Everyone gets AI. Everyone can build faster. So where does your advantage come from?
Inspired by this MicroConf talk, here are three questions for your next product meeting.
1. Sell the outcome, not the benefits and features. (I mean the actual outcome).
Businesses buy software, then pay people to operate it. AI creates an opportunity to take on more of that work.
An invoice dashboard tells someone who to chase. A product that handles the chasing helps the business get paid.
You’re now competing for some of the labour budget, which can be much bigger than the software budget.
Ask: What work could we take off our customers’ hands?
2. Turn your customers into your moat. Put them in your DNA.
Build their language, workflows and awkward exceptions into how your product works.
Your relationships give you access to things a newcomer won’t know: why a process exists, where it breaks and what customers will trust you to handle.
Use every conversation, support request and correction to deepen that understanding.
Ask: Where does our product show how well we know our customers?
3. Build the learning loop
Do the work → observe the result → improve the next attempt.
If your product chases invoices, learn which approaches lead to payment and when a person needs to step in.
Each completed task should help improve the next one. That accumulated experience can become harder to reproduce than a feature list.
Ask: Does using our product make it better at delivering the outcome?
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