When you’re an early-stage startup founder, your job is clear—find “product:market fit” (Silicon Valley–speak for “a product that a significant portion of customers in your market love, use, and will pay for”), then scale.

Who are the customers? What problem are they trying to solve? What solution can we create? How will we make money? This is classic startup territory.

In the early stages of a startup, focusing on “execution” will put you out of business. Instead, you need a “learning and discovery” process so you can get the company to the point where you know what to execute.