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Jeffrey A. “jam” McGuireAligning and orchestrating product content for complex business use cases is much easier when you have a framework to structure and guide your efforts.
Jeffrey A. “jam” McGuire and his business partner developed the “value map” framework to structure and organize product marketing information. This helps them to align internal stakeholders on strategy and messaging and to efficiently deliver the right content to both business and technical users of the product.
We talked about:
- his role as Partner at Open Strategy Partners, his consultancy based in Cologne, Germany, that focuses on marketing for B2B and open-source software companies
- the origins of his value map framework in the complex marketing services that he delivers in an early client’s need for a CMS comparison
- an oral walk-through of his (very visual) value map diagram
- how clusters of features in his map provide technical answers to focused business questions
- his concept of a “value case,” and its benefit-challenge-solution structure
- the role of structured content in the implementation of a value map
- how value cases serve as “a cheat code for storytelling” because it actually portrays a hero’s journey
- the unique objectives of B2B marketing and the role social proof and face-to-face human interaction in his work
- a conceptual ascent of his framework pyramid: features and functionality at the base, position and USPs, and then up to guiding principles
- his methodology for aligning stakeholders around a product’s messaging strategy
jam’s bio
Jeffrey A. “jam” McGuire is a Partner at Open Strategy Partners, where he helps organizations communicate and grow, finding and telling the stories that connect their technologies with the value they deliver. He builds on nearly twenty years of experience in open source technology, at the intersection of software, business, and culture. His approach to technology marketing is centered on sharing the human context of complex technology solutions. As co-Founder of the German Drupal Association, community-building is close to Jeffrey’s heart. He enjoys celebrating creators’ expertise and combining storytelling and performance to convey information and motivate his audiences. An experienced public speaker, he has hosted numerous awards ceremonies and delivered dozens of keynotes, 150+ conference presentations, and 220+ podcast interviews in the last 15 years. He’s based in Cologne, Germany.
Connect with jam online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 211. When you’re taking on huge content challenges in complex business environments, it helps to have a good framework to guide your efforts. Jeffrey A. McGuire, known as “jam” in the content marketing and open-source software communities, has developed “value maps” to structure and organize product information. Content strategists and creators then simply follow the map to address the needs of both business and technical users of the product.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 211 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Jeffrey A. McGuire. Jeffrey, he’s known as Jam in the communities that I know him from, the open-source software and CMS communities. He’s a partner at Open Strategy Partners, a consultancy that he runs. So welcome, Jam. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re doing these days.
jam:
Hey, Larry. I’m really thrilled to be here talking with you, and I have no idea how we’re going to cram… A half an hour is never going to be enough, I’m just saying that. And let’s see, about me, I live in Cologne, Germany and I consider it my home. And at the time of recording, we’ve just finished Carnival for 2025. And the number 11 is a very special number in Cologne, so I’m thrilled to be on episode number 211.
Larry:
Oh, I did not make that connection. I was just in Cologne at the holidays for Christmas markets and learned a lot about that 11 stuff. That’s a whole other… Which we’ve already had that conversation. That’s fun. So, Jam, I can’t remember which gathering it was, but you presented about this value map framework that you use to work with the content marketing content that you work with so much. So it’s very visual, so this is going to be a little bit of a challenge, but I want to convey this in the form of a podcast as best we can because I’m just a sucker for a good framework. So talk a little bit about, how did this thing even come about? Where did the value map framework come from?
jam:
Open Strategy Partners has been in business for more than eight years now, and we serve B2B technology companies and open-source organizations, so imagine SaaS, content management, hosting platform certification and so on, and in general, specialist audience marketing, and generally technical. And I come out of open-source software. I come out of the Drupal community originally. I’ve been involved in Drupal and TYPO3 and PHP and a lot of other communities. We founded the company to help my friends and peers do better in their businesses by helping them communicate the value of what they do better.
jam:
We have a very specific meaning when we say we do B2B marketing and technology marketing, and the B2B marketing is not about getting 100,000 clicks to convert to 1,000 redirects to 10 demos to a client. It’s about building trust, it’s about building authority, it’s about, in content marketing terms, consistency and relevance technically. So the first point there is that we operate on the principles of empathy, clarity, and trust. I want to create material that’s relevant to the audience and that’s easy to consume and that’s technically accurate and that’ll build up trust over time.
