newsletter called WorkMatters. Back issues are marinated for three months before being published to Medium. This article was originally published on Friday, Sep 19, 2025. If you are reading this, you’re missing out: Subscribe now and get the next issue delivered straight into your inbox. 😁