Positioning

A few weeks ago, I listened to an interview that Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke did. In it, he compared building a company to chess insofar as chess is two games in one: a positional game and a tactical game. 

I interpreted what Tobi was saying as winning comes from exploring new opportunities (“conquering your opponent’s territory”) while keeping your core (in this chess metaphor, “your king”) alive. I’ve had this “lesson” from Tobi stuck in my head for the better part of a month, and I’ve been sharing it internally here at Intelligems. 

Here’s the funny thing, though: Either no one I shared my lesson with actually listened to the Tobi interview I drew it from or they didn’t have the heart to tell me I got it wrong. Because when I went to pull the quote for this newsletter, I misheard the point he was making.

Here’s what Tobi actually said: 

He goes on to say that, when we talk business, we celebrate the “easy hacks” and don’t spend enough time thinking about the positional game. Basically, Tobi is saying that the strategic positional facet is undervalued or underresourced and he thinks you just need to be good enough at tactics to not go out of business. (“You can’t get margin called, sure, but the sum total of all the value of the potential tactics that you could employ stays with you if you’re actually doing the positional game.”)

In other words, the positional work is as or even more important than tactical work. Not necessarily do you need to go “conquer new territory” but rather place yourself strategically on the board.

Earlier this week, we announced our Series A and that, too, probably had an impact on the way I’m interpreting things lately. I started reflecting and thinking introspectively about our strategy and relating it to this paradigm.

Core to our strategy is helping brands grow their profits.

As Drew and I wrote in the announcement, our vision is that Intelligems makes a profit-maximizing decision on every single online shopping session — whether through hyper-personalized experiences, AB tests, dynamic pricing, or otherwise.

I’ve positioned our growth strategy as adding on new mechanisms for profit growth, like building out more dynamic onsite experiences and evergreen profit-maximizing solutions. Embedded here are new tools for marketing teams that want to extend their targeted promotions to their site. Or the experiences a web product manager can build that are triggered by onsite behavior. 

This goes back to positioning – are these new mechanisms really “new”? Or are they about strengthening our core product? My revelation is that it’s the latter – it’s not about expanding and leaving our old identity behind, it’s about doubling down on the core. Growing brands’ profits.

One of the biggest tensions I feel is how to allocate our resources and time. Do we make our existing “core” better? Or continue to expand into new things? 

My realization is that it’s both. 

That’s the strategic positioning. The tactics here are the day-to-day things, like How do we make onboarding easier? or How do we explain profit growth strategies to our customers? We can’t lose sight of the tactics, the “growth hacks”. It’s great for business, our growth, and a necessary part of executing on our strategy. If we fail to do these, we get “margin called” in Tobi’s words.

So it all comes back to our chess game. We must learn and execute the tactics. But positioning is the overlooked core to winning.