jam:
And when I say that we are in technology marketing as well as in B2B technology marketing, when I compare that to B2C marketing, I feel that technology marketing needs constant creation and reaffirmation of the context you’re operating in. B2C marketing, if I’m selling a hamburger or a shampoo or a car, if you’re in the same culture and timeframe as I am, we know the factors that go into choosing a car or food to eat or how to wash your hair.
jam:
In technology, do you know what the difference is between Kubernetes and Docker and how APIs work and whatever? Maybe not. So my clients are technically oriented businesses often selling very complex products to less technical people. So we have to do a lot of translation between technical complexity and the business value that those things deliver and then tell the stories to at least two kinds of audiences, more technical audiences. If we stick with the software businesses, which is what we do mostly, you know you’re talking with developers, you’re talking with project managers, you’re talking with… And you have to give people real facts written in the real way to build credibility and build trust. And then if you show them features that they’re excited to try, hey, presto, they download your thing, they call for a demo, they adopt your open-source project and so on.
jam:
Decision makers, budget holders, marketers don’t necessarily have a technical background, and we need to write content about the same products from a business perspective that says, “You can earn more money or lose less money or be more efficient or deliver better quality.” Everybody says they do. We start with the facts of a product and the business value that they deliver, and when we write the business stories, you can go and do your due diligence, and we’ve built them on fact. There’s no hyperbole, there’s no vaporware, so we’re selling reality.
jam:
And then the third little piece on the side of our practice is we come from open-source, so our friends and colleagues in all of the open-source world can start with us basically on day one. We understand licensing and community and contribution and a bunch of the special, wonderful concepts about open-source that you can’t assume that any given agency down the road will understand. When we got started with Open Strategy Partners in 2016, ’17-ish, one of our very early clients wanted a comparison between their open-source CMS and some other CMSs, some of them proprietary, some of them open-source. And my genius co-founder, Tracy Evans, she is definitely the brains behind the operation, and most of the frameworks and most of the ways that we work structurally come from her education experience and background. She’s an MBA, she’s an internationally experienced manager and leader, and she has a formal education in business marketing and all of these structures.
jam:
I joke, but I’m also not joking, I’ve worked in open-source since 2006-ish; I’ve had 5,000 beers with developers and agency owners and other people, and I’ve also been in the business and been in a startup and so on, and I came through a technical beginning into communications as a writer and journalism and then through the community path into marketing to where we are now. One of the first big problems that we needed to solve for one of our first big clients was this comparison. Tracy had herself gone through comparison exercises in previous situations in her life and career, and she was a perfect marketing persona because she was the non-technical, budget-holding executive making technology decisions, and if she looked at Drupal, for example, an open-source CMS, the thing that the community homepage said for the long time was something like community plumbing, and she didn’t understand why she would be interested in plumbing. And if she dug a little bit deeper, she would find a bunch of features, but it was impossible to tell as a business person what this thing would actually do for you.
jam:
Now, kind of even worse is any Drupal practitioner, especially 10 or 15 years ago, would have told you, “Oh, Drupal will do anything. Just tell us what you want and we’ll put it together,” right? You can’t sell a conversation. You need to sell a product. So she had a business vision, she knew it needed to be online. Adobe Web Experience Manager, or whatever it was called back then, took a really different approach. So in Drupal or TYPO3 or a lot of our friends in open-source in general, they’ll tell you, “Hey, you can plug in any WYSIWYG editor you want. We can add spell-checking, you can have drag-and-drop editing and image tagging, and then this and this and this and this.” What does she do with that? She has no idea.
