This is really helpful, and definitely a problem I’ve had in my line of consulting work. Not so much with hardtech—“We make better inverters” is a kind of thing that needs to be written down somewhere, and the hard part is figuring out exactly what they mean by “better.” But with software, descriptions are so vague, and companies pivot a dozen times and claim a hundred target markets.
In my own conversations with people developing software platforms, one part of the reason is that at an abstract mathematical level, many problems have very similar shapes, and differ in implementation and interface details and the questions a customer wants to use the math to answer. If you just say “We can tell you where to put energy storage to make the distribution grid work better” than you’re only going to get interest from utilities, and no one will realize (or believe) that the same approach will help with water and oil and gas and traffic and shipping. So instead you come up with vague words about digital logistics and routing and infrastructure solutions/insights/optimizations or whatever, and no idea what makes one company different from a dozen others.
Also: companies often lie or are confused about what parts of themselves want, need, and are willing to pay for. So pricing can only really get crystallized further into the product development process when the provider has gotten some real feedback on which of the things they could do are what real customers actually see as needs.
This is really helpful, and definitely a problem I’ve had in my line of consulting work. Not so much with hardtech—“We make better inverters” is a kind of thing that needs to be written down somewhere, and the hard part is figuring out exactly what they mean by “better.” But with software, descriptions are so vague, and companies pivot a dozen times and claim a hundred target markets.
In my own conversations with people developing software platforms, one part of the reason is that at an abstract mathematical level, many problems have very similar shapes, and differ in implementation and interface details and the questions a customer wants to use the math to answer. If you just say “We can tell you where to put energy storage to make the distribution grid work better” than you’re only going to get interest from utilities, and no one will realize (or believe) that the same approach will help with water and oil and gas and traffic and shipping. So instead you come up with vague words about digital logistics and routing and infrastructure solutions/insights/optimizations or whatever, and no idea what makes one company different from a dozen others.
Also: companies often lie or are confused about what parts of themselves want, need, and are willing to pay for. So pricing can only really get crystallized further into the product development process when the provider has gotten some real feedback on which of the things they could do are what real customers actually see as needs.