Exceptional outcomes require exceptional inputs

John J. Schaub 

Mar 1, 2023

I have recently been helping out a neoBank as they get ready to launch their offering and as part of that process I have been talking to a number of Social Media strategists and managers. To say this process has been disappointing is a massive understatement and my next couple of posts will be short discussions of just where these companies are going wrong. The first point I want to make is a piece of advice I received years ago - 'exceptional outcomes require exceptional inputs'. That is if you want to get a different result from what everyone else is getting you are going to need to do things differently then they are. Too often as Product Leaders we get trapped in the mode of looking at our competition and blindly playing follow the leader which at best will result in a marginally better solution if you happen to have a team that can out operate the competition (Reality check you probably don't).

In the case of the social media managers I have been evaluating the proposals were virtual carbon copies of one another with the exact same approaches, the exact same tools and I am willing to bet the exact same outcome as everyone else will get which is not worth much if you are trying to stand out from the crowd. In very simple and blunt terms if you are doing the exact same thing as everyone else you are at best going to get slightly better results and unless you are already in a dominant leadership position slightly better results will not be enough.  In my humble opinion as a startup Product Leader you need to be looking for methods to deliver results of at least 2x the incumbent in order to be able to overtake them.

So how can a Product Leader know when their approach is different enough to be viable? My go to question to assess this is always 'What is your secret weapon?' That is what is the thing you do that no one else does either because they cannot or just do not want to. Ideally your secret weapon will be something that no one else can do because they lack the skills or technology meaning that even if the competition tries to copy you they will be unable to do so but in reality it is often sufficient to  just do something your competition is unwilling to do because of entrenched behaviours or sheer size. If you find yourself struggling to answer the question 'what is our secret weapon?' that is a massive red flag that you do not actually have a method to outcompete and you need to find one. 

So how do you find a secret weapon? Like a lot of things in life the process of identifying your secret weapon is a lot of tedious gruntwork followed by a three second flash of insight that will make you feel dumb for doing all the hard work leading up to it. I start the process by listing out all the things I know my competition can do. The key here is to categorize these as 'can do' and 'actually does' meaning for example your competition may be licensed to offer remittance service in XYZ country but do they actually do that? Once you have the list of all the things the competition can and actually do you need to start making a similar list for your own service.  The key here is to get creative and really put some thought into the advantages you might have. These advantages can be things like local ecosystem knowledge, language skills, regulatory advantages ect. Again if you cannot identify a viable secret weapon you need to seriously reconsider wither you want to enter a space as an upstart. I am not saying it is impossible to succeed as an upstart without some sort of unfair advantage but doing so is really going to require that your competition fails and you should never count on that.

If you are able to identify something that you can do that your competition either does not do or cannot do the next step is the same - exploit the advantage relentlessly. In the case of items that your competition can technically do but doesn't actually do you should be ready for the fact that they will notice what you are doing and copy you. That said I have seen cases where the competition happily let an upstart grab up market share for years before realizing they could stop them trivially so do not hesitate to move on these advantages if you see them even if you think they are ephemeral.