When your platform does many things, how do you prioritize your messaging hierarchy?

When I was at Stripe, we offered upwards of a dozen products on our platform that go way beyond payments processing—from products for incorporation and billing management to fraud prevention and managing corporate spending. To manage the growing complexity, we introduced the concept of Anchor Tenants at Stripe this year. (This term comes from American malls, where there may be a large store that draws customers and traffic for the smaller stores.)For us, those are our core products: Payments (pa ...Read More

You nailed why platform products are difficult to message. This is also why I think they are more fun than working on “point solutions.” (Please forgive me for using that heinous jargon.) In the best-case scenario, you can identify an overarching value proposition for using the platform that resonates with your primary audience and helps them quickly understand the space you’re in. Then you prioritize use cases/solutions based on how frequently customers adopt them or their revenue value to your ...Read More

This will depend on what your product/service/platform does and who the target audience is. For instance, in one of my previous roles, we had one product for one audience. Of course the platform was extensible, had different feature sets, but the value was easy to articulate to one audience. On the other hand, in my current role at Handshake, we have a three-sided talent marketplace with very different products and audiences. We tackle this by having one company value prop and then tailor specif ...Read More

Think about what matters most to your customer, and then what matters most to your company. Is your base platform something which your customers will natively interact with and drive value from? Is it something that a new user in your target accounts will benefit from (eg, developers) ? Or is your platform something that allows you to accelerate development, so the customer sees more value from the platform faster? Thinking through this will tell you how to build your messaging. While most compa ...Read More

In my opinion, the most important thing in prioritizing your messaging is finding the common denominator across your platform. Does it create a new output, or solve a new problem, or enable a new style of working, for example. Then you prioritize that in your messaging hierarchy, and use the various things that your platform does as means to support that new narrative. For example, DocuSign's platform is composed of our ecosystem, our developer tools, our foundational infrastructure and our secu ...Read More

Your platform sits within a hierarchy itself (e.g., working bottom-up, messaging at the feature/function level are subordinate to product, to platform, to suite, to solutions, to corporate, to brand messaging). In other words, messaging cascades downwards from your mission and brand promise. Messaging at every level should map back to the previous level while telling its own story. Follow the MECE principle. Within your platform itself, prioritize the unique selling point. What about it drives t ...Read More

My recommendation in those instances is to start by developing a messaging hierarchy across your overarching offering story and expand it from there. As tempting as it is to rattle off features and benefits across your platform offerings and cater to every use case, having those all ladder up to a consistent core message is always beneficial. Why? Because that will be your true north. The reason why our API is built this way is because it ties back to our desire to do x for y. Ah, you want to kn ...Read More

Thank you for some wonderful frameworks and inputs on messaging and positioning. I have seen a trend especially across many segments - particularly in enterprise - to move from products to solutions to platforms. I had written a blog last year what that means, especially if the goal is to position a "platform" versus point products or point solutions. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/products-solutions-ecosystems-why-what-how-savita-kini/  In order for a "true platform" -- there needs to be an eco ...Read More

Often times, we say our platform has unlimited possibilities, it's the art of the possible -- because it truly is. But it doesn’t help the customer understand our unique differentiator vs any other option in the market. Starting with themes has been helpful to simplify the messaging hierarchy. We need to simplify the message, so it’s memorable. If we cannot do that, no matter how great the messaging sounds, it will be forgotten the next second. We developed a messaging and positioning framework ...Read More

I think it's helpful to consider the following following: Focus on What Matters to the Customer: Understand your customers' primary needs and pain points. What aspects of your platform directly address these concerns? Prioritize these features in your messaging. Highlight Purchase Drivers: Determine what will lead customers to choose your product over others. This includes the benefits that help them deliver more value to their business, advance their careers, and make their jobs easier or more ...Read More

Prioritizing your messaging hierarchy comes down to starting with your target audience/persona i.e. the people you are speaking to with your messaging. If your platform does many things, you should prioritize on the biggest problem you're solving for. Your platform may do many, many things and solve for many, many problems so you need to figure out what your target customer cares about the most and focus on that as the CORE message. If you don't know the answer, then you need to test and validat ...Read More

I generally look at it like this: Use Case -> Business Case -> Story. Starting with the use cases, I think about what people actually do with this platform (cue the "two Bobs" from "Office Space"). Then I think about how those capabilities translate into solutions to real problems, as different stakeholders experience them (that last part is absolutely critical, by the way). Those are my business cases.  Once I have my business cases, I can do one of two things. Either, I can see that one, ...Read More