--Do you have any cream cheese?
--We have Philadelphia.
--Okay, that’s cream cheese.
Not all American brands are recognized abroad, but some are so popular that people think the brand is the thing it’s selling. That’s at least what I’ve discovered living in Europe as an American.
For some Europeans, cream cheese is Philadelphia; a vacuum is a Hoover--these are category-defining products.
Category-creating products, on the other hand, are a little harder to identify and define, but typically they’re things that’ve hatched an entirely new market segment and audience.
My favorite non-IT example is Keurig, whose popular K-cups turned it into a billion dollar business. Keurig saw a unique problem with traditional office setups: brew one pot and it goes fast. People want variety and the autonomy to get a cup when they’re ready, not when it’s ready. Keurig filled this void with a fast, convenient product with dozens of flavors and its profits took off.
But didn’t instant-cup coffee already exist before Keurig?!
Yes, you’re probably correct omniscient naysayer, but nobody else was selling instant-cup coffee at the same scale as Keurig. And if you can’t scale, you can’t survive, and you certainly won’t be able to build a community of loyal customers.
Good Problems
Sometimes you don’t know you’re doing something novel until you hear it from customers. And that’s exactly what happened with Nexthink.
"What Nexthink’s been able to do is give us that visibility into our world that we never had. What’s going to be the biggest bang for the buck? Let’s get the big picture and then walk through it and prioritize the work". Derek Whisenhunt, Southwest Airlines
We never fit in any of the preexisting IT categories. Is Nexthink an APM monitoring tool? Or a network diagnosis tool? Or an infrastructure monitoring tool?
At its core, Nexthink can detect, diagnose, and remediate extremely complicated and annoying IT issues across all endpoints. But by saying we're one thing versus the other would be misleading. So rather than boxing ourselves into one category (and ignoring the product's other features), we applied what customers were telling us: we enable IT to continuously and proactively manage their employees’ digital experiences across devices, apps, virtualization environments, and networks.
Yes, Nexthink's "bread and butter" is finding and fixing tech problems, but it's also a management tool, a monitoring solution, a cost-cutter, a time-saver, and a sanity-checker.
Opening Hidden Doors
When I joined the company in 2019, the term Digital Employee Experience (DEX) didn’t exist anywhere outside of Nexthink. But every employee, regardless of where they worked, was versed in what DEX meant and how the product related to this overarching principle.
A year later, the pandemic hit and Nexthink found itself fixing problems for customers that they didn't even know they had.
And from my experience interviewing, writing, and listening to hundreds of technology professionals, the sign of a true category-creating product is when it can deliver both ROI and emotional appeal. Yes, Nexthink's customers get a straight-forward problem/fix solution, but they also get more confidence, clarity and authority in their organizations. We've become a positive enabler for IT, a stepping stone to something better than the traditional reactive help desk.
Being able to provide clear business results and emotional value has helped the company scale and grow its customer base to a point where we now have a community of like-minded IT professionals that listen to our podcast, read our articles, enroll in our learning opportunities, read our research, and attend our knowledge-sharing events.
And it’s not just us talking about the category.
Forrester and Gartner, two of the most respected firms in market, continually publish research about DEX and speak to its utility. Media outlets now report on DEX content, and there are even DEX-specific teams and career paths.
Those are doors that didn’t exist five years ago when I first joined the company. It wouldn't surprise me then if for some people, our brand is the thing we deliver:
---Do you have DEX?
--We have Nexthink.
--Okay, that's DEX.
