When you look at what’s perceived as the best product in any market – you feel like you cannot win against them. It just feels like a battle where there’s only one outcome – eventual failure.
The best products in any space have worked on a problem for many years, or sometimes just a year or so – and they’ve built such a good solution. That’s how it looks like, from the outside.
I’m not talking about products that have just captured a big market – like ServiceNow or Salesforce. It’s clear that there’s latent pain among their user base.
But I’m talking about products that have strong user love going for them, irrespective of the market they’re playing in.
Think Gamma (for presentations), Shopify, or even a simple addon like Yet Another Mail Merge.
You look at these products and think: they seem to have gotten everything right, how can my product and team even compete against them?
But once you get closer to the users of such a product – even the products that have a ton of user love – you realize that those products aren’t solving something well.
Either they’re not solving something well for a tiny segment of their current users, or for a larger group.
There’s always a gap. There’s always a bunch of pain points. There are always some divinely discontent customers 🙂
The essence of product strategy and positioning seems to be in identifying these users and their pain.
And then trying to figure what segment and what pains of those users to focus on, based on your goals and your team’s strengths.
Shankar is thinking 