How to Decide Which Shiny Object to Chase

Shiny object syndrome is real in agency land.

There’s always a new strategy, a new capability, a new process to chase. Running after all of them is impossible, and the trying is what eats away at org health. It’s the distraction tax nobody puts on the P&L.

But you can’t just ignore them either. In a market moving this fast, some of these shiny objects are a genuine matter of growth or death. So the question isn’t whether to chase. It’s how to choose.

One lens, two questions

Here’s the lens I run every shiny object through.

Cost to produce, against impact on strategy.

Two axes. Four outcomes. Green-light it, pilot it, defer it, or skip it. Simple on the surface. The trap is that the questions underneath are hard to answer honestly.

Impact: does this actually move the client’s needle

The first question is impact. Can this make a bigger difference for your clients and the goals you’re measured against?

Not “is it cool.” Not “is everyone else doing it.” Can it improve your clients’ reach, their resonance, their engagement, the high-intent activity that actually drives pipeline? Be honest, because this is where shiny objects do their best lying. Most of them feel important and change nothing.

If you can’t draw a straight line from the new thing to a number a client cares about, you already have your answer.

Cost: what it does to your unit economics

The second question is cost, and I don’t mean the price tag.

I mean what it does to your delivery unit economics. Can you absorb the new service, the new tech, the new people, the new workflow into how you already operate? Or does it force you to repackage, reprice, and rescope the entire business to make room for it?

That’s the cost that matters. A tool with a small invoice and a large operational footprint is an expensive tool, no matter what the contract says.

It’s also a cost your leadership team doesn’t pay. You green-light three things in a quarter and it’s the delivery team absorbing all three on top of the work they already owe. Nobody’s utilization went down to make room. That’s how a run of individually reasonable yeses turns into a burnout problem that looks like it came out of nowhere.

Most “pilots” aren’t pilots

Pilot is the box everyone hides in, because it sounds like discipline and costs nothing to say.

A real pilot has three things written down before it starts. What number would make this a yes. What date we decide. Who kills it. Without those you don’t have a pilot, you have a soft launch with no exit, and it will run for a year on the strength of nobody wanting to be the one who calls it.

Put the kill date in the calendar the day you start. If the thing works, you’ll be glad to have the meeting. If it doesn’t, that meeting is the only thing standing between you and a permanent half-built capability.

“But clients are asking for it”

This is the pushback, and it’s the strongest one, because skipping something a prospect just asked about feels like leaving money on the table.

Two things worth separating. One client asking is not a market shifting. Three clients asking inside a quarter, unprompted, is a signal worth acting on. One loud request is a data point, and the grid still applies to it.

And answering demand doesn’t require building capability. You can have a real point of view on a thing you don’t sell, which is often what the client actually wanted. Or you bring in a partner and stay accountable for the outcome. Both of those let you say yes to the client and no to the operational cost, which is the combination the grid is trying to get you to.

Spend your energy where the grid tells you to

Run both questions honestly and most objects sort themselves. High impact, low cost, green-light it. High impact, high cost, pilot it before you bet the agency on it. Low impact, defer or skip, however shiny it looks.

Here’s the discipline. Green-light and pilot are where my team’s energy goes, even when the allure is all on the other two. The thing you most want to chase is often the thing the grid is telling you to skip.

Shiny objects can be growth or death in this market. But without the discipline to decide what you chase and where you invest, things go sideways fast, and you won’t notice until the org health you spent is already gone.