Messaging and positioning
Your product serves both technical users and business buyers. How do you create a unified narrative that speaks to both without diluting the message for either?
Build the story as a chain where a technical fact leads to a business result, so each audience reads it from their own end. Put a shared outcome at the top, give each side its own depth and proof, and make every technical claim carry a plain consequence and every business claim trace back to something an engineer would accept.
Test the draft with one engineer and one executive.
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How a two-audience message gets diluted
Dilution comes from averaging. The team writes a headline both sides can tolerate, and it ends up sounding like neither. Engineers read it as marketing, and executives read it as vague.
The alternative is a causal chain, where a technical fact produces an operational change, which produces a business result. Both audiences are reading the same story, from different ends. What good looks like here comes down to four criteria.
- A shared outcome on top that both sides want.
- Every technical claim has a plain consequence a buyer can repeat.
- Every business claim traces back to a fact an engineer would accept.
- Separate depth for each side below the shared line, docs and demos for one, risk and cost for the other.
A deployment tool’s narrative, before and after
“The modern deployment platform for high-performing teams. Ship faster, reduce risk, and drive business agility with enterprise-grade automation.”
This is the averaged headline, and ship faster and reduce risk are true but unprovable as written. An engineer finds nothing to check, and an executive finds nothing to measure.
“Ship every week without more incidents. Any release rolls back in one command and about ninety seconds, so a bad deploy costs minutes of downtime and teams stop batching changes into risky monthly releases.”
The rewrite shows the chain in two sentences. The engineer gets the fact, one command and ninety seconds. The executive gets the result, weekly releases with fewer incidents, and each half makes the other believable.
Explaining the two-audience narrative out loud
“I’d build the story as a chain and let each audience read from their own end. We make a deployment tool. The developer’s end is that a rollback takes one command and about ninety seconds. The business end is that failed releases cost less, so teams ship weekly instead of monthly. It’s the same story, because the second follows from the first. Dilution happens when you average the two, so I’d put a shared outcome on top, ship more often without more incidents, and then send developers to docs and a demo with real commands and send executives to a page on risk and cost. Every technical claim gets a plain consequence, and every business claim has to trace back to something an engineer would accept. Then I’d give the draft to one engineer and one VP separately and ask each where they stopped believing it. Wherever they stop is the link in the chain that needs proof.”
A quick test for a two-audience story
- Ask an engineer to underline any claim they would roll their eyes at.
- Ask an executive to underline any sentence they couldn’t repeat to their board.
- Check that each business claim has a technical fact behind it in the same asset or one click away.
- Read only the headline and first line. Would each audience keep reading?
The step from Strong to Exceptional is anticipating where the chain breaks. If the executive asks how weekly releases reduce risk, the answer should already exist, smaller changes are easier to test and to undo.
Where two-audience answers split in two
“I’d create a core value message, then build two tracks. Technical content for engineers, like docs and architecture diagrams, and business content for executives, like ROI calculators and case studies.”
Two tracks are part of the answer, but without the chain linking them they become two messages, which is the dilution the question warns about. Fix it by showing how one technical fact becomes one business result, then build the tracks off that.
Follow-ups on one narrative for two buyers
| Follow-up | What it probes | A strong reply |
|---|---|---|
| Who wins when the two audiences disagree? | Prioritization | Whoever starts the evaluation. In developer tools that is often the engineer, so their end leads. |
| How technical should the homepage be? | Judgment | One concrete technical fact near the top. Enough to be credible, short enough for a buyer to follow. |
| What if sales only talks to executives? | Adaptability | Give reps the chain, so they can name the fact behind each business claim when asked. |
| How do you tell if the message is diluted? | Self-assessment | Neither audience can repeat it back. Test with one of each. |
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Frequently asked questions
- Should the homepage speak to both audiences at once?
- Usually yes, with a shared outcome on top and separate paths below. Developers want specifics quickly, and executives want the consequence. The shared line keeps them reading the same story.
- How technical should the business version be?
- Only as technical as it takes to be believable. One concrete number from the engineering side is often enough to back a business claim.
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