This feels pretty high level. Knowing that we want to build the most profound feature for the most number of users is not very controversial. But there are many ambiguities about how you measure profoundness. There are many things that I could fill up my time working on each day all in the name of building profound things - e.g. do I build this feature, do I refactor, do I do customer interviews etc.
In my experience, teams always struggle with that level of decision making, and the problems stem from optimizing for the wrong tasks, even if someone is overall agreed on what the "most important" metric is.
> Knowing that we want to build the most profound feature for the most number of users is not very controversial.
That's not the profound part.
> The application of this simple formula tends to arrive at a blindingly obvious conclusion: first build the features that affect lots of users as profoundly as possible, and which you can build quickly and cheaply.
The profound part is the ending of that sentence -- "and which you can build quickly and cheaply."
I know a huge number of startups (probably the overwhelming majority of them, actually) that think "we're going to do things right" instead of thinking "what's the next feature that will get us the biggest bang for least buck". Most new founders skip past the denominator in Geoff's equation, which later turns out to be the achilles heel that kills most startups.
Of course the fine grained level of decision making is very hard too, but you have to learn to walk before you learn to run.
In my experience, teams always struggle with that level of decision making, and the problems stem from optimizing for the wrong tasks, even if someone is overall agreed on what the "most important" metric is.