Choose your losses

Strategy is choosing what you’ll be bad at.

I’ve been revisiting Michael Porter’s work on strategy, and the point that's stuck with me is this: trying to be “the best” is usually a trap. “Best” often means you’re competing on the same dimensions as everyone else. The same benchmarks, same dashboards, same playbook. You can lead for a while, but the moment everyone copies what works, yesterday’s advantage becomes today’s expectation.

If you want to avoid the race to the bottom, don't try and compete on doing the same things as everyone else, but better. Do the things that you're uniquely positioned to do that are hard to copy for your competitors.

Stop Confusing “Better” With “Different”

Companies often confuse differentiation with excellence. Maybe you have more features, or higher quality, or better customer support. Those are differentiators, but guess what:

• Your competitors are building those features right now
• You're only one bad bug away from reputational damage
• Your best support staff will leave (potentially for your competitors)

The things that we say make us different are mostly operational effectiveness rather than strategic differentiation.

Strategic differentiation is the thing that's hard to copy. It's a set of choices that reinforce each other to build an advantage. Copying a single choice that you've made doesn't help the copier. They'd have to copy the whole system (and accept the trade-offs that you've made along the way).

This is how you differentiate yourself from the market.

The uncomfortable part is you have to name what you’re not going to optimize.

If you can’t say what you choose to be bad at, you don’t have a strategy, you have ambition.

Choose Your Customer

Let's build a sample use case to really drive the point home. There has been a proliferation of observability tools over the last couple of years. Thanks to open standards (thanks, OpenTelemetry!) it feels like a new competitor has popped up every other week and the cost of switching is lower than it's ever been. Competing on better pricing or a nicer UI is a dead end.

Many of the tools out there position real-time data processing as a benefit. The event happens, and less than 5 seconds later you can see it in your dashboard. Your system can do it in 3 seconds, so you're the market leader for those looking for speed.

Eventually though, someone else will do it in 2.5 seconds. Then 2, then 1. Suddenly your advantage is gone.

Instead of competing on the same metric that everyone uses, what if you explored other use cases:

• These tools have 30-day retention -> We'll provide 365-day retention at the same granularity (targeting compliance) -> Storage and retrieval of the data takes up to 10 minutes
• Sending so much data across the internet is expensive -> Our product can't show realtime, fine-grained data, but we have an agent that runs daily and reduces data egress costs by 90% (targeting FinOps teams) -> Additional deployment complexity for customers
• We pride ourselves on performance -> We're slightly slower to ingest, but we guarantee exactly once ingestion (targeting regulated industries) -> Our sales team finds it hard to demo

Each of these use cases forces architecture, pricing and go-to market decisions. They are hard to imitate, and hard to undo. If sales asks for realtime dashboards, the strategy answer isn’t ‘maybe later.’ It’s ‘no’ unless we’re willing to unwind the system that makes our advantage.

If you're successful, your competitors will try to copy you without having the correct foundations. They built an architecture around ingestion speed and are trying to pivot to long-term retention with the wrong technologies, and the wrong team.

It's important to emphasize that these are trade-offs. If the market values speed over retention, you don’t get to “pivot” to instant ingestion without undoing the choices that made you different. You can't do everything and be differentiated.

Build a Stack, Not a Skill

Most career advice is generic. "Be a great communicator". "Always deliver on time". When I'm reviewing applications as a hiring manager, I've seen all of the generic traits by the fifth or sixth application.

Instead of saying the same as everyone else, build a specific combination of traits that sets you apart.

To build your stack of traits, choose one item from each of these categories:

1. Domain / context (where you have unusual understanding)
   Examples: platforms, regulated industries, developer workflows, migrations, pricing, enterprise buying, support realities.

2. Craft (how you work)
   Examples: writing, systems thinking, facilitation, debugging, prototyping, negotiation, research.

3. Leverage (how it spreads)
   Examples: internal enablement, templates, docs, workshops, tooling, a repeatable process, a network.

Your uniqueness usually lives in the combination, not a single skill.

Example: “Deep platform context + crisp writing + enablement templates”
becomes: someone who makes complex platform decisions simple and repeatable across teams.

As mentioned earlier, there are trade-offs each time you make a decision. Name the trade-off you're willing to make consistently:

• I'll lose five small deals to save one large deal
• I care more about getting to what’s true than about everyone agreeing
• I prioritise iteration speed over upfront certainty
• We optimise for consistency, not autonomy
• I aim to understand 25% of Product, Engineering and Marketing rather than 80% of Product

Personally, I am the person you call when something is on fire, because I can rapidly gain context from both a technical and business perspective. To enable this, I will happily be mediocre at long-horizon planning and stakeholder consensus-building.

The Pattern Shows Up Everywhere

Being unique is a strategy that works in every industry.

IKEA optimise for low prices and immediate availability, at the expense of service through flat-pack, self-assembly, and “good enough” furniture.

FedEx optimise for reliable, on-time delivery rather than aiming to be the cheapest option.

Nespresso optimise for convenient premium-at-home coffee, at the expense of a closed pod ecosystem and a higher cost per cup.

That's how you build an advantage, not by competing in a race where the prize is eventually becoming everyone’s baseline. Strategy is choosing what you’ll refuse to be great at - and then living with that refusal long enough that it becomes your advantage.