jam:
As a geek, as a developer, I say, “Oh, I can build custom authoring experiences customized to the exact needs of my project.” Open-source is really good, especially Drupal in abstracting out generic solutions that people then customize. Adobe Experience Manager said, “We give you business-friendly authoring,” right? Radically different level of detail, radically different message. Is it true that they offer business-friendly authoring? Who knows? Big businesses use it. Is it customizable? Probably. You and I know that that’s expensive and difficult, whatever. But there was no way to do an apples-to-apples comparison of a feature list where you have to know what you’re looking for and a three-word description of business-friendly authoring, right? There’s no way to do this apples-to-apples comparison, and Tracy was unbelievably frustrated.
jam:
So when we got this chance to do a CMS comparison, Tracy came up with what we now call a value map. And the idea is it’s a tool… So the origin-origin story is we were doing comparisons between different systems and we needed to be able to look at the level of specific atomic pieces of functionality, what was actually there, and categorize them and name those categories so that we could do an apples-to-apples comparison.
jam:
So I come out of the world of CMS. It’s really easy for me to talk in CMS examples. But if you have the things that I just talked about, UTF-8 character support, which means you can have any language displayed, spell-checking, and WYSIWYG editor and whatever, those things in the features, then you can make a cluster of features, a node in the graph if you want, and call it authoring experience, right? And then you can go and see how far you can do on your due diligence with Adobe to find, what are the specific features that they mean with quote-unquote business-friendly authoring, and all of a sudden you have authoring experience and you have a one-to-one comparable situation, right? That’s how we started it.
Larry:
Right.
jam:
It turns out that we’ve done those much less often than we’ve used individual, single product value maps as an incredible tool for marketing and content marketing strategy and execution. And I believe that implementation is the one that got you excited the last time I presented it over in Amsterdam.
Larry:
Yeah. First of all, I have to say you couldn’t… I don’t know if you knew this when we spoke, but the last episode right before you, 210, is a chat with Greg Dunlap. I’m sure you know him and his book-
jam:
We go way back. We go way back.
Larry:
Yeah, exactly. And he just dropped his book about authoring experience. So I love that your first cluster, the first value cluster that you come up with, is around the topic of the last conversation. That’s just awesome.
jam:
Shout-out to Greg.
Larry:
Yeah. Greg is awesome. Yeah. But also, kudos to you for taking on the most challenging marketing situation in the world, this notion of B2B, which is already challenging for people who studied conventional marketing, tech content, and then kind of community-based stuff around open-source. You’ve picked all the really troublesome areas, so good on you for… But my assumption there is that maybe that’s why you had to come up with a framework, because this is so complex.
Larry:
You’re reminding me now… I’m just going to say real quickly for folks who are listening, I’ll share it in the show notes, but you have this brilliant diagram of the value map that is kind of features across the bottom, they kind of cluster as you go up, and then there’s this why and how up the side. And as you were talking, I can kind of picture… It sort of reminds me of my work as an ontologist where you look at all the cluster of instances at the bottom, try to put them together in meaningful things, but also look from the top at the business intent or the business value that you need to deliver. It looks like you’ve encapsulated that. And again, I’ll put a copy, a picture of the diagram in the show notes, but what you just said sets up the value map perfectly. Can you walk us through what it looks like?
jam:
Yeah. Yeah. And anyone who wants to learn more, please get in touch with me because I’m happy to hand-wave about this all day and talk about it and send you more information maybe if it’s helpful. Obviously, we do work with it. It’s our core tool among a few methodologies and processes that we’ve developed in the last eight or nine years now. Yeah.
jam:
So if you come back, we’re trying to map the full functionality of a given product or service, and I mean literally anything from a content management system to a partner program to a new feature in an existing product to a corporate division. Any feature is, as they like to say in tech, a thing that does a thing. The earliest value maps we did were content management systems, and I think that we determined that TYPO3, the way that we mapped it out… And ignoring the whole concept of extensions for a second because you can always open-source, you can always make it bigger, the content management systems that we looked at came in with seven or 800 features easily, right? So once we figured that out, that’s why we had to start clustering things.
