Geoffrey Moore: Create Serious Differentiation

So this idea about differentiation is most of the time, most offers live inside the yellow circle here, which means that they have to compete against each other mano a mano for winning a customer's business. Shell gasoline, Chevron gasoline, you know, Union 76 gasoline. You don't go like, whoa, that was amazing gasoline. Right? That's not what happens. Okay, all right. But periodically people do get separation from the competitive set. And your job as an offer manager is to imagine that blue arrow and that blue asterisk and to say, what could we do with my offer to take it that far? Now, you may not get permission. The company may say back to you, you know what, I'm sorry, it's your first product you ever got. We're not spending any money on your product. Okay, rats. But sooner or later, as a product manager, you will get an offer that says, know what? You know what? If you could do that, I would like to see your plan for doing that. So do that. And if you don't do it now, you're just back into doing mono. A mono. So if you look at some case examples, the people on the left all got competitive separation and the people on the right did not. Okay, so IBM PS2, it was not quite compatible with everything else. It just, it never kind of made it Kindle versus Sony's PRS 500. Okay, good, got a glass screen. Okay. But iPhone versus Palm Treo. And this is really tough if you're palm, right, because it was very different, but it just didn't get the separation. It just didn't happen. Cisco Telepresence vs HP Halo. Almost identical, but not quite. Not quite so. Innovating to differentiate, separate yourself from the pack, sustain the gap. This is an investment moment. You get to champion the idea somebody above you is actually going to give you the go ahead or not. But you need to champion, you need to create a vector that somebody could believe. Wow, you really are going to get separation. And typically what you have, the reason why they believe it is there's something that the company owns that's unique to that company, that can create what Andy grove called a 10x effect. So Andy Grove would say, 10x will get you apart from the crowd. So Salesforce was using SAS against Siebel against SAP, Oracle, whatever, and they took themselves off. Skype had peer to peer technology. Wikipedia had its open source model, and look how massively these things have changed the planet. VMware with its virtualization technology, Akamai with its overlay routing network. All of these companies do not have any do not have. They have unmatchable offers at this state in the game. Now. Are people catching up? Yes. Are there CDN people attacking Akamai? You bet. Are there virtualization technologies attacking VMware? Sure, of course there are. But look where they set themselves apart and how long they set. Look how much power those offers had to change the trajectory of a company. Because these were companies that didn't have company power. They were all kind of startups. Who'd heard of Skype, who'd heard of Akamai, VMware and Wikipedia, for God's sake, had no money. How could they take the Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta and make them irrelevant? Through offer power. Offer power? Did it.