I have written about prioritization previously on Tech Tuesday, introducing a prioritization heuristic and emphasizing the importance of a healthy mix of different projects. Today I want to add some point on how to think about competition in the context of prioritization. This is particularly important when you are in a somewhat crowded field and need to differentiate yourself from the competition.

What features should you prioritize when competing? Go back and take a look at the post on the prioritization heuristic first. Now think about the difference between going deeper on something that the competition has also versus working on something that the competition doesn’t have at all. The payoff to the latter is likely to be much higher and for less effort! When competing there is always the temptation to match competitors feature for feature and then pile on some more. In the diagram from the heuristic post think of that as going deeper and deeper along one of the directions with ever more diminishing returns.

The strongest position to take is to commit to just good enough along some dimensions and then pick the one differentiated dimension along which you will compete. For that it is best to choose something that changes the game as opposed to marginally improves on what competitors are doing. Or just short of that choose a dimension along which your competitors cannot easily follow you.

So what would be a concrete example? Self service sign up with aggressive pricing is an example of a dimension that would be difficult to match for competitors that are pursuing an enterprise sales model. Or if your competitors are all small startups with limited funding and you are well funded you might make infrastructure investments that give you a global footprint your principal dimension (eg building out a global network or marketplace where this is relevant).

Once you build out that dimension of your business you should also align your marketing messaging around it. That will set you apart from the crowd and everyone else is now playing catchup along that dimension. Another way you can think about that is: prioritize a dimension that you can “own” ie that can be uniquely identified with your startup.