Practical writing, videos, lessons, and shipped work from Daniel R. Odio, selected for Product Positioning.
5 items
You've shipped AI features that users love, but this article exposes the blind spot in your engagement metrics: you might be building digital cotton candy that feels like care but atrophies the human skills your users actually need. It's the mistake you won't catch in your analytics.
You're probably adding features to fix problems when you should be perfecting the core experience — this breaks down why Slack beat crowded competition by *removing* distractions, not adding them. The trap you're falling into is scope creep; this shows you how ruthless focus on 'less, better' creates the product/market fit that makes users overlook what's missing.
You've probably assumed the TV or the car dashboard is the 'main' device and your phone just connects to it, but you've got it backwards—and that mistake is why your app ideas keep feeling like afterthoughts. This piece explains why the phone is the command center and everything else is the peripheral, so you can stop building for the wrong screen.
You'll catch a pitch that nails the 'why didn't I think of that' test — HelioGraph's strategy of undercutting bloated enterprise tools by targeting the SMB market everyone else ignores. Study how they frame traction and positioning to avoid your own overcomplicated pivots.
You've been building "web apps" thinking they're fundamentally different from mobile apps, but users don't care about the tech stack — they care about ownership and focused action, which means your packaging and framing matters as much as your code.
You've shipped AI features that users love, but this article exposes the blind spot in your engagement metrics: you might be building digital cotton candy that feels like care but atrophies the human skills your users actually need. It's the mistake you won't catch in your analytics.
You're probably adding features to fix problems when you should be perfecting the core experience — this breaks down why Slack beat crowded competition by *removing* distractions, not adding them. The trap you're falling into is scope creep; this shows you how ruthless focus on 'less, better' creates the product/market fit that makes users overlook what's missing.
You've probably assumed the TV or the car dashboard is the 'main' device and your phone just connects to it, but you've got it backwards—and that mistake is why your app ideas keep feeling like afterthoughts. This piece explains why the phone is the command center and everything else is the peripheral, so you can stop building for the wrong screen.
You'll catch a pitch that nails the 'why didn't I think of that' test — HelioGraph's strategy of undercutting bloated enterprise tools by targeting the SMB market everyone else ignores. Study how they frame traction and positioning to avoid your own overcomplicated pivots.
You've been building "web apps" thinking they're fundamentally different from mobile apps, but users don't care about the tech stack — they care about ownership and focused action, which means your packaging and framing matters as much as your code.