The brain surgeon and the psychotherapist

Last week was a blur of activity at the first in-person KubeCon in nearly two years… but instead of a re-cap (though you should certainly check out the panel I was on with The New Stack to talk about security as code).

But today I want to talk about how working on positioning with someone like me works, because there are some misconceptions I’ve run into that I’d like to address.

There are many consulting models, but the ones I’m going to talk about are the brain surgeon model and the psychotherapist model. Roughly speaking, you don’t really interact with the person giving you brain surgery — you just want the best surgeon, but don’t expect to have any input in the process at all or be involved in any way in the surgery. You trust that the surgeon is an expert and that’s it.

The psychotherapist, on the other hand, can not do his or her job without your direct involvement. It would in fact be malpractice for a psychotherapist to apply a one-size-fits-all approach and just tell you want to do.

There are consultants who are brain surgeons — they just need to get an read on the piece of your business they are experts in and then they will have a solution for you.

This is not how I work, and not how I think positioning should work. Positioning exercises, even when done with a facilitator like me, are collaborative. The point isn’t for me to have a look at your website and dash off a bit of genius, but rather to work through your customers’ characteristics, the feedback they provide, the product’s attributes and values and bring it all together to see if it’s being positioning in the best way. I suspect all positioning experts approach this similarly — as a collaborative process in which I am an expert in the process but not in possession of all the answers. Here’s why.

I really don’t have all the answers

I work in the fairly narrow space of cloud native and open source startups. Just as there is a whole speciality in developer marketing and developer relations, so I also think that positioning technical products for software engineers, especially when there’s an open source component, requires some understanding of the landscape. But I am not an expert in every single cloud native specialty or in every open source technology. I’ve worked with companies in storage, service mesh, data processing, service delivery, observability, security and many, many more. I don’t think anyone could be sufficiently expert in all of those areas to truly come in and just tell you what to do.

I’m not talking to your customers — you are

I do start with a couple customer interviews, but I don’t have the months and years of experience interacting with customers that you have, both as company founders and as marketing, sales and product leaders. The easiest way for me to understand the patterns in customer interactions isn’t for me to re-create all those interactions, but for me to ask you the right questions about who understands the message, what characteristics the good customers share and how customers are using the product in the wild.

I need buy-in

The number one reason a positioning exercise is a failure is that we haven’t gotten sufficient buy-in from the team — or even from the founders. One piece of the value from positioning is to finish the workshop with everyone aligned on the direction the company is going and clear on what needs to be said and done to reinforce the positioning. You want everyone to feel like positioning is settled, something that will no longer be argued about, just implimented. Sometimes the workshop feels like marriage counseling for 5 people. That sort of alignment won’t happen without working through the process together.

The bottom line is that positioning should always be a collaborative initiative. If you undertake it without an outside facilitator, it’s important to include not just the founders but also leaders in sales, marketing and product. I’ve often found that the non-founders in leadership roles often have the best insights — I think because they are slightly less attached to what the founders originally envisioned with starting the company and therefore more attuned to what customers are actually seeing and doing.

So, if you feel like you and your team needs therapy (related to positioning, of course), reach out. If you really just want someone to swoop in and fix all your problems by cutting out a strategic slice of your brain, you’ll have to look for that solution elsewhere.