What We Learned Positioning a Google Moonshot

Back in the spring, Jamie Roche called me. Jamie is the CEO of Flux, a construction software platform that’s raised over $44 million from A-list investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Obvious Ventures. Flux was incubated at X, Google’s self-described “moonshot factory” for startups that "could someday make the world a radically better place.”

Jamie wanted my help in crafting Flux’s story—a strategic narrative for communicating the disruptive nature of the Flux platform. As Jamie put it:

Hundreds of millions of dollars in our ultimate valuation are riding on our ability to tell a story that quickly conveys Flux’s value and differentiation.

Over the next few months, I led Jamie and his leadership team in crafting their strategic story. While details of the story remain confidential, Jamie gave me permission to share the high-level elements, our methodology, and five lessons we learned while working together.

#1. Positioning Works Best When It Comes from Customers’ Mouths

The most important element in a positioning narrative is what I call the Promised Land—your articulation of the desirable (and difficult-to-achieve) future you commit to make real for your customers. Without a clear, differentiated Promised Land, your team will lack alignment on why what you’re selling matters.

For example, whether Elon Musk is pitching a Tesla Powerwall battery or a Tesla Model 3 electric car, he touts the same Promised Land:

Flux had already built a strong following among architects and designers, but Jamie saw a larger opportunity in targeting global general contractors—multinational firms that orchestrate the world’s largest constructions projects.

When I asked about Flux's Promised Land, Jamie and his team knew it had something to do with helping general contractors delight their customers—building owners—who were becoming increasingly demanding.

To hone that notion, I interviewed senior executives at several large general contractors that Flux was targeting. I asked these executives, What’s changing in your world that’s creating opportunity and risk?

Indeed, the executives confirmed that their customers were becoming more demanding, but they described the shift in a very specific way. As one of them told me:

In their personal lives, [the people who hire us to construct buildings] now live in a world where Uber promises a car will arrive in three minutes and it does. So they’re starting to ask, “How come I can’t get that kind of predictably great experience when it comes to the construction of our new office tower?”

We heard that sentiment so many times that one day, Flux CTO Michael Carrier suggested this Promised Land for Flux customers:

We loved how building named both the process of construction and its outcome. Still, we weren’t sure if predictable would be aspirational enough. Isn’t predictable the definition of unexciting?

To find out, we tested the message in real sales calls.

#2. Great Strategic Messaging Gets to “That’s Right”

The negotiation guru Chris Voss, a former lead FBI hostage negotiator, has a tactic for gaining trust with adversaries that he calls Getting to “That’s right.”

When Voss reviewed the transcripts of his most difficult hostage negotiations, he found that a successful resolution often came right after he would summarize the captor’s position back to the captor, and the captor responded, “That’s right.”

As Voss writes in his book Never Split the Difference:

It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood … Reaching “that’s right” in a negotiation creates breakthroughs.

Through my work with Flux and others, I’ve come to believe that the first job of strategic messaging is to elicit a “that’s right.” A great strategic narrative, in other words, starts by telling the customer’s own story back to her—not to educate her, but to show her that you understand her world and are, therefore, worthy of her trust.

Happily, when Jamie laid out “predictably great building” as the Promised Land message in conversations with general contractors, he received solid confirmation that we were on the right track. As he reported back to the team:

I would get a slide or two in my presentation about how owners now want predictability great outcomes, and all the heads in the room would start nodding. People would literally say, “That’s right.” Now, prospects and investors are understanding our value and our differentiation in minutes, sometimes seconds.

#3. Stakes Drive Emotional Connection

Every movie you’ve ever loved lays out a Promised Land for its characters. In Star Wars IV: A New Hope, it’s blowing up the Death Star. In Lord of the Rings, it’s destroying the ring. In Finding Nemo, it’s finding Nemo.

But as audiences, we only get invested in these outcomes if the screenwriter lets us know what’s at stake in achieving them. Luke and his friends save the galaxy or die. Pretty much the same thing for Frodo and his fellowship. Nemo and his dad will either have a joyous reunion or miss each other forever.

To name stakes for Flux’s customers, we went back to a sentiment we heard many times in our interviews with general contractors. As one of them said:

Of five huge projects we did last year, four went according to plan, yielding a healthy profit margin. But on the fifth, so many unexpected things happened that, overall, we barely made a profit for the year. If we could deliver results even a little more predictably, we’d not only be more profitable, we could bid less and win the most lucrative projects.

We put that right into Flux’s story (in the slide below, “that” refers to “predictably great building”):

Of course, when Jamie presents this slide, he also calls out its flip side: fail to deliver great results predictably, and find yourself in a race to the bottom of your industry. The silence that usually greets this slide is the opposite of disinterest.

(I find it fascinating that, in both epic films and great company narratives, what’s often at stake is some version of life and death.)

#4. Story Must Dictate Product—Not the Other Way Around

A few weeks after Jamie’s team began telling the new story in sales and partnership conversations, I learned something that surprised me from Flux’s head of product, Karl Garske.

A big contributor in shaping Flux’s new narrative, Karl told me that, when we first began our work together, he simply wanted a quicker way to communicate Flux’s value proposition. But once we had defined the Promised Land, he told me that he had begun using it to guide Flux’s product roadmap.

For me, this insight of Karl’s was an eye-opener:

Before our work together, I would have never imagined that the story would drive the product. But now I see that it’s kind of like the tail wagging the dog if you build features without first getting the story straight. Now that we all know the Promised Land, my team is aligned on what we have to deliver.

#5: Ben Horowitz is Right

Armed with the new narrative, Jamie has signed some of the world’s largest general contractors as early customers. Next, he plans to roll out the new story on Flux’s website and other channels. (Perhaps I’ll revisit their story — and reveal more of its mechanics — once the details are public.)

Jamie says he’s seeing the benefits around team alignment that Karl spoke of, but on a grander scale. As he told me the other day:

As I expected, the new story made our selling conversations more productive. What I didn’t anticipate was the dramatic, positive effect it had in focusing my team.

Jamie’s experience offers yet more evidence for my favorite observation about strategic narratives, courtesy of Andreessen Horowitz partner Ben Horowitz:

The mistake people make is thinking the story is just about marketing. No, the story is the strategy. If you make the story better, you make the strategy better.

True that—whether or not you’re riding on a moonshot.

About Andy Raskin:

I help CEOs and leadership teams align around a strategic story — to power sales, marketing, fundraising, product, and recruiting. My clients include teams backed by Andreessen Horowitz, First Round, GV (Google Ventures), and other top venture firms. I’ve also led strategic narrative training at Salesforce, Uber, Yelp, VMware and General Assembly. To learn more or get in touch, visit https://andyraskin.com.