Do we overfocus on technology?

I wrote an article about data mesh for The New Stack that published today. The most interesting takeaway from the research that went into this article was how important it is to consider how organizations are structured and what business outcomes we’re looking for.

As an industry, it’s really easy to get caught up in technology and tools. When do so, we can end up blinded to our actual goal and fail to think about the different ways to get there.

This is important to consider as we position products, too. We want to think about the business outcome we can help our customers get — not just the snazzy technical features we provide. If we keep our tech-focused blinders on, we can miss important information. Maybe our product solves a problem that isn’t what we set out to solve. Maybe our product is a high-tech way but ultimately inferiour way to solve a problem — if that’s the case, we need to seriously re-think our strategy, but there are plenty of products out there that offer high-tech ways to solve problems that are best solved with low-tech solutions.

Pay attention to how your product fits into organizational structures, if it requires changes in organizational structures and who will benefit from it the most. Those are all core positioning issues, but they can help you market and sell to the right people in an organization and immediately see which types of companies would be a good fit — or not — based on how they structure the company.

If you need help with your positioning, that’s what I do. Feel free to reach out here.