Let's all accelerate innovation together!

I was at All Things Open last week, and spoke twice — I’ll share links to the talks when they’re posted. But I’d like to share something that happened at one of the talks…

I was talking about how to talk about your project so people get it, and the related need to be high level enough that you’re talking about the benefit or value of using your project rather than the technical details about how you’re providing that value. At the same time, you need to be specific enough about the outcome you’re providing and the pain you’re solving that it’s clear exactly why someone would use your project and who would use it.

I made the point that every single sponsor in the conference, and for that matter probably ever project discussed over the course of the conference, could say that it ‘accelerates innovation’ as a top-level value. But while that definitely describes the high-level value, it gives someone zero information about what the project or product actually does. It does not help an individual determine that this project does or does not solve his or her problem.

After my talk, a guy came up to me and said…. my company just spent tons of time and money with a marketing agency and changed our tagline to… you guessed it. “Accelerate innovation.” He said he agrees that it is totally meaningless.

Yes, you positioning needs to talk about values, not features. But it also needs to be diferentiated, and specific. Sure, maybe when the CTO is justifying spend to the board he’ll just say we’re doing this to ‘accelerate innovation.’ But when the actually purchasing or usage decision gets made, there’s a much more specific outcome in mind.

Remember, the goal is to get people to understand exactly what you do as quickly as possible. Meaningless buzzwords do not help you do so.