Designing Your Real Quadrant

Friday, October 11th 2024

When I worked in enterprise-focused software companies, there were consultants who helped decision-makers at those enterprises.

One approach to distilling complex decisions into a more understandable frame was the quadrant, a 2x2 illustration to help show the "position" of companies in a defined space.

I explored starting a consulting service for software companies to define their own quadrant, which I called a "Real Quadrant."

The exercise was two fold: to help distill key advantages as core decision criteria for customers; to enable a reframing of the market.

While the 2x2 quadrant may oversimplify things, that's also it's benefit: to help sharpen one's own aperture on oneself and on customers.

I'm going to introduce this concept with a focus on individuals.

Defining Your Axis

When the 2x2 has only two axis, the stakes rise: these must be well chosen.

Here is a minimal set of criteria (sure, there are more, but I'm trying to make this exercise quick):

Legible
Valuable
Orthogonal

Legible

"Legibility" encompasses a few attributes of the axis: clarity, comprehensibility, and composability.

In other words, is it clear what the axis means; is it understandable broadly what the concept and value is; and are there sub components that can help define it, laddering up back to the axis.

For example, the common two axis for software vendors are "vision" and "execution."

It's clear and understandable what these mean in the abstract.

But they can also be decomposed into specific attributes that ladder back up to those two.

While I think these aren't great for creating your own category, it's not necessarily a bad way to see how you would stack playing the same rules everyone else plays just as an individual.

Valuable

The quadrant needs to be valuable to your audience.

Vision is important to software buyers because they want innovation.

Execution is important because they want stuff that works.

How these are delivered and defined is more murky.

"Fast" vs "Secure" is another dimension that is clearly valuable to software buyers.

They don't want infrastructure which slows things down; but also they don't want things that are open to hackers.

Orthogonal

Another way to think about these axis is that they should be Mutual Exclusive, Comprehensively Exhaustive (MECE).

They shouldn't be proxies for one another.

In fact, they should have no correlation with one another.

If they are both valuable and orthogonal, this should contribute to a "sweet spot."

Do they need to trade-offs?

Not necessarily: if they are truly trade-offs, it gets hard to be in the magic quadrant (upper right).

But they should be skills or attributes that don't always correlate; and a bonus if they form a synergy -- together they yield a greater result than separately.

Types of Axis

To help narrow this down, what should those axis be?

Let's use as an example Employee-Company Fit.

The market are the companies you want to work for or gain a promotion in.

You want to figure out your Magic Quadrant, how you would frame the game to have axis with attributes described above.

While the actual axis you use should be things you define, the broad categories should be things that companies will care about. You're just emphasizing what you think matters (and this ultimately ladders up to your How your POV drives product and market).

While in the end, you will construct your own, and are the owner of whether the axis you select fits the criteria outlined above, here is one set of categories.

Y-Axis: Leadership

Whatever role or industry, a core part of your job function, even if you are an IC in a role that is isolated, need to have some element related to leadership.

This can be in communication, relationship building, strategic thinking (but can't be thinking alone) -- whatever element that can help drive results with customers and leverage efforts from other employees.

You can't use "leadership" as the y-axis because it's too broad; in this regard, it's not necessarily clear stand-alone (although it is very composable, your job to do; and comprehensible -- people get the intent; and as a result, it is valuable).

Examples that can fit there:

XFN Collaboration - work with different functions to enable success
Strategic Alignment - develop a strategy and rally troops behind it
Evangelism - able to excite customers about a new concept

As we go through this series, I will provide more examples of language and concepts for your axis. Categories Beget Language and Vice Versa and Language is the API to Your Personality

What are some concepts you can come up with that represent the way you lead?

X-Axis: Impact

This drives the execution aspects and includes productivity, domain knowledge, prioritization ability, attention to detail -- the "doing" of the job and clarity on the results.

However, the "doing" part isn't how you would describe the category. It's how you would describe your uniqueness and the levers.

Impact should be as unique yet commonly valued impact to the company.

Growth of developer adoption
Inflows of locked value
Reduce risks with streamlined outcomes

This is the area of exploration that everyone should go through when defining this matrix.

Limitations

Are there limitations to this approach?

Of course. As with any simplification framework, there will be.

But constraints force resourcefulness.

Constraints also can make it easier for the audience to understand.

It's not the end all be all of designing your category of one.

But it's can get you off zero.

I'm applying and learning in real time.

When I first heard of Substack, I thought that this is not a good fit for me: their GTM strategy picked reporters or writers that already had a known category they dominated.

Then the doors opened wide, and I still had no idea what to do with it.

But now that I realize having some kind of online writing presence will be essential, even if likely only a small percentage will monetize it, I needed to get off zero.

Now, I described the Y and X axis in terms of an Employee-Company Fit.

But, as I described, this has been used by software vendors selling to large enterprises.

So could this work in helping to give shape, direction and focus to my newsletter?

Let's try!

Note: I think that the categories for the two axis of the quadrant do differ from the ones I used for Employee-Company; but I'll explore those later. Right now, I'm going to stick with these because they are still fit, although perhaps not as snugly.

Y-Axis (Leadership): Individualization

One form of leadership in companies is "Individualization" -- the ability to recognize someone's uniqueness and unlock those to benefit the team and company.

This is a core value of behind Category of One: how to drill into an individuals skills and gifts to unlock value for companies or customers.

I'll describe later how to ensure you're in the upper right in another newsletter, but the summary for why I would put this newsletter there is because it's focus area is in fact on enabling the individual.

I subscribe to a number of Substacks, and many of them give me the POV of the writer.

I read them so I can be informed, so I can pick and choose which tactics or strategies benefit myself.

I do that work -- the newsletter is intended to be one size fit all.

My newsletter is forcing an inward conversation with the readers to guide them into unlock their own individualization and Escaping NPC.

X-Axis (Impact): Differentiating Value

Lots of Substacks play along the axis of Value.

People largely wouldn't subscribe if they didn't get value in their jobs or their businesses.

So I wouldn't compete there. The ideas in the Substacks are often extraordinary, and the challenge for me is selecting and implementing.

This newsletter shifts things a bit on the execution of how that value is different for the reader.

This is hard, and the exercises, frameworks, and language needed can't be readily "done for you." The execution and impact north star is how to understand someone's individual attributes to unlock their differentiated value.

I focus on both.

Some can advocate for differentiated value by working more hours, doing more, doing the specific tactics described in a strategy. But I would argue that, by its nature of being prescriptive, it's value (high value in many cases), but not necessarily differentiated.

Anyway, that's how I would apply this framework to the newsletter.

But what matters is you, the audience?

The same questions I am asking you are the same questions your audience will ask themselves

Is it important to you to read a newsletter that is dedicated to you discovering the individual strengths of you?
Is it important to get guidance to how to convert those idiosyncracies into value that helps you stand apart in whatever the market is you are in?

If the value underlying the axis is low for customers, none of this matters.

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