Stop pitching everything. Start proving something.
Why complex product stories fall flat – and how focus builds trust.
When you have a complex product, it’s tempting to prove credibility by showing breadth of capability. You try to touch every corner of what your solution can do, just to reassure people that you’ve got it covered. But to do that, you have to stay so high-level that everything starts to sound a bit…generic.
The Jennifer Lopez bodega problem
When asked about her “go-to bodega order,” she gave the following answer: “an orange drink, if you know you know”. Spoiler alert: nobody really did know. It was the kind of vague, generic answer that told anyone who’s ever actually been to a New York bodega that she possibly hadn’t.
That’s what happens when you try to show every use case in broad strokes. It all blurs into something that could be correct but remains unconvincingly hollow. Breadth is noise. Depth is proof.
Why vagueness kills trust
Malcolm Gladwell once said that people believe most in specific stories: Give them one vivid detail; the name of the street, the colour of the shoes. Suddenly feels real. Specificity builds trust.
That same principle applies when you’re pitching complex technology. Most companies start by trying to prove capability: look at all the things our platform can do. It’s understandable. Range feels like strength. But from the outside, that’s exhausting. It’s like being dropped in a warehouse of tools and told to find the one that fits your problem. You’re asking the customer to do the interpretive work, to imagine their own story inside your complexity. Most won’t. They’ll move on to the business that already did that thinking for them.
Instead, invest your time in just a few scenarios that feel deeply true, not a long list of possibilities that feel plausible. When you focus on two or three critical use cases – the ones that matter most to your audience – everything starts to click. You give people a clear picture of where your value shows up, and they can naturally extrapolate the rest. The simplicity gives them confidence: if it works that well there, it’ll probably work in most other ways for me too.
Breadth is noise. Depth is proof
Recently I was working on a proposal for an engagement platform for large financial institutions. In the initial pitch we could have shown everything: loyalty, rewards, onboarding, communications, analytics, and so on. But instead, we chose to focus on a few precise use case scenarios that had surfaced in the conversation with the bank.
Those weren’t picked from a feature list. Those examples came from listening, from catching the moments when the client said, that’s exactly what we struggle with. We circled back to those moments, built the story around them, and showed in detail how the solution worked end-to-end.
That level of depth - right down to the final interaction a customer would see - was what built belief. You can’t do that across every possible use case. But when you zoom in on a few that truly matter, you create space to show real substance not just possibility.
Make focus your advantage
And here’s the hidden bonus. Narrowing focus doesn’t just make life easier for your customers. It makes it easier for you. When your story centres on a few defined use cases, your proposals, decks, and websites become clearer too. You don’t have to cover every possible angle. You can go deeper, faster, and show what good actually looks like.
Listen for what matters most to your customer. They’ll often tell you the two or three scenarios that really count – if you’re paying attention.
Focus your story around those. Make them specific, human, and complete.
Prove that your solution works all the way through, from the first problem to the final result.
For founders and marketing leaders, this is the real work: translating complexity into coherence. Choosing what not to show is an act of strategy, not omission. Because clarity doesn’t hide capability, it’s what makes it visible.
