Sometimes, you should talk to fewer customers

Top performers need to flip the question they ask about their work. Instead of "Is this a good use of my time?" they should ask "Is this the very best use of my time?" The article argues that corporate best practices-answering support tickets, rapid Slack replies, mandatory customer calls-are designed to lift the average employee, not the elite. For the top 10% of product people, those activities deliver diminishing returns and waste scarce mental bandwidth.

The piece points out that while those practices generate ROI for most, they become noise for high performers. The real leverage for them lies in identifying genuine customer needs, surfacing unique market insights, making risky product bets, and creatively solving tough problems. Influence should come from ideas, not from answering every ping, and leaders must shield their teams from needless distractions while staying correct on the high-impact moves.

The author shares examples of talented engineers who spent their careers dutifully answering tickets and chasing customer metrics, yet never built market-winning products. The flaw isn't talent; it's the misguided instruction that volume equals value. CEOs often tell everyone to talk to more customers, but they would actually accelerate success by letting their top talent talk to fewer customers and spend the saved time thinking harder about strategic direction.

For technical leaders, the takeaway is concrete: prioritize deep thinking over busy work, allocate time to market-shaping activities, and protect that time from low-ROI demands. By treating opportunity cost as the primary filter, senior engineers and product leaders can focus on the work that truly moves the needle.