Welcome
Meet the Hedgehog
The day I met the hedgehog started on a dark and stormy night. I was due in Salt Lake City that morning for an all-day meeting at my client's corporate headquarters. The CEO had asked for my help in aligning the leadership team around a company-wide holistic product vision.
I had been working with the CEO as an executive advisor and actively coaching their CTO. Despite the CTO's success in academia, he had no experience in the private sector, and the company's technical debt had been compounding at an alarming rate. The company was bouncing from one technology-induced crisis to another, with no clear path forward.
This story is not unique. In sales-led startups where revenue is growing quickly, it's often hard for the engineering team to keep up. Speed to market is prioritized over quality, and technical shortcuts are taken. Over time, cracks appear in the technology foundation, features take longer to add, and bugs occur more frequently.
It takes rigorous thought to craft a clear product vision and discipline to stick to it. Without a clear focus, it's easy to chase "rabbits" - compelling new sales opportunities that require features outside your core vision. This cycle can generate rapid sales growth, but eventually, you realize you've built your product on a technical house of cards.
My client wanted to avoid this fate. They wanted to get clarity on what they did best, define it, and use that to guide their strategic decision-making. The purpose of our meeting was to facilitate this clarity and create a vision that would synchronize the efforts of both the sales and engineering teams.
After a challenging flight and drive through snowy conditions, I arrived at the offices only 10 minutes late for the 9:30 am meeting. The whole senior leadership team was assembled - CEO, CTO, CPO, CRO, CMO, both original founders, and some senior VPs. This was the team that had done the impossible, building a multi-million dollar revenue stream in the travel and tourism industry during the pandemic lockdown.
The CEO reminded the team of why they were there: to get crystal clarity on both the purpose of the organization and the products they were building. Then, to my surprise, the CEO announced that I would be facilitating the meeting. Despite the surprise, I relished the opportunity to be able to contribute at this level and was ready to do my best to synthesize all the information to help facilitate a transformational outcome.
The meeting kicked off when the Chief Product Officer got up to the whiteboard and started to draw out three intersecting circles, reminding everyone of the Hedgehog Concept from Jim Collins' book "Good to Great." This concept focuses on finding the intersection of three important characteristics:
What you are deeply passionate about.
What you can be the best in the world at.
What drives your economic engine.
We spent hours discussing and debating, exploring different ideas about target demographics, customer needs, and technological possibilities. After lunch, as the team struggled to focus on a singular vision, a sentence popped into my head, seemingly synthesizing all the information from the morning's discussion and my prior executive interviews.
I cleared my throat and shared my idea. The room fell silent, then erupted in excited conversation. The CPO jumped up to the whiteboard and wrote it down. After some refinements, we had the company's first hedgehog concept:
"We use universal insights, benchmarking and forecasting to help destinations find more of the right customer."
It felt like one of those "ah-ha" moments where a seemingly unsolvable problem suddenly finds its solution. For the client, this moment was galvanizing, creating an air of focused optimism and alignment across the senior leadership team. As the meeting wrapped up, several team members commented that this had been their most productive meeting ever, finally achieving clarity on something that had eluded them for two years.
Nearly eighteen months later, my client has continued to refine their hedgehog as they optimize their offering for market fit. Gone are the days of chasing rabbits and being distracted by every new opportunity. The Hedgehog now serves as an anchor to rally around and a North Star to filter decisions against and validate assumptions with.
The strength of the hedgehog lies more in the clarity of focus it brings than the specific vision itself. While the vision is important, markets often change unpredictably, requiring companies to pivot. The key is having clarity and alignment on what you strive to be the best at and are capable of achieving - and then rigorously staying focused on that.
The hedgehog concept not only works for organizations, it is also extremely effective at a personal level as well, with a couple minor refinements as you can see below.
In my executive and strategic coaching, I help clients discover and align with their own personal hedgehog. This is a concept I not only teach to others, but is integral to my own work and evolution as a human being. Encapsulating your vision, purpose, and service to others can be incredibly powerful lens to focus your energy through.
When you can align what you're deeply passionate about with your natural talents in a way that drives value for others, you have the recipe for a life filled with abundance and joy. While this doesn't guarantee freedom from hardships or setbacks, it does provide purpose, meaning, and an unshakable inner confidence that the path you are on is the correct one.