When only one problem can receive the remaining hours, fix the failure already blocking users before polishing the opportunity that might bring more attention. An award can amplify a product, but it cannot rescue onboarding that three people failed to complete.
In April 1970, Apollo 13 had several urgent problems at once. After an oxygen tank exploded, astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise were stranded far from Earth with a damaged spacecraft, limited power and an uncertain route home.
Then carbon dioxide began rising inside the lunar module.
The command module had square scrubber cartridges. The lunar module needed round ones. Mission Control had to help the crew make incompatible equipment work using materials already aboard.
Flight director Gene Kranz and the teams in Houston could not treat every problem as equally immediate. Power mattered. Water mattered. Navigation mattered. But rising carbon dioxide could kill the crew before the other work paid off.
NASA documents the mission and its improvised cartridge adapter in its history, Apollo 13: Houston, We’ve Got a Problem. The detail that stays with me is the order of work. The team did not solve the mission in one grand move. It kept identifying the constraint most likely to make every later decision irrelevant.
At 11:47 PM, a founder with an ECOWAS award form open beside notes from three failed onboarding sessions faces the same decision shape, with much smaller stakes. One tab offers recognition. The other contains evidence that people cannot reach the value the award application describes.
The application is easier to finish
Award forms create a satisfying kind of work. The questions are bounded. The progress is visible. A founder can refine the company description, tighten the impact statement and make the product sound coherent.
Failed onboarding is messier.
One person may have misunderstood the first screen. Another may have stopped when an email failed to arrive. A third may have completed the steps but missed the moment when the product was supposed to become useful. Fixing that means replaying sessions, checking events, reproducing failures and deciding which break matters first.
The form offers completion. The onboarding evidence offers uncertainty.
That difference can make the award application feel urgent even when the product problem is more consequential. The application also carries an imagined reward: a shortlist, a logo, a room full of potential partners. The failed sessions carry an immediate discomfort. They suggest the product may be less ready than the founder hoped.
I have learned to be suspicious when the cleaner task keeps winning.
Attention multiplies what already exists
Recognition can help a small team. It can put the founder in front of customers, partners or investors who would otherwise never hear about the product.
That attention also sends more people into the existing onboarding path.
If three recent users failed for the same reason, additional traffic increases the number of people who encounter that reason. The founder may gain a stronger credibility signal while collecting more silent exits underneath it.
This is why I treat external attention as a multiplier. It multiplies a working path, or it multiplies a broken one.
The useful question at 11:47 PM is not which tab carries the bigger opportunity. It is which unresolved problem can cancel the value of the other. Broken onboarding can waste the award’s attention. An unfinished application cannot make a working product stop working.
That ordering also appears in what a two-person team should fix before a shortlist sends new traffic. The shortlist changes the volume. It does not change the product’s ability to carry that volume.
Fix the narrowest shared failure
Three failed sessions do not automatically justify rebuilding onboarding. Small teams lose days when they respond to several observations with a complete redesign.
I would start narrower.
Place the three sessions side by side. Mark the last step each person completed without help. Find the earliest point where their paths break or their understanding diverges. Then define the smallest change that would let another person move past that point without the founder explaining it live.
That change might be a clearer instruction, a missing confirmation, a corrected button state or a shorter first task. The evidence should decide. Esi’s print button is a useful reminder that a small interface detail can expose a much larger readiness problem.
Run one more onboarding session after the change. Do not wait for a polished flow. Watch whether the next user crosses the point where the previous three stopped.
If they do, the founder has reduced the immediate constraint. If they do not, the failure has become more specific, which is still useful. Either result produces better evidence than another hour spent adjusting adjectives in the award form.
Leave the form honestly unfinished
The award application may still matter. The practical choice is to preserve it without pretending it deserves the night.
Save the current draft. Write one sentence at the top naming what remains incomplete. Add the evidence needed to finish it, rather than polishing around the gap. Then move to the onboarding failure with a fixed test in mind.
Apollo 13 still had power, water and navigation problems after the carbon dioxide adapter worked. Solving the immediate constraint did not finish the mission. It kept the crew alive long enough for the next problem to matter.
That is the bridge back to the two tabs. The founder does not need to decide that awards are useless or that onboarding deserves endless work. The remaining hours should go to the problem that can erase the value of everything else.
At 11:47 PM, close the form, open the three session recordings and find the first shared point of failure.
Comments
No comments yet.