Can features be your differentiator?

If you’re a technical founder, creating a product for other engineers, and you’re like most other founders I’ve worked with, you are hyper-aware of the features in your product. You are also hyper-aware of how your feature list stacks up compared to other competitors.

So, can we just say that our differentiator is that we have feature X and they don’t?

Nope.

Even when you are selling and marketing to engineers — and even more so when you are selling to directors and VPs of engineering — you have to highlight the value that you provide, not the feature itself. Especially at this level, buyers will need you to connect the dots between the very technical feature (I’m thinking about the diagram of your app architecture on your sales deck right now) and how it helps them meet an objective.

Speaking in generalities, here are some pretty common ‘values’ you might provide:

  • Improve development velocity

  • Reduce the risk of downtime

  • Improve app performance

  • Decrease cloud cost

  • Reduce turnover in the engineering team

  • Improve security

If you start talking about the technical specific of each of your features, buyers are going to want to know how that feature contributes to the value they are looking for. Here’s the thing about focusing just on features:

  • They tell you nothing about which type of company would benefit most from your product

  • They tell you nothing about the job title of the person who will care most (head of development or head of compliance?)

  • Even if they resonate with in-the-trenches engineers, they don’t translate to business goals, making it harder to justify spending money on them

Focus on the value you provide to differentiate your product and operate in a market with no true competitors. If you tell someone about X feature, she will want to know why that matters. If you tell someone you cut unplanned downtime in half… well, they don’t really need to know anything else.

Need help figuring out what your differentiating value is? See if working together on positioning would be a good fit.

Emily Omier