Varun Parmar: belief

Transcript context

…Got it. So what I'm hearing is be very clear about your differentiator and continue to invest there and then make sure your positioning is clear around why you're... just identifying, "Here's why we're different and we're not just a better or worse version of this thing" or "Here's why we're different" and making sure that's really clear. Exactly. I think the other thing I would say, there's another core philosophy I have, which is products either get better over a period of time or they get worse. Products never remain the same. I think you can take that philosophy to a bunch of things in life, but I'm going to take the lens of products, which is my core philosophy is every single day, every single time somebody is pushing your code to production and you're releasing a feature or an enhancement, you are making the product better or you're making the product worse, but the products never remain same. The lens for this, Lenny, is actually from a customer's perspective, from the end user perspective. The thing is that if you are a player where there's no one else in the market, that's one thing, so that's great. Kudos to you for actually identifying a blue ocean strategy and sort of executing to that. But most markets, most products, actually have either direct or indirect competitors that are available. From the customer's mind, you're doing something, the competitor is doing something, so in their mind they're looking at these products and they're looking at these companies and they're saying, "Which is better versus not?" So with every release that your competitor is making and every release that you're making, you're either making chess points, moves against them, positive points, or you're going negative. I think that framework, if you have in mind, it actually drives an insane amount of clarity in terms of what you're doing and what the impact is going to be. Because every single move that you're making, the customer has that sort of in their mind, if not explicitly, implicitly that they're actually comparing these things. I think it brings a level of focus in terms of where you need to invest and why you need to invest and why this is going to make those decisions. I think it allows at least for product leaders to make some high quality decisions around the bets that they're making and how they're going to play out in terms of eventual once the dust settles and the market at large is going to say, "I'm going to standardize on something and now I feel I need to go get it for everyone." Or "This is the tool that I want to use for this particular use case." That all of these decisions that you are making ladder up to that final sort of play that you have to do in terms of the market consolidation that eventually happens. This is so interesting. Essentially what you're saying is that you find that being very close to and understanding the competition really well is really essential, versus this kind of the other end of the spectrum almost from just like, "Don't worry about the competition, don't pay attention." I like this point, metaphor of just like, "Are we moving ahead or further behind?" Is that where you operationalize that to track that? Then also just how do you not over-obsess with, "Let's just catch up, get more features," that kind of thing? How do you find that balance?…

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