jam:
And then it quickly became clear that what I call logical functional clustering works really, really well. So then you can see that with 800 features on the bottom line of a pyramid, it’s a very broad pyramid, we clustered these logical functional groups, and I believe that we came in with a something like 27 feature areas, so 27 nodes of functionality, 27 clusters… Sorry, our neighbor is starting his very loud car. I’m hoping …
Larry:
I can’t hear it on the recording, so I think …
jam:
Oh, that’s good news. It’s obnoxiously loud. So we came out with this, let’s say, 800 features and had written down what each one does, “It does this and contributes to that,” kind of statements. That was a lot to deal with. That was really overwhelming. We’re like, “Okay, we’ve really got to cluster this, because how can you work with that?” So, okay, we clustered those into about 27 feature areas. In terms of marketing and content planning and strategic thinking, 27 is still a lot, so then we thought, “Okay, let us cluster the clusters,” and we called the next level of the pyramid up feature categories. Quick example, WYSIWYG and UTF8 and the things that we were mentioning, there’s a cluster that’s called authoring experience, and if I have another cluster that’s social Media integrations and another cluster that’s digital asset management maybe, they would go into a feature category, so a larger group that I could call digital marketing enablement, right? So then you have that.
jam:
And then what became apparent to me, which has become a really powerful mental model, is that any feature and any cluster of features are a technical answer to a business question. So I know that you love ontologies and probably knowledge graphs and all that stuff, so there’s a pretty typical concept in marketing and in query-building and so on where you have triplets. So if you think in marketing for a second, I am a persona, a given like, “My job is such and so, I work in a type of organization or a particular industry, and I have X business challenge,” right? So, “Oh, we need to do digital marketing with our content management system,” so, “I am a marketer at a kind of company and I need to do social media scheduling and I need to write content and publish it,” right? Well, a CMS can publish content, and then if you’ve got this digital marketing enablement cluster, then that’s that need question answered with a technical answer.
jam:
The next thing that we came up with turned out to be the beating heart of all of our work, almost. We have a concept called a value case. So once we get to any size of cluster, each cluster gets a name, it gets a tagline, which is already proto marketing copy, and it gets what we call a value case. And the value case is very specifically the benefit you get from adopting this piece of the technology, the challenge that it addresses, and the solution of how it fixes, solves, addresses the challenge, right? We work in the order benefit challenge solution because a great deal of the content we write, I need all of that right in the lead, right in the first couple of sentences of any piece of content because, as I said before, we want to have empathy with the reader. I want them to self-qualify when they’re reading. I want them to read that first paragraph or that teaser and say, “Oh, this is for me and I see myself. I feel seen. They see me. They understand my challenge,” and then I’m willing to read the rest of this thing, right? So it’s calculated, but I think it’s really meaningful.
jam:
And then we associate personas kind of abstractly with our marketing, but they’re not directly in the value map. They’re a factor. We don’t write different value cases for different personas, for example. We give this very tight benefit challenge solution definition with a name and a tagline. That’s a lot of marketing. That’s a lot of campaign ideas. That’s blog ideation. There’s a lot there in that node. And then we also sometimes say, “Have you got documentation for this feature? Is it on the current version? When was the last time you blogged about it? Is there a campaign about this?” It’s this huge store of potential storytelling, I guess-
Larry:
That’s really interesting. Another love of mine is omnichannel marketing, omnichannel content strategy, and what you just described… And that’s one of the benefits… I don’t think we’ve even talked about this yet, but that’s one of the benefits we’ve talked about before is that this is a way to organize not just marketing content, because you just mentioned technical documentation or other kinds of content. I guess, how do you do that both conceptually and then… We’re both CMS nerds… how does that manifest technically in a CMS implementation?
jam:
What we have not done is turn these methodologies and processes that we go through, we have not turned them into explicit software. We have some internal tooling that we can go from interview and workshop into value map, and we have a lot of experience in saying, “There’s a feature, there’s a feature, there’s a feature, there’s a feature,” and then we go back and interview a stakeholder and say, “What’s the benefit of that? Why do you have this,” kind of things, right? And then, “Okay, and if you say that client X gets something out of this, how is it that you solve that,” right? We’re good at spotting those.
Larry:
Well, I guess, actually let me back up from that. As you’re saying this, I realize that… The reason I wanted to talk to you is because I love a good framework, and most frameworks, and it sounds like this one is, from what you’re saying, technology-agnostic-
jam:
Oh, yeah.
