#001 - How/Why Ladder
This is one of those tools I find myself coming back to over and over and over again—it’s probably my favorite product marketing and messaging technique.
It’s a great companion for writing:
product launch materials
website pages
sales decks
one-pagers
emails
ads
anything you want to put influential words on
B2B purchases are typically team decisions, not individual ones. The How/Why ladder helps you articulate messaging that resonates with a buying team's full range of personas. - Executives typically care about strategic long-term benefits & outcomes. - Operators care about specific product functionalities or how they’ll incorporate your product into their daily workflows. - Team leads/managers fall somewhere between the two.
Pick a seed
Choose a seed message to start with. For example, if you’re Figma, you might say: “Our tool makes product design and development processes more efficient.”Ask "why?" to go up the ladder
Ask "Why is that important?" of your seed message. This helps you go up in abstraction. Going up the ladder helps you articulate outcomes, benefits, and the broader contextual frame of the issue.Ask "how?" to go down the ladder
Ask, "How does it work?" to go down in abstraction. Going down the ladder helps you clarify your capabilities, features, and use cases. This is often most useful for users—P1 in our personas framework.Repeat steps 2 & 3
Continue asking "how?" and "why?" to find different levels of specificity for your message.Explore new branches & solution areas
Experiment with different seed messages to branch out into different solution areas. Your messages don't all need to nest neatly into each other!
The biggest thing to watch out for is what I’m deciding to call the ‘value fog.’
Sounds spooky, right? Yeah… It’s hella spooky.
If you climb too high on the value ladder, you can find yourself in the value fog. Asking “why?” enough times almost guarantees you’ll land at "save time," "save money,” “do more with less,” or some other silly nonsense.
If you find yourself there, you've gone too far. At that level, messages are weak, undifferentiated, and uncompelling.
Isn't every B2B product designed to save time or money? It’s better to focus on articulating messages that differentiate you from alternatives. Be careful to keep out of the value fog—don’t waste valuable real estate on uncompelling words.
Ideally, your messaging should be specific enough to check against Harry Dry's three rule framework for good copy (which will get its own card):
Visualizable - can you picture what’s being described?
Falsifiable - can your claim be falsified? Or is it so nebulous it can’t be challenged?
Only-ness - is your claim specific to your product? Can anyone else say it? Claims get weaker the more common they are.
