Cannonballs and Lead Bullets
"There's no silver bullets, just many lead bullets... Yes. And a few massive cannonballs every now and then." - Adriel Frederick
What It Is
A framework for balancing your product work portfolio between big, fundamental investments ("cannonballs") and smaller, iterative improvements ("lead bullets"). It pushes back against the trap of getting comfortable with small experiments while avoiding the big changes that actually move the needle.
The framework helps teams recognize when they're being lazy by focusing on easy-to-ship small changes versus making the harder investments that drive meaningful impact.
How It Works
Lead Bullets
Small, incremental improvements and experiments:
- Easy to come up with and design
- Quick to build and ship
- Lower individual impact
- Important for optimization and refinement
Cannonballs
Big, fundamental changes that require significant investment:
- Harder to conceive and design
- Take months to build properly
- Major impact when they land
- Necessary for step-function improvements
The Danger of All Lead Bullets
"There's a laziness that can creep in where you're just finding a lot of little things because they're easier to come up with and they're easier to design and think about. It's easier to build, it's easier to talk to your boss and say, remove the number by 0.02%..."
This creates "incremental thinking"—endless small wins that feel good but don't add up to meaningful change.
Examples from Facebook Growth
Cannonballs:
- Sign up with phone numbers (now standard, but was a fundamental change)
- Getting SMS delivered reliably worldwide (not glamorous, very hard)
- Good friend recommendations that work across different friend groups
Lead Bullets:
- Button text optimization
- Funnel improvements
- A/B tests on copy and placement
How to Apply It
Audit your current portfolio - Look at your current roadmap and experiments. What percentage is cannonballs vs. lead bullets?
Force portfolio allocation - Set explicit constraints like "80% of energy on big bets, 20% on small experiments" to prevent drift toward easy work.
Vary by stage - Early stage products should be nearly 100% cannonballs ("Just go knock the big pieces out, don't worry, it'll work"). Mature products can have more lead bullets.
Question the small stuff - For each small experiment, ask: "Could this team time be better spent on something bigger?"
Protect cannonball time - Like Tom Allison at Facebook who "hid in a corner" to rebuild a fundamental system, sometimes big work needs protection from the urgency of small wins.
Stage-Appropriate Allocation
| Stage | Cannonballs | Lead Bullets | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early | ~100% | ~0% | You know what to build. Just ship it. |
| Growth | ~80% | ~20% | Still driving big changes, refining where needed |
| Mature | ~50% | ~50% | Fewer big moves available, optimization matters |
When to Use It
- Roadmap planning and prioritization
- Evaluating experiment programs
- Team retrospectives on impact
- Resource allocation discussions
- When you notice the team is "busy" but impact feels flat
The Cost of Experimentation
"Also, the cost of experimentation is time. So if you are experimenting on every little thing and waiting for the data to come in and also screwing up some other part of the product because your experiment's on 50-50, it's just not worth it."
At early stages, the opportunity cost of A/B testing small changes is high. Just ship the obvious improvements and spend your experimentation capacity on the harder questions.
Source
- Guest: Adriel Frederick
- Episode: "Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook)"
- Key Discussion: (~55:00-58:00) - Adriel explains the lead bullets/cannonballs dynamic and portfolio thinking
- YouTube: Watch on YouTube
Related Frameworks
- Related to prioritization frameworks like ICE and LNO in terms of resource allocation