What's your unfair advantage?

Technology, teams, products and individuals… all of strengths and weaknesses. Whether it’s a product or a human, there are some things we do really well, seemingly without effort, and others that are an uphill battle no matter what.

All software products and open source projects are not created equal. Even open source projects that are directly competitive, created to accomplish exactly the same task or meet the same need, are usually not identical, because they were created by different humans, who had different technology preferences and different assumptions about what is and is not important.

As a result, even products and open source projects that on the surface appear identical often do one thing or another differently. In other words, they do at least one thing better than any other option. (Ok, I’m going to admit, sometimes a product or project just sucks and doesn’t do anything particularly well. Let’s assume that’s not your project. Then again, I’ve heard many complaints about products/projects that aren’t that good, but get massive adoption. In that case, you could say the thing they do better than anyone else is marketing).

One critical component of positioning is identifying this one (or more) thing you do better than anyone else. Your unfair advantage. Maybe it’s that you allow organizations to run open source software in air gapped environments. Maybe it’s that you make it possible for applications to run continuously on edge devices with or without connectivity. Maybe it’s that you enable blazing fast processing of huge data sets.

To better position your product or project, you have to understand what it is that the project does well, better than any other option. It might feel like an edge use case — in fact, it should feel like that. But there is probably at least one use case, one scenario, where your product or project is clearly, obviously the best choice. Figure out what that is, because it’s key to positioning your project/product well.