Should you let Gartner position your product?

Companies selling software of all kinds, including those selling products to facilitate buidling and running cloud native applications, are very eager to get the blessing of Gartner and Forrester. This makes total sense to me. But that doesn’t mean you should let a Gartner analyst decide what your product is.

First of all, Gartner analysts don’t think like your customers think. They spend all day thinking about the bleeding edge of technology, rather than juggling ten spreadsheets to track which workloads have had their CVEs patched or which one have been updated to the latest version of Kubernetes and which ones are still pending or even which workloads run in which cloud environment. In other words, they are really good at giving you an idea of the competitive landscape of other SaaS products that do something similar and less good at helping you compare your product to the status quo, which is less sexy but what your prospects are comparing you to.

Second, Gartner analysts are going to fit you into a box based on your features and your technology, rather than focusing on the business value you provide.

Third, Gartner isn’t going to help you figure out how to segment your market or which types of organizations are going to be most interested in the value you provide. Segmenting your market can involve creativity, since you’ll need to think about not just the obvious ways that one could isolate the companies who care about the value you provide from the companies who don’t.

Gartner’s goal is to put you in a category that includes other vendors so that they can compare everyone and see who ticks off which feature checkboxes and which ones are most “visionary.” Your goal in positioning your product should be to position it so that there aren’t any competitors. Gartner does not do Magic Quadrants with only one company. When you let Gartner decide on your positioning, you’re giving them too much power and essentially guaranteeing that you’ll be one of the pack to your prospects instead of the one obvious choice.

Not sure how to go about positioning? I help startups in the cloud native ecosystem position themselves in a way that sets them apart from other market actors and transforms them from ‘one of many’ to ‘the only option.’ Here’s how I work.