Differentiate based on outcomes

Earlier this week I wrote about how features are not your differentiator — the value you provide is. This is really important, so I wanted to write about it again from a slightly different angle.

If you and your competitor have a different feature set but those features provide exactly the same value for customers… you are selling the same product and are completely undifferentiated.

That is not a good place to be, especially if your competitor is a big company. So pay close attention to the value you provide, and make sure it is differentiated. No one really cares whether it’s with some special YAML sauce or by tweaking an existing open source project in a relatively simply way.

They care about the outcome you help them achieve, whether it’s quicker deployment speeds or the development and security teams not hating each other. Focus on that.