What’s the Point of View driving your strategy?
Don’t just call yourself Uber / Amazon / Spotify / platform for X. Do this instead
A few years back, I was exploring building a start-up using Generative AI, before it became a thing. I even had a bunch of customers signed up for a trial, and I thought I knew what I was doing (I did not).
I reached out to a potential early stage investor who was interested in hearing us, and in the conversation, she mentioned a competitor whose founder she knew. “I know X, and her point of view about this space is Y”, she said, “what is it that you see that she doesn’t?”
This other founder was an established expert in this field, and I couldn’t get away by replying that I just knew better. And so I said, “I see it differently”, and fumbled to find words to justify how I actually saw it differently.
Needless to say, the investment did not materialise.
Since then I’ve been curious to learn the methods successful business leaders employ to communicate their Point of View about their product with clarity. What follows is a simple, yet powerful framework I’ve discovered, and an example of how the CEO of Rippling applies it.
How Rippling does it
The CEO of Rippling, the Employee Management System company valued at $10Bn+, Parker Conrad, shared a memo (not a deck!) that he used to raise $45Mn from Kleiner Perkins on the company blog. I’ve broken down the structure Conrad uses to construct his point of view:
#1 Conrad starts by describing the status quo
Most businesses have dozens of systems that maintain a list of their employees, and for the most part, none of these systems talk to each other or to any central system about who these employees are…
…Whenever something changes about an employee, many (and sometimes, all) of these systems need to be updated, and because they don’t point to any central authority, they each need to be updated separately and by hand.
#2 He then offers his PoV about Rippling
We believe that the effort to maintain this fragmented employee data across all of a company’s business systems is, secretly, the root cause of almost all the administrative work of running a company.
There should be a single system of employee data that sits underneath every other business system. Companies and their employees could come to this one place, and make changes to employees in this one system, and that system would handle the propagation out to every other business system.
That’s what Rippling is, and that’s what we do.
There are two things that Conrad is doing in the above paragraph:
(i) He presents a contrasting vision
Powerful stories offer clear, contrasting visions of the existing (negative) world experienced by your customers, and the future (positive) world that your customers will go.
But what makes them positive or negative? It is the values that are at stake. These are the universal qualities of human experience that we all hold dear. These could be: control, confidence, knowledge, etc. The positive or the negative charge we associate with them determine the experience. At its core, every product is seeking to deliver a positive value change in the lives of its users. The more important the value at stake is for your audience in their world, the higher are the chances that your story will land.
The positive / negative framing around these values can be seen in a number of product stories we are familiar with: less-confidence->more-confidence (Nike), obscure->well-known (Facebook Ads), information-opacity ->transparency (Slack), etc. In the case of Rippling, the value pair is: lack of control -> complete control (over resources that are to be spent to perform administrative work)
(ii) He offers a cause for change:
The cause is how the change in the value is produced. This is where your customers learn about your insight to building a new world.
Make no mistake, the cause of the change is not merely the purchase of your product. Instead it is the mindset shift that your customers need to adopt to affect a change. This in turn necessitates usage of your product.
In the case of Rippling, this mind-set shift is characterised by “a single system of employee data that sits underneath every other business system.”
Why does this matter?
Your PoV is the simplest description of why your business needs to exist.
If you do not proactively convey your PoV, your customers (and employees) will do it for you: by looking at your product’s features, your marketing material, they will lump you with a similar sounding product they know (although you are nothing like them!).
A well-articulated strategy statement helps you differentiate your product and offers your customers, and internal stakeholders, a clear vision of the new world you are seeking to build. Tactically, it helps you transcend your sales conversations beyond features.
Conclusion
Imposing a structure to your strategy makes it possible to clearly see when actions are out of line, and forces you to always act within the framework. Such clarity is not just useful at winning business, or raising $45Mn, but when done properly can be your source of truth at all times.
