How I Use the 80/20 Principle to Lead AiSDR Development
Find out how I apply the 80/20 principle to my daily and strategic work at AiSDR
The 80/20 principle, also known as the Pareto Principle, holds that 80% of results come from 20% of effort.
As a CTO at a tech start-up, this is a principle I live by. It helps me focus on critical matters and saves me from spreading myself (and my team) too thin.
Here are 4 ways I’ve applied the 80/20 principle to my work at AiSDR.
TLDR:
- The goal: Get work done smarter, not harder
- The tactic: Use the 80/20 principle to spot and prioritize high-impact work
- The result: My team and I stay lean and focused on AiSDR development
Step 1: Deciding features to include in the AiSDR MVP
As a CTO, one of my biggest challenges is deciding which features to build first. Not every idea can – or should – make it to the product. That’s where the 80/20 principle helps.
To speed up our launch and start getting the product in front of users, we limited our MVP to 20% of the features we hoped to eventually include. But when it came to picking the 20% that made it in, we focused on high-impact features that delivered 80% of user value.
In AiSDR’s case, this was:
- Lead discovery
- Email generation
- LinkedIn personalization
- Email sends and replies on auto-pilot
This doesn’t cover every responsibility of a sales email specialist, but it does deliver the most value in the fewest number of tasks.
Step 2: Planning feature development
Once we know which features to focus on, the next step is building them efficiently. My goal is for each new feature we launch to cover 80% of use cases (and handle the remaining 20% through future iterations).
Instead of over-engineering a solution from the get-go (and dealing with the debugging headache), we start with a simplified version that solves the core problem. For instance, when we were working on email response classification for system notifications, we started with just 3 categories:
- Positive response
- Negative response
- Neutral
This is definitely not enough categories in the long run, but it covered the majority of cases in the short term. We shipped it, started delivering value, and began collecting feedback and other cases.
Once the feature was working normally and reliably, we started adding new categories and even action items.
For example, auto-replies don’t fall in the positive or negative category, but they don’t quite fit neutral. So we added a new category for auto-replies and even trained AI to handle them independently.
By focusing only on delivering the most important parts first, we save time and resources while meeting customer needs.
Step 3: Issue resolution
No product is perfect, and issues are bound to pop up. We follow the 80/20 principle to prioritize fixes. By solving 20% of the issues that cause 80% of user frustration, we keep customers sufficiently satisfied.
For instance, if most bug reports are about the same email generation issue, we focus on fixing that problem over smaller glitches that occur once or twice for a few users. We use customer feedback and analytics to pinpoint problems that affect performance and usability.
Whether we should prioritize features or stability during each sprint is something I discuss each Monday with my co-founder. Sometimes our sprints are feature-heavy while others concentrate on stabilization.
Step 4: Accept that you can’t 80/20 everything
While the 80/20 rule is powerful and something that changed my life, it doesn’t work for every situation. Some tasks demand all your attention and resources. When this happened to us, we assembled the entire dev team and worked all day in the same room on the same problem.
I think Mark Zuckerberg said it best:
“You can’t just 80/20 everything. There have to be certain things that you are just the best at and that you go way further than anyone else on to establish this quality bar and have your product be the best thing that’s out there.”
The key is knowing when to apply the 80/20 rule and when to go all in.
Result
The 80/20 principle shapes the way I approach my work at AiSDR’s CTO. By focusing on tasks that create the most value – like picking the right features, building them efficiently, and prioritizing fixes – my team’s able to get work done in less time with less effort.
As a result, we’re able to:
- Launch major features each month
- Ship fixes and minor features each week
- Pursue personal research projects
