I’ve led VP-level transformations and scaled companies to $25M ARR.
I’ll be honest: my first years were completely wasted solving problems that kept me poor.
My biggest career breakthrough came when a mentor told me to change the difficulty setting.
You are paid in proportion to the difficulty of the problems you solve.
If you solve small problems, you get paid very little. This is the brutal truth of the market.
The Executive Problem Set: Upgrade Your Focus
Elite leaders understand that time, energy, and attention are finite resources. You must focus 100% of them on high-leverage problems that create exponential value.
The Small Problem: Arguing over a feature’s priority, fixing a minor bug, or reporting a simple KPI. (Low Return on Attention).
The Big Problem (Executive Focus):
Financial Levers: Mastering P&L Management and GTM Strategy to secure new funding or identify multi-million dollar revenue opportunities.
Strategic Integrity: Leading Build-vs-Buy analyses and securing C-Suite Buy-in on critical strategic decisions.
Systemic Discipline: Defining and enforcing Roadmap Governance and Data Governance across a major technology portfolio.
Stop wasting your most valuable asset time, energy and your attention, on things that don’t yield a 10x return. Upgrade the scale of your problems, and your market value will follow.
What is the biggest “small problem” you need to delegate or eliminate this week?
Richard Ewing is a Product Executive and the creator of The Product Economist framework. He serves as a Strategic Advisor to B2B SaaS organizations, helping leaders audit their roadmaps for capital efficiency and prevent “model collapse” in their business models.
Stop guessing. Start auditing.
Connect on LinkedIn: Richard Ewing (MBA)
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