One of the most important things to do when you are building a product of any size is to focus. Pick the few things you are going to be amazing at and the many things you will not be. It’s hard, but it’s the only way to succeed.

Try to be great at everything and you’ll end up with a mediocre product. Focus on one thing to be great at and you have a chance to dominate your competition. Why? You can align your entire company (sales, marketing, product, dev) on just one goal and therefore do it so well nobody can compete.

Take Google Search. Since their launch their focus has always been one thing: Get you an answer to your question as fast as possible. Their home page doesn’t have ads or news or anything but one big search field. Most of the features they add have traditionally been about making that better. Or take Walgreens. They don’t have the best selection or the lowest prices. But they succeed because they are the most convenient with stores on pretty much every corner. They’ll pay up to be on every street corner so that at the moment you need something you first come to them.

When we are thinking of building out a new product, I generally ask three questions: Where do we want to Win? Where are we just going to Play (and be just good enough)? And where are we purposely going to Lose (and let someone else win)? A great product will have all three.

At Shop It To Me, we want to win on personalization — understanding you, the consumer, like nobody else and then showing you the most personally relevant items on sale. And almost everything we do reflects that. We launched first in a category (clothing) where personalization is super-important. We require all of our users to tell us all of their individual preferences before they can sign up. We have invested in sophisticated technology to figure out which sizes a retailer has available each morning and which are sold out so that your email only has items in your size.

When it comes to personalization — we purposely do the hard stuff. Our system knows which items you have seen before so you don’t get duplicates and even tries to guess items and sales you might like based on not only your behavior but the preferences of others like you. We send millions of emails every day and each one is different — individually personalized for its recipient. It’s the reason why my mom, my wife and my teenage cousin can each feel like the Shop It To Me emails they receive are “just for them”.

To keep this focus, we are willing to give up on winning other things: We don’t have a celebrity promoting us; our site is pleasing but there are many that are prettier; we don’t include fashion advice or content in our emails; our item pictures are good but definitely not the best.

And for many things that are critical to most shopping sites, we are willing to lose completely: we don’t play SEM arbitrage and our SEO is terrible. Why? None of these matter for a personalized product. In fact, they hurt it. Instead of optimizing for a transaction, we want to build a long-standing relationship with our users — and that requires a different type of interaction and focus.

In fact, I believe it is our unending focus on a personalized shopping experience that lets us succeed and thrive in a crowded marketplace. While some companies have made personalization a feature (and are trying to shortcut it by guessing based on what you clicked or optionally asking you) — we have made it our core which means when it comes to building a product “just for you”, we can beat them every time.

So my question for you product managers out there: What do you want to be awesome at?