What I used to believe
For more than a decade, product marketers have repeated the same advice: stop talking about features and start talking about outcomes. For a long time, I believed that too. It’s a learned muscle and product marketing 101.
The logic is straightforward. Customers rarely purchase software because they want a particular feature. They purchase software to solve a problem, reduce friction, mitigate risk, or make progress toward a desired future state.
The problem is that somewhere along the way, many organizations and individuals (myself included) interpreted this advice to mean the specificity of the features themselves no longer mattered.
Feature-heavy messaging became outcome-heavy messaging. Product language was replaced with business language. Promises of transformation replaced technical capabilities; features became productivity; platforms became innovation; automation became efficiency, and so on.
We could go on for days on these translations. The point is, the messaging sounded more strategic, but it became less meaningful.
What started making me question it
Over time, I’ve noticed something interesting. Feature-led messaging began to struggle because it assumed customers could connect technical capabilities to business value on their own.
Outcome-led messaging struggled because it assumed customers would accept business-value claims without understanding how those outcomes would be achieved. Both methods require the buyer to handle translation independently. And often I have discovered that when clarity is lacking, trust and confidence in the promise diminish.
That matters because modern B2B buying is already incredibly difficult. Gartner found that 77% of B2B buyers described their most recent purchase as highly complex or difficult. Buyers are navigating larger buying committees, more information sources, and increasingly independent research before they ever engage a vendor.
In other words, messaging should be doing far more of the selling than it once did. Yet much of the messaging I encountered and generated seemed to create more interpretation, not less.
What listening to the customers taught me
I was reminded of this while helping an enterprise software company work through a positioning exercise. Like many technology organizations, they were trying to clarify what differentiated them from the competition in a crowded market.
The product team talked about event-driven architecture. Engineering talked about orchestration. The AI team talked about agents. Leadership talked about a unified platform. Sales wanted stronger competitive differentiation.
Not that any of these perspectives were wrong, but the core problem was that none of them sounded like the customer.
So we listened to customer conversations. When we paused to do this, an entirely different narrative emerged. Customers weren’t talking about orchestration engines, event-driven frameworks, or agent architectures. Not surprising.
They were talking about operational complexity. They described disconnected systems, overlapping automations, governance concerns, fragmented workflows, and a growing inability to understand how work moved across the organization.
The company was describing capabilities. But the customer was describing consequences.
The gap existed where most messaging breaks down.
Research from the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework helps explain why. Clayton Christensen argues that customers don’t simply buy products. They “hire” products to make progress in a particular circumstance. The purchase decision is less about the feature itself and more about the progress customers are trying to make.
And yet many organizations and product marketers, myself included, position products from one extreme or the other.
Feature-led propositions emphasize what the product does. Outcome-led messaging emphasizes what the customer gains. But neither adequately explained how one creates the other.
What I believe now
Today, I believe we’ve misframed the debate. Customers do not purchase features, nor do they simply buy outcomes. Instead, customers seem to invest in a credible path that takes them from their current situation to a better future.
That conclusion is supported by a growing body of buyer research. Studies from Gartner, Google, and CEB have consistently shown that buyers are more likely to move forward when they feel confident in their understanding of the problem and the solution path, not simply when they hear bigger promises.
That distinction is important.
Having an event-driven orchestration capability is a feature. Operational efficiency is an outcome. On its own, neither statement is particularly compelling.
What truly matters is the chain of cause and effect linking the two.
If a customer is struggling to understand how dozens of automations interact across multiple systems, event-driven orchestration creates visibility. Visibility reduces troubleshooting. Reduced troubleshooting decreases manual intervention. Less manual intervention creates more resilient operations. More resilient operations improve efficiency.
The feature becomes evidence. The outcome becomes believable.
And the customer begins to understand how one creates the other. They see the possibility of the product promise.
Where product marketing can create value
The longer I work in product marketing, the less I believe messaging is primarily a writing exercise. Most messaging problems are understanding problems disguised as copy problems.
In fact, this aligns closely with research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, which has repeatedly shown that buyers are more responsive to clear, easily understood communication than they are to highly differentiated or creative language alone. Distinctiveness matters, but comprehension comes first.
Organizations often approach positioning as a search for the perfect headline. In reality, the challenge is understanding how customers experience their world.
That work should happen long before anyone writes a headline.
It happens in customer interviews. It happens in discovery calls. It happens in support conversations. It happens when teams stop asking what features customers want and start exploring how work actually gets done.
One of the simplest exercises I’ve found is asking these questions:
- What does the feature do?
- What does that eliminate?
- What does that make possible?
- Why does that matter? And then why does that matter?
Eventually, the conversation stops being about software and starts being about progress, and quite often, that’s usually where the messaging is hiding.
The real job to be done
Product teams think in functionality. Sales teams think in business impact. Executives think in strategic outcomes. Customers think in terms of tasks, projects, frustrations, and responsibilities.
Everyone is describing the same product, each at a different layer of the story.
The role of product marketing is not to choose which perspective wins. Our role is to connect them to the promise the product delivers. What does this product do, and what possibilities does it create for the customer?
When organizations fail to connect them, they create what I’ve started calling narrative debt.
One team talks about orchestration. Another talks about automation. Another talks about AI. Another talks about productivity. Customers talk about operational complexity.
Everyone believes they’re describing the same thing, yet over time, those descriptions drift further apart.
The result is weaker messaging, inconsistent sales stories, and misaligned expectations. This can slow adoption while trust erodes.
And it’s not because the product lacks value, but often because the organization never developed a shared language to explain it to the end customer.
The question I am beginning to ask now
I no longer think the future of product marketing is feature-led messaging, but I don’t think it’s outcome-led messaging either. The most effective companies I have seen focus on understanding and possibility.
Slack didn’t initially win because it talked about channels, notifications, or integrations. Nor did it lead with vague promises of transformation. Much of its messaging centered on a reality customers immediately recognized: work was scattered across email, meetings, and disconnected conversations. The product features were presented as the mechanism for solving a problem people already felt.
Apple is another example. Apple rarely markets specifications in isolation, but it also doesn’t market abstract outcomes alone. The messaging connects capability to experience. A better camera isn’t presented as a camera. It’s presented as a way to capture moments. The feature serves as evidence for a desired result.
Features matter because they provide proof; outcomes matter because they provide direction; and customer language matters because it provides meaning. This is about combining the three into reasons that persuade the customer to believe.
So, the next time you’re reviewing a website, a pitch deck, or a positioning statement, don’t ask whether it talks too much about features or too much about outcomes. Ask yourself this:
Does it sound like the customer will believe the promise is possible?
