Leading Focus and Tradeoffs Inside a Global Services Organization
Situation: Growth, Breadth, and the Limits of “Doing Everything”
Leapfrog Technology is a Nepal-based software consultancy with a global client base across consumer startups, fintech, edtech, and healthcare.
The company’s historical strength was breadth: the ability to do many kinds of work for many kinds of clients, efficiently and cost-effectively.
By the time I stepped into a senior leadership role, Leapfrog faced a familiar but difficult inflection point:
- Revenue growth was flattening below ambitious targets
- Costs were rising due to global competition for talent
- Work was fragmented across domains, technologies, and client types
- Product experiments (including Signetic) consumed meaningful energy and capital
The organization needed focus, not more ideas.
The Real Problem (Not the Obvious One)
The obvious problem looked like:
“How do we grow revenue faster?”
The real problem was:
How do we align people, skills, and strategy around a shared purpose without losing the resilience that breadth had historically provided?
Without focus:
- Expertise didn’t compound
- Sales relied almost entirely on referrals
- Teams struggled to build pride around a clear mission
- Margins compressed as differentiation eroded
Constraints That Shaped Leadership Decisions
Leapfrog’s constraints were structural and human:
- Global delivery model: 300+ engineers based primarily in Nepal
- Services economics: Revenue tied closely to utilization and staffing
- Talent market pressure: Rising wages and increasing competition for engineers
- Organizational inertia: Success through breadth made change uncomfortable
- Capital reality: Limited room for prolonged experimentation
There was no option to “pause the business” to reinvent it.
Key Leadership Decisions
1. Narrow the company’s strategic focus to patient-centric digital health
Rather than continuing to chase unrelated opportunities, leadership aligned the company around:
- Digital health
- Patient-centric systems
- Regulated, high-trust environments
This decision:
- Created a shared narrative across teams
- Allowed skills and domain knowledge to compound
- Improved positioning with healthcare-focused partners and clients
2. Treat product initiatives as explicit bets with kill criteria
Product experiments (including Signetic and others) were reframed:
- Limited number of concurrent bets
- Clear hypotheses
- Defined checkpoints to pause, double down, or stop
This avoided slow-drain initiatives and made tradeoffs visible.
3. Confront the limits of pandemic-era assumptions
Signetic’s pandemic-driven success created optimistic growth expectations.
As demand normalized, leadership made the harder call to:
- Reassess market size
- Reduce spend
- Refocus Leapfrog on its services core
This prevented deeper structural damage at the expense of short-term discomfort.
4. Invest in organizational clarity, not just delivery
Beyond client work, leadership focused on:
- Clear roles and responsibilities
- Explicit ownership of initiatives
- Shared understanding of priorities across geography and time zones
The goal was not speed at all costs, but coherence.
Outcomes & Signals
- Clearer strategic narrative across the organization
- Improved alignment between leadership, delivery teams, and sales
- Reduced fragmentation of effort and context switching
- More disciplined approach to product and growth bets
- Hard but necessary decisions made earlier rather than later
Not every outcome was positive in the short term — but ambiguity decreased.
What This Case Says About How I Lead
This case reflects my leadership philosophy:
- I’m willing to narrow focus to unlock long-term strength
- I treat strategy as a series of explicit tradeoffs
- I value honesty over comfort when conditions change
- I respect both people and economic realities
- I believe clarity is a form of care for organizations