Larry:
… that you do this work outside of whatever the technical implementation is. I guess I’ll kind of withdraw the question about the CMS because there’s a whole bunch of implied things about structured content and how you might organize things. But I guess-
jam:
Well…
Larry:
Yeah.
jam:
If you look at, I think, some of our blogs, and I’m certainly happy to share proper examples, there is a structural connection between the value map and content very, very often because you might say, “Okay, we need to sell this product more this year, and we’ve identified an opportunity in a particular industry,” and “Okay, so there’s a vertical that we’re going for. What are the primary personas in there?” So you’re doing campaign design already. “We know the challenges that you’re facing. We know this,” so you’re designing a regular old campaign, targeting someone who has a set of to-dos and challenges and so on.
jam:
We write structured content. We have a brief that says, “This piece of content, the title is probably going to be this. It’s in this campaign. This is a target audience. These are the top three challenges. Here’s the feature from our product that addresses that.” All of this material goes in before we start writing a lick of content. I want content creation to be a fill-in-the-blanks exercise, right? Knowing that I’m writing for this persona and that they have these challenges, I can do really targeted research, and I as a writer or my writing team can… They know we’re writing 1,000 words. And of course, in practice, we’re also doing SEO stuff, we’re looking at key phrases. The whole digital content marketing stuff feeds in, but we work in a really structured way. So what you have, if you know that there’s like, “Here’s the top three challenges for this persona,” you look at your value map, those challenges are fixed by these features; interview the developer of that feature, get a background story on this, do a demo of that one. All of that stuff goes into content planning.
jam:
And then the content itself, because I have names of these functional clusters and I have taglines for them and I have these little stories, I can, not necessarily one-to-one, but I can dump those into my outline and say, “This is how we describe this. This is the collective, agreed-upon value map definition of this feature,” and building a story around that. If you think about it for a second, the value case is kind of a cheat code for storytelling because it’s actually a hero’s journey. “Here I am as a persona X with the problem, I’m managing a golf club and I need to schedule my tee-off times better,” or whatever it is, “Boy, I wish I could do that better,” and my vision, the benefit that I want is I’ve got all that managed and I know capacity and I can predict it and I can do my job better and know when to water it, whatever it is with golf. I’m not a golfer. So there’s that vision of, “Here’s my current state,” and the start of the hero’s journey where, “Oh, okay, so I have a vision,” and then the challenge… So that’s the benefit, right?
jam:
And then the challenge is, “Well, I can’t personally…” whatever it is. “I can’t plan for left-handed players.” I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. Well, no, in this case actually I do know because I need to coordinate in five-minute increments and my current system only lets me book on the hour and whatever. So I’m looking for a system that does that. “Okay, can I do to-the-minute scheduling?” “Yes.” “Oh, awesome.” And then how do you solve that? Well, solve that by implementing this extension of this system that… and we build a case study, and then we do content marketing. We build a case study, we do social bites, we interview somebody, but those pieces from the value map go straight in there, then to the… So this value case, right? You have this little hero’s journey from where we are, and my challenge is I see the vision to benefit, and the product solves it, and the solution is my little journey to go from the challenge to the benefit, right?
Larry:
The people who are listening can’t see this, but you just made a couple of circular gestures. It makes me wonder both how iterative the process is, but also what the learning loop is, like how the success of those stories, when they’re presented, how that might feed back in.
jam:
I wish I had a better answer for you. We’ve been working more and more this way for more than eight years, and we have really, super successful, wonderful relationships with our clients who are doing better in their business, which is why we wanted to do it. So it’s very fulfilling as well.
