Leapfrog is a Nepal-based software consultancy with 300+ engineers and a global client base. For years, the company’s strength was breadth — they could do many kinds of work for many kinds of clients, efficiently and at competitive cost. That flexibility was a genuine advantage.
But by the time I stepped into a senior leadership role, the cracks were showing. Revenue growth had flattened. Talent costs were rising because of global competition for engineers. Work was fragmented across so many domains and technologies that expertise never had a chance to compound. Sales relied almost entirely on referrals, and teams struggled to rally around a clear mission.
The organization didn’t need more ideas. It needed focus.
The Hard Part About Focus
The tempting framing was “How do we grow revenue faster?” That’s what the board wanted to hear about. But the problem underneath, I think, was more like: how do you align people, skills, and strategy around a shared purpose — without losing the resilience that breadth had historically provided?
This is one of the harder transitions a services company can make. You’re asking people to stop saying yes to work they’re perfectly capable of doing, in exchange for a bet that specialization will pay off down the road. That’s a difficult conversation when 300 families depend on utilization rates.
What I found was that focus doesn’t come from a strategy deck. It comes from shared language — a framework people can use to make decisions on their own when leadership isn’t in the room. Without that, every decision gets escalated, every priority gets debated, and the organization drifts.
Narrowing the Aperture
We aligned the company around patient-centric digital health — regulated, high-trust environments where deep domain knowledge actually matters.
This wasn’t arbitrary. We had real experience in healthcare from multiple client engagements and from Signetic. The bet was that if we focused there, skills and knowledge would compound, positioning would sharpen, and we’d attract better-fit clients instead of chasing everything that moved.
It worked — slowly. Teams started sharing a common narrative. Engineers began developing genuine domain expertise. Sales conversations shifted from “we can build anything” to “here’s what we know about your world.”
I couldn’t mandate focus across a 300-person company in another country. What I could do was articulate a direction clearly enough that people adopted it because it made sense, and then keep reinforcing it until it became the default way of thinking. In my experience, that’s usually how ideas take hold in organizations — not through authority, but through repetition and clarity.
Treating Product Bets Like Bets
Leapfrog had several product experiments running, including Signetic and others. These were consuming real energy and capital, and some had been running long enough to become assumed rather than evaluated.
I pushed to reframe them as explicit bets with kill criteria. Limited number of concurrent experiments. Clear hypotheses. Defined checkpoints where we’d either double down, pause, or stop.
This was uncomfortable. Nobody likes putting an expiration date on something they’ve been building. But I’ve found that slow-drain initiatives are worse than failed ones — at least a failure teaches you something. A zombie product just eats resources and attention.
When Signetic’s pandemic-driven market contracted, we made the harder call to reassess the market size, reduce spend, and refocus on the services core. That prevented deeper structural damage, even though it was painful in the short term. I think the willingness to learn fast and adjust fast — even at the organizational level — is what separates a hard decision from a bad one.
Clarity as Care
Beyond strategy, I spent a lot of time on something less glamorous: organizational clarity. Clear roles and responsibilities. Explicit ownership of initiatives. Shared understanding of priorities across geography and time zones.
I’ve come to believe that clarity is a form of care for an organization. When people know what they’re responsible for and why it matters, they make better decisions on their own. When they don’t, they either freeze or freelance — and neither scales.
At Leapfrog, a lot of the trust-building was about transparency. Visible metrics. Shared notes. Honest conversations about what was working and what wasn’t. The same rhythms I’ve used with small teams — standup, parking lot, shared docs — applied here too, just at a different scale.
What Changed
The strategic narrative got clearer. Alignment improved between leadership, delivery teams, and sales. Fragmentation decreased. Hard decisions got made earlier rather than later.
Not every outcome was positive in the short term — focus means saying no, and saying no has a cost. But ambiguity decreased, and I think that was the thing the organization needed most.