Should 'everyone' use your product?

Who is your product best for?

There is almost certainly more than one right answer to that question. In the context of tightening your positioning, however, there’s also definitely a wrong answer:

Everyone.

“Everyone” of course does not actually mean ‘everyone.’ It means ‘all data engineers’ or ‘all enterprise architectects’ or ‘all platform engineers.’

Here’s the problem: It might in fact be true that all platform engineers would get value out of your product. But it’s also true that they wouldn’t get equal value out of it.

The point of positioning is to identify not just that platform engineers in general will get value out of your product, but to get really specific about which platform engineers will get the most value out of it.

You want to get specific about:

  • Characteristics of the company that would make them get more value out of your product — complaince / legal frameworks they need to follow, industry vertical, geographic location, etc;

  • Whether the application in question is customer-facing or not;

  • What other technology is part of their stack;

  • And more…

In the context of a software engineering tool, ‘all platform engineers’ is still too broad. You want to figure out the characteristics of situations where your product delivers the most value, more value than it delivers in the other 90% of cases. And then speak specifically to people encountering those situations.

If you do so, you’ll be able to charge more while increasing your leads and your conversion rates.

Would you like to speak more specifically to the engineers who will get the most value out of your product, but you’re not sure where to start? Reach out to see if I can help.

Emily Omier