Larry:
Yeah. No, and I know this is some kind of weird holy grail for me that in all my CMS work, I’m always trying to figure out, what’s the feedback mechanism, something like cloud observability, but for content management systems. I know that’s pie in the sky. But hey, Jam, I can’t believe-
jam:
We have a weird challenge too. Keep in mind that our core business is B2B, so what is my metric, right? It’s not mass traffic. It’s not clicks. You don’t know. Designing the KPIs can be tricky, right? And we have to build up trust and we have to be honest that content marketing takes some time to be effective, right? However you’re building your reputation, the search engines have to recognize that you’re authoritative in your space. You have to be careful on all sorts of technical levels, right? But you have to be giving genuinely good information over the longer term, and yet I have clients who need four projects a year. They need four projects a year. I have clients who sometimes there’s no connection between reading a thing and… There isn’t that classic B2C funnel where it’s like 750 eyes on a page equals 10 credit cards in the machine. That’s a whole other interesting thing.
jam:
So we look at all sorts of things like owning SERP results, looking at specific keywords, but then also in every case, including my own business, going to events and talking with the humans and being ready to tell the real stories that back up. I guess social proof is what closes the loop for us. I have a lot of structures and a lot of methodologies, how to build a website, where to put information, all that kind of stuff, and case studies and testimonials are incredibly powerful. What’s that saying? As much as things change, they always stay the same?
Larry:
Exactly.
jam:
Oh, no, the more things change, the more they stay the same. That’s what it is.
Larry:
Plus ça change… Yeah. I don’t speak French, but yeah. No, that’s awesome. And the way you just described that, it’s like the challenge of every… And like I said earlier, the challenge of not just B2B, but technical content to both technical and business users, that’s like… Yeah, it would be ridiculous to try to apply consumer, page-based metrics to that kind of thing.
jam:
So you just mentioned what I think is maybe your second favorite aspect of the value map according to what you’ve told me in the past. So if everyone can imagine for a second that you have a broad-based pyramid with 30 to 800 features on the bottom, one or two levels of clustered features that are functional groups, they’re proto-marketing with some text and some thought behind them, we generally can and will write content for our clients that is either focused on technical audiences, so developers and whatever technical means in your industry, and we do content for what I sometimes call budget holders, but that might be marketers, that might be the CFO, that might be the CEO.
jam:
The empathy play here is they want different kinds of content and they use different language, so we have to be aware of that as content creators. But having a fact-based collection of what your product is and does connected to value delivery, so I think of… Imagine this pyramid. The bottom is features and functionality. If you go upwards through the pyramid, it gets narrower and narrower and narrower. Above the clusters of feature are things like your positioning, your USPs, your product taglines, all of these… You’ve boiled up all of those facts into marketing stuff essential to your brand, like guiding principles for your communication.
jam:
When we write anything about a given technical feature, we want to give the technical readers the chance to be influencers within their organizations because they have a lot of influence over technology decisions. I want a developer to go to her boss and say, “Boss, boss, boss, boss, boss, I saw this unbelievable package, and I read this article about it, and I want to play with it because it does…” blah, blah, blah, blah; fill in technical details here. But they say that they’re increasing deployments by 35% and reducing errors by 15%, and so she’s got a business benefit-based set of facts to present to a decision maker to give the permission to buy a license or to download a test or whatever. So they can influence by having business arguments presented alongside the API implementation whatever that we’ve put in the technical article.
jam:
If we write a business article that says, “Hey, you should give your developers this package if you’re already using this other thing because 47% here and 57% there and…” the CEO or the CMO might have no idea, technically, often. Because we’ve built completely fact-based structure, they can hand off the YouTube video that they see or the white paper that they read to their CTO, to a senior developer, and say, “They claim such and so. Can you please go look?” And if you do technical due diligence, we have built this on no vaporware, no BS. This is fact-based, technical marketing that holds up to any level of investigation.
jam:
So going up from the bottom to the top, it’s why are you developing a feature; we’re developing this feature because it delivers value; and then you’ve defined the value already in your value case; and then as you distill it, as you boil it up into the USPs, into the positioning of your statement, and as we talked about before, you can also say, “I am a such and so in this kind of organization and I have this challenge.” The why you’d build this feature is because it solves that challenge. And business content says, “We give you all this benefit,” and the question is, “Well, how do you give me the benefit,” and the how is looking downwards through the pyramid because there is a technical answer to a business question. So, yeah, I love that bit. I love that bit of the pyramid.
