In the startup world, the prevailing advice is to move fast, pivot often, and expand aggressively. Every conference talk celebrates the companies that grew by constantly broadening their scope. What rarely gets celebrated is the opposite: the companies that succeeded precisely because they refused to broaden, because they stayed focused on one problem long enough to solve it better than anyone else.

At PR_D_CT DAY 2025 in Ghent, Quinten Vandermeulen from Mbrella delivered a talk that went against the grain. He shared how Mbrella built its mobility budgeting platform by maintaining disciplined focus on a single problem space, resisting the constant pressure to add adjacent features, enter new markets, or pivot toward whatever was trending. The result was a product that defines its category rather than competing in someone else's.

For product managers who feel the daily pull of shiny new opportunities and stakeholder demands to do more, Quinten's talk was a powerful reminder that saying no is not just a nice principle. It is a competitive strategy.

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Original Presentation Slides

Download the slides from this talk as presented at the gathering.

The Case for Relentless Focus

Quinten opens by describing the pressure that every product team faces to expand scope. Customers ask for features that are adjacent to your core product. Sales wants capabilities that would help close a specific deal. Investors want to see a larger total addressable market. Competitors launch features that make your product look limited by comparison. The natural response is to expand, and most companies do.

At Mbrella, the team made a deliberate choice to resist this pressure. They defined their problem space narrowly (mobility budget management for Belgian employers) and committed to solving that problem more completely and more elegantly than anyone else. Every feature request, every partnership opportunity, and every market expansion idea was evaluated against a single question: does this make us better at solving our core problem?

“Every time we said no to a feature that sounded good, it felt painful in the moment. But every time we said yes to something outside our focus, it cost us months of engineering time and diluted what made us special. The math is clear: focus is cheaper than expansion.”

- Quinten Vandermeulen

Quinten argues that focus is not a limitation. It is a form of leverage. A small team that is deeply focused on one problem can outperform a much larger team that is spread across five problems. The depth of understanding, the speed of iteration, and the quality of the solution all benefit from concentration.

Patience as a Competitive Strategy

The second dimension of Quinten's talk is patience. He argues that focus without patience is just stubbornness. Patience means giving your focused strategy enough time to produce results before evaluating whether to change course.

Market timing: Mbrella entered the mobility budget space before the Belgian regulatory framework was fully defined. Rather than pivoting to a more established market, they waited for the regulation to mature, building product capabilities in advance

Sales cycle patience: B2B sales in the Belgian market take longer than international benchmarks suggest. Rather than compromising the product to close faster, Mbrella accepted longer sales cycles and focused on building the product that would win when the decision was finally made

Feature depth over breadth: rather than launching ten features at 70 percent quality, Mbrella launched three features at 95 percent quality. The depth of execution became their reputation and their primary sales argument

Competitive patience: when competitors launched features that Mbrella did not have, the team evaluated each one against their strategic focus rather than reactively matching them

infoThe patience premium

Quinten observes that patience creates a compounding advantage. Each quarter of focused execution builds deeper expertise, stronger customer relationships, and higher switching costs. Companies that expand too early sacrifice this compounding for the illusion of faster growth.

Maintaining Conviction Under Pressure

Quinten is candid about the difficulty of maintaining strategic conviction when external pressure mounts. He shares specific moments when the temptation to deviate from the focused strategy was strongest and how the team navigated those moments.

The enterprise expansion temptation

A large enterprise prospect approached Mbrella with a lucrative contract that required building capabilities outside the core product scope. The revenue would have been significant and the reference customer prestigious. After careful evaluation, the team declined the deal. Quinten explains that accepting it would have pulled three engineers off core development for six months, delayed the roadmap for all other customers, and created a maintenance obligation that would have persisted long after the initial project was completed. The short-term revenue was attractive, but the long-term cost to focus was too high.

He also discusses the psychological dimension of conviction. Saying no to opportunities feels counterintuitive, especially in a startup where every revenue opportunity feels critical. Quinten shares that maintaining conviction required regular reinforcement: revisiting the strategic rationale, reviewing the evidence for the focused approach, and celebrating the wins that focus had produced.

lightbulbThe decision filter

Mbrella uses a single-question decision filter for every new opportunity: if we pursue this, what do we stop doing? If the answer involves stopping or slowing anything in the core problem space, the default answer is no. This simple filter eliminates most scope creep before it reaches the roadmap.

Making Focus Work in Practice

Quinten closes with practical advice for product teams that want to adopt a more focused approach but are unsure how to start, particularly in environments where the culture favours expansion and feature count.

check_circleDefine your problem space explicitly and share it with every stakeholder, because clarity about what you are not doing is as important as clarity about what you are doing

check_circleCreate a not-doing list that is reviewed quarterly. Make the trade-offs visible so that focus is a deliberate choice rather than an accident

check_circleMeasure depth metrics alongside breadth metrics: feature adoption depth, customer satisfaction on core use cases, and time-to-value on your primary workflow

check_circleBuild conviction through evidence by tracking and sharing the results of your focused strategy so that the case for maintaining it is always grounded in data rather than faith

The talk concludes with a message that is particularly relevant for the Belgian product community: in a small market, focus is not just a strategy. It is a necessity. Belgian companies cannot out-resource their international competitors. But they can out-focus them, solving specific problems for specific customers with a depth and quality that generalist products cannot match.

The Discipline of Focus: How Patience and Conviction Built Mbrella

Original Presentation Slides

The Case for Relentless Focus

Patience as a Competitive Strategy

infoThe patience premium

Maintaining Conviction Under Pressure

The enterprise expansion temptation

lightbulbThe decision filter

Making Focus Work in Practice

This article is for Consortium members

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