I like to think that when we read, we do so with an underlying belief. We’re hoping we might just come across an insight that proves to be a game-changer to us. Perhaps it might help solve a problem, or help envision the context to how things are today. And so recently, I found myself reading a section on Will Durant’s The Lessons from History. Have you heard of him? He seems to have spent his entire life devoted to compiling the most comprehensive reports of human history and culture. I briefly paused to wonder about the sequence of events in his life, that carried influence for each thought that made it to his mammoth series, The Story of Civilization. It offers a plethora of insight into the formation of factions and eventually civilizations, albeit the occasional hegemonic perspective. And so when I came across one particluar line, I knew I was onto something.

He describes the primary reason for competition among individuals to be ‘acquisitiveness, pugnacity, and pride; the desire for food, land, materials, fuels, mastery’. Perhaps you don’t find yourself fitting in to this category; however, it is safe to assume that the majority of society has traditionally followed this path to seeking satisfaction from their lives. I work with this explanation for individual human behavior, and argue that the best positional products and software have won by delicately navigating the above.

Positional Software - What is it?

The mammoth and incumbent software companies today sold their products top-down, to the authorities of enterprises, rather than attracting the attention of users first. They looked out to satisfy institutional needs. An employee that is given a company level subscription to an MS Office product, might not even consider the idea that better software exists out there. Such tools have historically focused more on feature-variety, and less on user experience and design. Just consider the clutter that a first time MS Office user faces; in fact, simply knowing how to use Powerpoint itself is a skill that is listed on resumes today. As Des Traynor put it, ‘when Microsoft asked their users what they wanted added to Office, they found 90% of the requested features were already there.’

And so, enter positional software. Just like you would expect that Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man was constructed with a superior set of tools, positional software helps users feel like they own the best tools to get their jobs done. I will discuss later, whether this is actually true. Regardless, today there is a Figma to Photoshop, a Notion to Google Docs, a Typeform to traditional face-interviewers, each able to convince existing users about the tyranny of incumbent products. The underlying theme is simple: attract users bottom-up (i.e. attract individual users first, and place a bet that they are impressed enough to market your product in their social circles), make them feel important and useful, and put superiorly designed products in their hands.

Why does it work?

First, there is an undeliably high Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is a metric used to measure the willingness of a customer to recommend a product’s service to others. Consider it a proxy to understand a customer’s overall satisfaction with the product. When we come out of a theatre (or today, a Netflix binge), we feel more obliged to talk to our friends about an above-ordinary and incredible film. Anything short of this, and we find outselves either i) not talking about the film/show at all, for fear of being remembered for recommending an inferior piece of media, or ii) outright talking ill of the film, to make it evident that you don’t associate with the film’s primary audience. It is perhaps this same line of reasoning that goes through a customer’s head, when they have recently used a product or service. This is why you see products like Roam Research and Airtable being recommended in college groups and social cricles, instead of Microsoft OneNote or Google Keep.

Next, positional products make users feel like their time is somehow more important, and that this has been taken into consideration. This is reflected by marketing the product on the basis of superior efficiency, instead of features. Regardless of who the user is, being told that their time is important, and that feature placement has been planned in such a way to make this apparent? That’s a user that’s already hooked — possibly for life. I knew this was powerful when a friend of mine texted me saying Notion lets him ‘embed everything at once, cause I hate manually uploading things into place’.

Lastly, positional products place a heavy emphasis on design. Sometimes, i feel that the word design gets thrown around — everyone in the field has watched Steve Jobs talk about what it means for the future, and why everyone needs to innovate with it. Everyone knows that its gets products more attention, and that its a good idea to work with interesting and experienced product designers in the field to achieve this. However, to actually understand the significance of design, I found something particularly useful in the works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, an early 1900 novelist in Austria.

Detour: The works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal

He wrote The Death of Titan (1892) and The Fool and Death (1893) — surrounding ideas that while art offers fulfillment and satisfaction for the artist, it doesn’t do the same for the mass of society who are unable to create. He tells a story where the daughter of a Greek vase painter has all the comfort and riches in life, yet lives with a deep sense of dissatisfaction. She finds herself reliving her childhood, where she spent time with the arts, and her fathers paintings. When she tries to pursue this urge and escape her current life, she is slain by her own husband; this leads Hofmannsthal to explain that beauty itself is paradoxical, and perhaps even subversive. Though the spontaneous, instinctual life has its attractions and urges for personal fulfillment, it is always a dangerous and explosive path. Aesthetics, then, is not self-contained and passive; it implies judgement and action, from the eyes of the beholder. In other words, viewing and interacting with great art and design actually influences people to take action, and move forward with some sort of commitment — specific to their circumstance.

While art offers fulfillment and satisfaction for the artist, it doesn’t do the same for the viewers; the mass of society who are unable to create. The viewers instead feel an urge to partake in some creation process of their own — either out of inspiration, or from an urge to not be left behind.

Coming back to the discussion of art and design in products — perhaps making the users, the beholders of products, feel like the artist itself, is where the real potential lies. A conscious approach to the use of language, coupled with deep UX testing to identify pain points might help achieve this. Google Docs makes us feel like a student, illiciting memories of writing research papers at 4 in the morning. Notion and Roam Research makes us feel like a creator/novelist (i.e. the artist). In a similar way, Gmail invokes in its users a sense of compliance in the way we can deal with communication. Superhuman changes this game, and makes us feel, well, truly superhuman.

So, what does it all tie down to?

Will Durant’s outlined reasons for competition are as follows - ‘acquisitiveness, pugnacity, and pride; the desire for food, land, materials, fuels, mastery’.

Today’s software has changed it’s focus from providing the best tools and materials, to providing the feeling of having achieved mastery. Perhaps this is itself an illusion, and that users of popular new software products aren’t really going up a level in their skillset. However, by posing as a way to achieve mastery, great software makes us feel like creators, and that we have already put in our 10,000 hours of hard work in order to deserve these tools. Just consider that web and mobile app prototyping companies (like Figma) provide its users with the feeling of having put together an entire application, with mastery over design and native app components, without the hassle of learning either skill. This would have taken a whole team and a sizable seed investment, about 10 years ago.

Here are a few thoughts I’d like to engage with:

  • How does one identify if a customer wants a product just to play a status-signalling game, among their friends, beforehand?

    • It is obvious to look back at product usage and determine if users are doing so. However, can this process be quantified, hence allowing a company to optimize for it? Customer Interviews and UX testing will never truly give this away — nobody likes to admit that they went out to dinner last night, just to get photos and document a moment of joy to their friends. In fact, it is more likely that customers do not realize that they are playing this signalling game.

  • If we can agree that a customer seeks a product that gives them leverage (significant and disproportionate results, in comparison to their inputs), perhaps this is all that matters. Maybe the variety of features that a new company displays on their landing page, is not as important as one specific task that they achieve with disproportionate gains for the user.