Above All Else, Reduce Confusion

Confused people do not take action. If you get to an intersection and you are not sure whether you should go right, left or straight, your default reaction will be to stop and do nothing.

Confused people do not buy. If you go to the grocery store and encounter a fruit you’ve never seen before, most likely you won’t buy it.

This is a big problem in the cloud native space, because the baseline familiarity with cloud native technology and the tooling ecosystem around it among end users is much lower than many startup founders assume. Many people on the buying end of cloud native technologies are fundamentally confused — they do not always understand the difference between tools, which types of tools they need given their current maturity level and business goals, and what criteria they should be evaluating the tools/platforms/frameworks etc that they do decide to purchase.

Unfortunately, many vendors in the cloud native space don’t do a great job of cutting through the confusion. In fact, many add to it. Here’s some of the ways vendors confuse buyers even more:

• By describing their product with vocabulary that doesn’t make sense or trying to create a new market category for their tool

• By offering too many options, especially when it is not obvious which option is best for which type of buyer

Reducing buyer confusion is one of the core goals of positioning. With great positioning, your buyer should understand a) what your product is and b) whether or not it is appropriate for a buyer like him/her within minutes and/or without scolling down on your homepage.

If you get the feeling that your buyers are confused, a positioning workshop might be right for you.