My dogs love a good stick. We spend may hours chasing sticks. I have spent hundreds of dollars on dog toys, and yet their favorite toy is a free stick. And they absolutely love to chase the same stick as another dog is currently enjoying. They could both have a stick, and yet the stick they want is the one in the other dog’s mouth.

The other day my dogs were wrestling over a small, not great stick. The thing they loved the most about it was that the other dog wanted it. I had a much larger, thicker and (to me) nicer stick in my hand and I was calling their names, trying to interest them in this superior stick, but they were paying me no attention; they were busy wrestling and chewing this inferior stick.

Sometimes it seems like product development is the same way. A competitor launches a new feature and we must also have that feature! A competitor pursues a strategy and we must also do that. Clearly that stick has something we don’t; we must gain feature parity and wrestle over this market/product/stick. Their analysts found a stick we missed! We must get it!

But if we take a step back and start with “why,” we might make a different decision. Why this particular stick, and why now? Is this really the right stick for us and our brand? Why are we wrestling over this stick, which is more like a twig, when there’s a bigger, much more satisfying stick being waved in our faces? Or did we, in fact, miss something? And if so, rather than wrestling for the same stick, could we achieve an even better outcome by doing our own research to identify an even better stick elsewhere?

And then again, is my human estimation of a “better” stick accurate and fair to project onto a dog (or market)? Perhaps there’s something about that smaller stick that truly was superior and worth wrestling over. I doubt it, based on empirical evidence of stick throwing with my dogs, but I’ll set that aside for the purpose of this post!

So my point here is that perhaps there is no single right answer. Perhaps the tiny twig does taste marvelous; perhaps we’re really only wrestling because we enjoy the activity and it’s not about the stick at all. After all, it’s perfectly fine to be in business doing the thing we do best and/or enjoy the most simply because our entrepreneurial spirit demands we follow our dream to be independent. We don’t have to be the biggest or THE BEST; perhaps it’s enough to simply be.

Or then again, perhaps we really are missing out on a bigger, better stick by focusing on what’s being enjoyed elsewhere. Either way, I do think it starts with “why.” What is the desired outcome? How can we best achieve this outcome and what will be the most enjoyable journey?

Something to consider as business advice from a dog.