What differentiates successful outcomes in a world of finite resources - I use the milestones heuristic.
Typically defined as ‘a significant stage or event in the development of something’. Here it is the inflection point where a continuous trend becomes a binary.
A milestone can be:
- When your media files are served fast enough to ‘stream’ in ‘real time’
- When a battery lasts ‘all day’
- A ‘Retina Display’ - when pixel density exceeds a users visual resolution
- Achieving critical mass in Network effects
- ‘Zero latency’ devices - when response times faster than we process feedback
- Comparative Milestones - when one thing becomes faster or more cost effective than the other (e.g. Petrol vs Diesel vs EV vehicles)
- Hardware based - apps, games, and AI models can only work with the hardware thats available (e.g. ray tracing only works if consumers have capable hardware)
With limited resources, failure to prioritise means falling short of the outcome. While effort yields incremental results, not all increments are equal. What wins markets are milestones that bring meaningful changes to people's experiences.
Frameworks don’t matter - Concepts like MVPs, 0-1, or first principles thinking implicitly target milestones. The abstract goal is to quantify a key target or avoid a bottleneck and optimise around it.
There is a point where a feature becomes a commodity - so focus on the next area of differentiation and find the most significant boundary to break.