Observations
Почему даже самый крутой IT-продукт не продается сам: взгляд маркетолога для технаря
Your team spent months developing a product. You used the most modern tech stack, designed elegant architecture, and achieved outstanding performance. Technically, your solution is far superior to those of any competitor. Then, you launch it on the market, only to watch clients choose a competitor’s solution that is technically weaker but “beautifully packaged” instead.
Frustration sets in at this moment: “The market is irrational. They simply don’t understand how much better our product is.” But the market is not irrational. It simply speaks a different language. It doesn’t purchase technology, frameworks, or architectural patterns. It buys solutions to business problems, risk reduction, and confidence in the future. The enormous gap between your brilliant code and the client’s wallet is a translation problem.
This article is written by a marketer for a tech specialist. There will be no clichés or calls to “be more creative.” Instead, we will logically break down why the best product does not always win and explain what engineering “translation system” is needed to connect your technical excellence to market needs.
Your Target Audience Is Not You: The Language Problem
The main reason technically excellent products fail is that their creators believe that everyone thinks the way they do. Technical teams admire clean code, scalable architecture, and high throughput. They assume clients make purchase decisions using the same criteria.
But they don’t. The person who allocates the budget and signs the contract usually thinks in entirely different categories. It’s like a brilliant engine designer trying to sell a car to the head of a large family. The engineer passionately describes an innovative fuel injection system and unique piston ring alloys. Meanwhile, the family head stares in confusion because they actually care about three things: safety rating, fuel consumption, and whether a stroller and bicycle fit in the trunk.
Both perspectives are valid. The innovative engine is great. However, its value to the buyer is not revealed through technical terms, but rather through understandable benefits, such as fuel savings. The problem is not the engine and not the buyer. The problem is the absence of a translator.
In the business world, systematic marketing acts as the translator between technology and business outcomes. Its job is to understand your product’s technical advantages and “repackage” them as answers to executives’ core questions: “How will this help us earn more?” “How will this help us spend less?” and “How will this reduce our risks?”
The “Feature → Benefit → Value” Translator
We understand that speaking to businesses in the language of technology is ineffective. So, how does this “translation” work in practice? Marketing uses a simple yet powerful engineering model to translate technical characteristics into buyer-friendly arguments.
It consists of three sequential steps: Feature, Benefit, and Value.
Step 1: Feature (the fact). This is an objective technical characteristic of your product. What you built. For example: “Our application is written in Elixir and runs on the BEAM virtual machine.” To a tech specialist, this sounds like music. To a CEO, however, it is an incomprehensible set of words.
Step 2: Benefit (the advantage). This is the direct result that the feature produces. Here, we answer the question: “So what?” For example: “This means the system can handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections with minimal latency and without failure.” This is better, but it’s still not tied to money.
Step 3: Value (the money). This is the final and most important step. We link the benefits to a specific business outcome for the client. We answer the main question of any manager: “What’s in it for me?” For example: For a business that conducts online broadcasts, this means zero loss of revenue due to a server crash during peak load, as well as maintaining the loyalty of thousands of viewers who won’t experience frozen images.
This is the final output of the translation process. Systematic marketing takes every key technical feature and methodically passes it through this three-step process. The result is a set of strong, business-friendly arguments used in all advertising materials, presentations, and commercial proposals. The client does not need to know what happens “under the hood.”
How can you “sell” the invisible?
Even if you learn to translate features into value, another challenge remains: Many of your strongest technical advantages are invisible to the end user. Scalability, fault tolerance, and security cannot be “shown” in a demo or “touched” on a website. Their value lies in what does not happen: the server does not crash, data does not leak, and the system does not slow down as loads grow.
How do you prove the value of something invisible?
Marketers must materialize these invisible advantages, turning abstract promises into tangible proof. For instance, rather than merely claiming, “We are secure,” marketing can obtain ISO 27001 certification, publish a white paper on security policies, and develop a case study with a banking client that has stringent data protection requirements. These are proofs.
Rather than making vague statements such as “we work 24/7,” a public status page is created that shows uptime history. The commercial proposal also includes a service level agreement (SLA) with financial guarantees. These are commitments.
Marketing transforms your invisible engineering achievements into formats that the business world understands and trusts: certificates, case studies, and guarantees. This establishes your technical superiority as an indisputable fact in the eyes of the client.
Marketing as a Public API for Your Product
A technically flawless product has a powerful, yet closed, core. In order for the external world (the market) to interact with it effectively, it needs a clear, stable, and well-documented interface. Simply “showing the code” is not enough.
In this sense, systematic marketing serves as a public API for your product. It takes complex internal logic, such as features, architecture, and security, and exposes a set of simple, understandable “endpoints”: value propositions, case studies, ROI calculations, and webinars. Business users interact with these endpoints to make purchase decisions. They don’t need to know what happens “under the hood.”
If you feel the market “undervalues” your product, the issue might not be the product itself, but rather its “API.”
Talk to your marketer or CEO. Discuss how well your translation system turns technical advantages into business value. Improving this API may be the key to your growth.
