You aren’t telling your product’s whole story.

Use the Ladder of Abstraction to get to the bottom of it!

You aren’t telling your product’s whole story.

Words matter. Words bend around concepts, shape them, and bring your ideas to life. The wrong words–using on-premise when you mean on-premises¹–destroy meaning. Attaching words to a narrow slice of the spectrum of abstraction deprives your audience of engagement and understanding. 

The right words, expressed at the appropriate level of abstraction, make a compelling story. 

You probably aren’t telling your most compelling story.

Word choice is important. Even carefully chosen words stuck in the abstract or mired in the concrete fail your reader.

An audience wants to know why you built your product, to hear your vision and purpose, but you tell them how your product works.

Another audience needs a nuanced understanding of what your product does and how it works, but you tell them why your product defines an entirely new product category.

Visit a tech company’s website; it doesn’t matter which company, although in this article, I will pick on so-called B2B software companies, especially those building and marketing security software. 

On the homepage above the fold–a charming anachronism–appear concisely constructed product descriptions characterized by strong verbs and concrete language. Products analyze, detect, monitor, enforce, create, and protect. Dozens of similar products perform these duties in unparalleled, unmatched, unprecedented, and entirely unique ways because each author was coached to be specific and write about their product in terms of firsts and onlys.

There is nothing wrong with being concrete and specific. These statements stand on their own. But no narrative carries these examples into the reader’s imagination.

A bit of What, a lot of How.

The following examples throw a reader in at the deep end of product positioning. These are introductory statements companies make about their products. A couple are the very first full sentences on the website.

“We analyze telemetry from your core IAM systems to discover your workforce identities, protect them with best practices, and continuously monitor for identity threats.”

“Enhance incident investigation, prioritization and correlation with unmatched visibility of identities, assets, access privileges, and activities from a single pane of glass.”

“Comprehensive cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) capabilities [to] help organizations detect identity misconfigurations, ensure least-privilege compliance, and monitor identity hygiene metrics [...] detect security risks in cloud workloads, data, control and API layers.”

“Extend MFA and modern identity security to any sensitive resource, including ones that couldn’t be protected before – legacy applications, service accounts, OT systems, command-line interfaces used by ransomware, and more”

Huh?

Companies like these tell very little of their product’s story, instead focusing on What the product is and How it works.

Imagine a customer’s confusion. The language is so specific it’s opaque, full of jargon and unidentified acronyms, and introduces concepts without context. What are best practices? What are identity hygiene metrics? What is an IAM or an OT system?

All of these products may do the same thing. It’s equally likely they don’t. The security software market is finely segmented, with dozens of vendors in each narrowly defined category and so many products crammed to overflowing with esoteric features that, eventually, those companies, products, and features start to sound exactly the same.

The Ladder of Abstraction

S.I. Hayakawa² was an academic, linguist, and semanticist. In his book, Language in Thought and Action, Hayakawa proposed a model called the Ladder of Abstraction, which describes moving between concrete and abstract concepts while thinking, speaking, and writing. At the bottom rung is the most concrete language, and the top rung is the most abstract. 

The security software market’s Ladder of Abstraction looks something like this.

An existential threat sits at the top rung: everyone builds software, it is vulnerable, and malicious actors exploit those vulnerabilities. Over the past four years, the average cost of a security breach has risen by almost 30%.

By my unscientific survey, roughly 90% of security software vendors skip right past this astonishing fact and jump straight to what they built and how it works. And they stay there, mired in the How. The language ignores anything resembling a problem a customer might experience. There’s no big shift, and you lose the opportunity to tell how better off the world will be after they have your product.

Imagine a product that monitors for threats, detects and remediates those threats, and provides a dashboard where security practitioners can watch these events happen in real-time. These are interesting, fact-based statements about what the product is and how it works. 

But why did the company build the product? Why those capabilities?

What if those companies told the whole story?

Traffic stretches before you. A mile-long line of trucks clogs the highway waiting to enter a port that is no longer functioning. A vicious piece of malware has taken the computer systems down hard. 

Food and medicine languish in shipping containers, unable to finish the 1700-mile average journey.

If the food and medicine supply chain isn’t quickly restored…

Now, hit us with, “Enhance incident investigation, prioritization and correlation with unmatched visibility of identities, assets, access privileges, and activities from a single pane of glass,” and suddenly, we care a little more. 

This event happened³, motivating security companies to build products and venture capitalists to fund them to stop it from happening again.

Could this product have stopped that nightmare?

The Ladder of Abstraction reminds you to articulate the whole story: why you built your product, who it is for, what it does, and how it works.

So what and who cares?

The Ladder of Abstraction is a useful tool for inventorying and categorizing how you talk about your company and products. 

If all you talk about is What and How, expect shrugged shoulders and customers mumbling, “So what,” and forgetting to return your calls.

Match statements you make about your product to a rung on the ladder. I’ve found that most software is described in concrete terms, emphasizing how it works, standing on the lowest rungs of the ladder. I wrote product content like this for years, decades. Software is intangible, you cannot hold it in your hand or stand back to get a good look, and we fight against that abstractness by describing our products in the most concrete terms possible. 

If you find everything clusters low on the ladder, you’ve done a great job articulating What and How. Shift focus up the ladder and tell the Why part of the story. 

People think in terms of significant changes, shifts in how the world works that directly impact them. They are motivated to make those changes work to their advantage. Articulate that you understand how those factors contribute to your customers’ fitness and that you, too, are motivated by those factors. You’ll establish something no list of features and capabilities can–empathy.

Empathy creates differentiation. A customer with empathy believes she needs your product. Lists of features and capabilities merely convince. It is possible to convince without belief, but wow, it is much more challenging.

The story drives the product.

The story drives the product, not the other way around. Tell the product’s story starting with Why, high on the Ladder of Abstraction. Your product strategy fills in the details, and the roadmap delivers the features that finish the story. 

We faced an existential threat; our company mission is to protect customers from that threat; we observed patterns that made customers vulnerable, and our product has features that neutralize those patterns.

Suppose the customer understands the story and empathizes with it. In that case, they understand your company’s purpose and will be better prepared to understand what you built and how it works because they already anticipate it will solve their problem. 

Working the other way–telling them what it is and how it works before they understand the why–is a path to long, drawn-out, and difficult conversations.

1. Premises: a building and land occupied by a business. Premise: a statement or proposition which proves a separate proposition known as the conclusion. It’s a toss-up whether this is worse than saying you could care less when you mean you couldn’t. The frequency of both mistakes stuns.

2. He was also Canadian and a United States Senator from California, mere side notes to this discussion.

3. https://www.amazon.com/Sandworm-Cyberwar-Kremlins-Dangerous-Hackers/dp/0385544405