What If Your Weaknesses Don’t Matter? How to Focus on What Counts
Should you play by your strengths or work on your weaknesses?
On both a personal and business level, I used to torment myself with this question.
Personally, I saw development as a constant investment in becoming a master of everything. Be better at this, and deepen my understanding of that.
On a product level, I was obsessively looking at the industry, competitors, and the endless “musts,” “needs,” and “shoulds.” What do others offer? What do users expect? How do we measure up to these so-called “hygiene factors” that supposedly make or break customer decisions?
In both cases, I was running, struggling, and spending a lot of energy. And yet, I wasn’t getting anywhere. And I know I am not alone, I’ve mentored many product people running in the same circles
Until I realized that I was looking at development from a skewed perspective, success isn’t about mastering everything, it’s about mastering the right thing.
My main lesson is:
There’s only one way to achieve greatness, for yourself and your product: become amazing at what you’re already good at.
Play to your strengths. Master them. And suddenly, nobody will pay attention to your weaknesses. No product or person will ever be perfect. Instead of spreading myself thin, I chose my zone of mastery.
For me, that’s scaling products post-market fit, solving complex problems with a team, connecting dots, connecting people, and growing together. That’s what I’m good at, and that’s where I focus on getting even better.
For the products I’ve worked on, the strengths varied. It could be market position, first-mover advantage, a far superior UX, local presence, or whatever made them uniquely strong.
Are there 1,000 things I (or my product) can’t do at the highest level? Absolutely.
Do I feel insecure about them? Sometimes.
But instead of chasing mastery in everything, I found a different solution: collaboration.
I started surrounding myself with people who complement my skills and challenge me to grow. And for products, I defined the areas we needed to own and the ones better solved through partnerships.
One concrete example
When I worked with an e-commerce marketplace, we assumed we needed to build our own checkout, because checkout optimization is a key e-commerce lever, right? So we started building. But with limited capacity compared to competitors, we were constantly playing catch-up, leaving little room for the actual optimizations we had hoped for.
So we changed direction. Instead of forcing ourselves to compete in a weaker area, we integrated with a checkout provider.
The result? We could channel our energy into what we could truly master. That shift in focus helped the company become profitable.
And this collaboration pattern is everywhere if you look for it. Think about Spotify partnering with Google to scale infrastructure, or Nike with Apple to leverage software.
If you ask me today, I have no doubt: Strengths over weaknesses. Every. Single. Day.
And to quote Derek Sivers:
"Nobody cares what you’re bad at,
and neither should you.
Amplify your strengths.
Nobody will see the rest."
What’s a product—or a person—you admire that plays best to its strengths?
