Cues, Not Critiques

There is a distinction worth naming before anything else, because the whole chapter depends on it: criticism and critique are not the same word. Criticism announces what’s wrong, and critique tries to make the work better. One is judgment and the other is investment. Criticism comes from someone who wants to be heard, and critique comes from someone who wants you to succeed. The same words can deliver either one, what changes is the care underneath.

This chapter is about a third thing entirely, because even the best critique can be too much in the moment. Under the bar, mid-swing, or mid-presentation, you don’t need analysis. You need something tighter than that. You need a cue.

My mentor Nate Fick used to talk about the power of laser focus, and he did not mean attention. He meant precision. That phrase gets thrown around a lot, but he meant it in the truest sense: laser focus isn’t about doing one thing, it’s about doing the right thing, the move that creates the most impact and the shift that makes everything else click into place.

I saw that principle in action during my early days at Endgame. When I joined, we had four different products, all in different markets and serving different users, built with a small team and sold with an even smaller one. The problem wasn’t that the ideas were bad. They weren’t. Each one had real potential. But potential doesn’t scale without focus, and Nate made a tough call. He chose to end-of-life three of the products, even though they were generating short-term revenue, and put every ounce of our talent behind a single one. It was a risk, and it paid off. We built an endpoint protection product that could go head to head with anyone in one of the most competitive markets in cybersecurity, not because we chased everything but because we aligned everything to a single mission.

That’s what laser focus looks like in the real world, and feedback should work the same way. When you’re under pressure, under the bar or under deadline, you don’t need a list of everything that’s off. You need one cue, one phrase that slices through the noise and sticks when it counts.

Point the Flashlight

Baseball figured this out. Coaches used to flood hitters with advice mid-swing: “Keep your hands back.” “Level the bat.” “Don’t bail out.” All of it technically true, and none of it actually helpful in the moment.

Then came a better idea. Picture the knob of the bat as a flashlight. In the “flashlight position,” you’re aiming that light beam right at the catcher’s face. This cue helps you set the correct bat angle, slightly upward, with the knob directed toward the target, and it’s called the flashlight position because you’re holding and pointing the bat the same way you’d shine a flashlight in someone’s eyes. So the whole correction collapses to one word: “Flashlight!”

It’s weird and vivid, and it works. The batter stops overthinking and starts moving with intention, the hips rotate, the swing tightens, and the power follows. The magic of laser-focused feedback is that it isn’t more, it’s clearer.

Two Words That Changed the Lift

The same thing happens under the bar. Stefi Cohen is one of the most accomplished powerlifters on the planet, but even the best get stuck. During a heavy squat cycle, she was losing depth and collapsing forward, the kind of breakdown that could invite a checklist of mechanical critiques. Her coach didn’t do that. The cue was two words: “Knees out.”

Her glutes fired, her hips opened, and her position locked in, with no overcorrection and no overthinking, just a precise adjustment that reconnected the movement. Real feedback works like that: instead of flooding you with everything that’s wrong, it puts a spotlight on the one thing that matters most right now.

From Backlog to Breakthrough

In product development we’re inundated with feedback. Users, developers, sales teams, executives, everyone has ideas, and most of them are shared with genuine excitement, because everyone wants the product to be better. But without focus we risk becoming a jack of all trades and a master of none. Chasing every suggestion means delivering none of them well.

The best product teams don’t just collect feedback, they hone it. They find the thread, the theme, the one insight that can generate the most impact with the least investment. In software we can build almost anything, given infinite time and budget. But for some reason, executive teams rarely offer those. So it takes real leadership to sift through the noise, spot what matters most, and act.

Dropbox is a good example. They had a problem most product teams would recognize: users were signing up but not sticking around. Specifically, they were dropping off before installing the desktop client, the core part of the experience that made Dropbox more than just another web app. The team started spinning on solutions. Maybe the onboarding flow needed to be redesigned, maybe they needed more education, more nudges, more screens, and the backlog of ideas kept growing. Then a PM said something simple: “You’re treating the CTA like a destination, not a trigger.”

That one line cut through the noise. They changed the button copy from “Next” to “Install Dropbox,” added a subtle animation to guide the user forward, and that was it. Conversion went up. There was no massive rebuild and no big campaign, just a focused shift that made it crystal clear what the user needed to do next. What mattered wasn’t the volume of feedback, it was knowing which piece would actually change the outcome.

That’s product leadership: listening broadly, then acting precisely.

The Flashlight, Not the Floodlight

The same principle applies across every domain I’ve worked in: lifting, sport, software. You don’t have infinite time to build a product, you don’t have infinite weights to lift and sculpt the perfect physique, and you can’t act on every idea, every error, every impulse. So you focus. Whether you’re adjusting your squat, refining your swing, or unblocking a user journey, the best feedback doesn’t overwhelm, it illuminates.

You don’t want a floodlight that blinds people or a laser that burns them. You want a flashlight, steady and clear, aimed at the one thing that matters right now. That’s how progress actually happens, one cue and one rep at a time.