Clarity Is the Strategy

Four years of advising technology companies taught me that positioning rarely fixes a confused product. More often, the product has to become clearer first.

Overview

Between 2014 and 2018, I worked with more than thirty technology companies at moments when something important was changing. Most came looking for strategy, positioning, or a clearer way to explain what they had built. The deeper problem was usually harder to identify: the company itself had become unclear. Scalar taught me that clarity is not a marketing exercise. It is an operating advantage that influences what a company builds, who it serves, and what it chooses to ignore.

Category:

Reflections

Published:

Nov 2, 2018

Updated:

Publisher:

Philip Cross

Reading

5 min

Series

Learning

Updated:

Intoduction

When I started Scalar, I thought I was helping companies explain themselves better.

The work appeared to support that assumption. Founders came to us because their positioning was unclear, their websites were difficult to understand, their products had become more complicated, or their teams were struggling to agree on what the company should say.

It was tempting to treat those as communication problems.

Over time, I realized that communication was usually where the problem became visible, not where it began.

A company would describe itself one way on its website, another way in a sales conversation, and another way internally. Its product would have accumulated features because each one had made sense at the time. The team would be pursuing several customer segments because each seemed commercially attractive. Nobody was necessarily making a bad decision.

The company had simply accumulated too many reasonable decisions without a sufficiently clear idea connecting them.

That became the real work at Scalar. Not making companies sound clearer. Helping them become clearer.

The Problem Was Usually Somewhere Else

The first thing I learned was to distrust the problem as it was initially presented.

A founder would say they needed a new positioning strategy. A sales team would say they needed better messaging. A product leader would say the website did not explain the product properly.

Sometimes those things were true. But they were often symptoms of something upstream.

If a company serves too many types of customers, its positioning becomes difficult. If the product solves too many unrelated problems, the website becomes difficult. If the leadership team has different ideas about what the company is becoming, the sales team naturally tells different stories.

None of those problems can be solved permanently by finding better words.

The work therefore started with the product itself. What does it actually do? Who uses it? Why do they choose it? What were they using before? What alternatives do they consider? What part of the product creates the most value? What does the company believe is important that customers do not seem to care about?

The answers were often different from the company's existing narrative. That was usually where the interesting work began.

I became increasingly convinced that positioning is not something you attach to a company once the product is finished. It is a description of the choices the company has already made. If those choices are unclear, the positioning will be unclear too.

Clarity Changes What You Build

Once you know exactly who you are building for and what problem matters most to them, product decisions become surprisingly different. Features that once seemed obviously valuable become distractions. Customer requests become easier to evaluate. Roadmaps become shorter. Some opportunities become easier to reject.

That last part was particularly important.

A company can usually find a reasonable argument for building almost anything. A customer wants it. A competitor has it. A salesperson thinks it will help close a deal. An investor might like the market it opens. An engineer thinks it would be interesting to build.

Individually, those are all valid reasons. Together, they can destroy focus.

At Scalar, I started seeing product strategy less as deciding what to add and more as deciding what the company was willing to leave out. That required a much clearer understanding of the product's purpose.

If a feature strengthens the reason the right customer chooses you, it may be worth building. If it simply makes the product more capable without making the core value clearer, the answer becomes less obvious.

This was one of the most useful lessons I carried forward from the studio. Good positioning does not merely change what a company says. It changes what the company is willing to build. And once that happens, positioning stops being a marketing exercise. It becomes a product discipline.

Clarity Has Consequences

The longer Scalar worked with companies, the more I noticed that ambiguity rarely stayed in one department.

A company that could not clearly explain its product eventually had trouble deciding what to build. That uncertainty appeared in the roadmap. The roadmap then affected hiring. Hiring affected organizational structure. Organizational structure affected how decisions were made. Meanwhile, sales teams were trying to explain an increasingly complicated product to customers who were already struggling to understand why they needed it.

What looked like several independent problems was often one problem appearing in different places.

This changed how I thought about strategy. A good strategy should make decisions easier. If the strategy requires every team to reinterpret it independently, it is probably not clear enough.

The same principle applies to positioning. If a customer understands the company but the product team does not, something is wrong. If the sales team understands the value proposition but the roadmap does not reflect it, something is wrong. If the product is excellent but nobody can explain why it should exist, something is wrong.

The strongest companies we worked with were not necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated strategies. They were the ones where the strategy created alignment. People knew what mattered. They knew what did not matter. They could explain why a decision had been made.

That last part is easy to underestimate. Clarity reduces the amount of energy a company spends negotiating with itself. It gives people a common reference point. And as companies grow, that becomes increasingly valuable.

The Hardest Decision Was to Stop

By 2018, Scalar had become a successful business. We had a strong team, more than thirty clients behind us, and enough demand to continue for as long as I wanted.

That should have made the decision easy. Instead, it made it difficult.

There was no crisis forcing me to leave. Nothing had failed. The business had not become unprofitable. There was no dramatic reason to explain why it should end.

I simply wanted to build again.

The longer I stayed at Scalar, the easier it became to continue advising other founders instead of taking the risk of becoming one again. That was the uncomfortable truth.

The studio was working. But it was no longer taking me where I wanted to go.

So we finished the remaining engagements, transitioned several long-term relationships to trusted partners, and paused the company.

I learned something from that decision that had nothing to do with consulting. A successful company can still have reached the end of its purpose.

We often talk about knowing when to stop in the context of failure. It is much harder to recognize when stopping is the correct decision precisely because something is working. There was no metric that told me to leave. The decision came from direction, not performance.

That distinction has stayed with me. Scalar was successful. It simply wasn't the future I wanted to spend the next decade building.

Conclusion

Scalar changed the way I think about strategy because it taught me that clarity is rarely produced by better communication alone.

It comes from making difficult choices about what matters. Who the company serves. What problem it solves. What it will build. What it will not build. What opportunities it will ignore. And eventually, even whether the company itself should continue.

The work also changed how I understood my own role. I had started Scalar by helping other people navigate inflection points. By the time I left, I had become much more interested in experiencing those inflection points myself.

That was the real reason to pause it.

The studio had taught me how to look underneath a problem before trying to solve it. It taught me that a positioning problem can be a product problem, that a product problem can be a strategy problem, and that strategy is ultimately about creating enough clarity for a company to make coherent decisions.

Those lessons followed me into everything I built afterward.

Scalar ended without failing. It ended because it had done what I created it to do.

That was perhaps the first time I understood that a founder's job is not always to make a company last. Sometimes it is to know what the company was for in the first place.

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Trust Is a Product Feature

Winning Together

Clarity Is the Strategy

Clarity Is the Strategy

Overview

Intoduction

Intoduction

The Problem Was Usually Somewhere Else

Clarity Changes What You Build

Clarity Has Consequences

The Hardest Decision Was to Stop

Conclusion

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