Larry:
Yeah, I love the way this all stitches together. Hey, Jam, I can’t believe it. We’re coming up on time already, but I think we’ve done a good job of… I feel like we got to everything we wanted to talk to, so I feel good about that. But before we wrap, is there anything last, anything you want to revisit from the conversation or that we didn’t get to or…
jam:
I think the little cherry on top that I’d like to share would be a quick summation of what you’ve got with the value map and then actually the next step that we do to get to what I’ve been talking about, which is the positioning and taglines and USPs of your product because it’s really, really important. All of this value map work we do, we interview and workshop with stakeholders: developers, product owners, executives, salespeople, happy clients and so on, anyone that we can get to talk with. And we have a good set of questions. We know how to look for things and how to find things. We combine scraping your documentation, seeing what you’ve written in public to help us start asking questions, and we don’t have to be an expert in your technology to start building this thing about your technology, which is also really important, because it’s a methodology; it means it’s repeatable.
jam:
So we get all this stuff in this beautiful pyramid we’ve been talking about, and we have a list of dozens or hundreds of challenges and benefits and solutions in our value cases, and we work through with all of the stakeholders again in a further series of interactions to figure out what are the top three to five challenges, benefits, and solutions, independent of the other parts of the value cases and independent of personas, like what is the most important to you as a client? What is the most important to you as a sales guy? What is the most important to you as a developer? And everyone’s allowed to have their own reasons. And we go through this voting exercise, and stuff generally floats to the top and becomes quite clear. And if there’s any fuzziness or there’s a couple too many or things are coming out equally, everybody gets together, and we talk about it until we all agree on it. It’s an amazingly unifying exercise, because think about… I talk about the blind and the elephant a lot. People working on your product might be touching the tail or the foot or the trunk or the side of the elephant if they’re in sales and marketing and devs and whatever. We build the whole elephant, everybody can see, and then we’ve agreed on the best-selling, most interesting, most valuable parts of it.
jam:
Then this positioning exercise is your brand, which is in whatever product service category it is, serves an audience of such and so, that’s your personas and your verticals, with these four top challenges, benefits, and solutions. We put that all into a thing, we talk with everybody, and we start putting together product-level value cases based on the most important things that have floated up. So we’re distilling this another time even harder. And we generally will give one to three value cases that you either test or use in different circumstances in the market, and we do a product positioning statement out of the sum total of all of this top-of-the-pyramid information to say, “Your brand in this category helps an audience address a challenge delivering this benefit by solving it this way.” And it, of course, could be more than one audience, more than one challenge and so on. But it’s very, very formalized, and it’s a very dumb, long sentence, but it gives you the structure to then write beautiful text with, to compress, to choose however you want to use it, create taglines from it, but it’s not random copywriting or something. We really work with everyone together to arrive at this agreement.
jam:
And once you have all of this collection of technical features that are well-described in what they do, in the value that they deliver, and the positioning of the company and the USPs that all link between each other, this is a single source of truth for the sales team to build sales materials, to decide what your marketing campaigns are, and connect with all the different things. It’s really, really satisfying and it’s so, so helpful. Yeah. And then we sort of come full circle on that thing, and obviously-
Larry:
So many people proclaim the desire for a single source of truth, and this seems like… So seldom it actually happens, but this seems like it actually does once in a while. Hey, one very last thing, Jam, if folks want to connect with you or follow you online, what’s the best place to find you?
jam:
Right. So our website is openstrategypartners.com. Our company is on LinkedIn as Open Strategy Partners. I’m on LinkedIn either as Jeffrey McGuire or Jeffrey A. McGuire, but look for the Jeffrey McGuire with the comedy mustache, and that’s me. My DMs are open. I’m super happy to talk. Technically I’m on other bits of social media, but LinkedIn is a really, really good place to find me, or we have a contact form on the website. If you want to see more than listening to me hand-wave, we’ve got lots of diagrams. Yeah, I’d love to talk.
Larry:
Excellent. I’ll put all that in the show notes as well. Well, thanks so much, Jam. It’s always fun to talk. This was a particularly awesome conversation.
jam:
Great. Thank you so much, Larry. It was way too short. I could keep going all day.
Larry:
Me too. That’s the hazard of this job.
jam:
Exactly. Exactly.
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