Stratagems Nexus:
Read the Complete Article
Download: Two Ready-to-Use Strategic Tools
📊 Adjacency Stack Mapping Worksheet — Map your workflow context, identify 8-12 adjacency opportunities, apply the "anti-sprawl filter."
📈 Adjacency Expansion Readiness Scorecard — Assess across 5 dimensions whether you're ready to expand—or if you'll weaken your core.
Your product is better. Your uptime is flawless. Your features shipped six months before the competition. Yet you're still losing deals.
Why? You're not competing against products anymore. You're competing against surface area.
The best CRM doesn't beat Salesforce. The best chat app didn't beat Teams. Why? Salesforce isn't selling CRM—they're selling CRM + analytics + marketing + commerce + Slack. Microsoft isn't selling Office—they're selling a nervous system for the enterprise.
Welcome to the adjacency trap. While you perfected your core, competitors quietly assembled constellations of capabilities around theirs. By the time you noticed, they weren't just ahead—they were unreachable.
Introducing: The Adjacency Stack Framework
A systematic blueprint for transforming from point solutions into compound moats—defensive positions that multiply in strength because each layer reinforces the others.
Three compounding mechanisms:
🔹 Data Gravity Amplification — Each layer generates proprietary intelligence that enhances the others. Shopify doesn't just process payments; they see merchant health, cash flow stress, expansion readiness.
🔹 Switching Cost Triangulation — Users tolerate mediocrity when combined switching costs become existential. You're not leaving Apple's ecosystem—you're switching identities.
🔹 Cross-Subsidy Economics — Dominant layers fund aggressive moves into emerging ones. Amazon ran AWS at a loss for years, subsidized by retail margins.
The brutal truth: Markets don't reward the best products. They reward the most coherent, multiplying systems.
The full article reveals:
✅ The 4-layer framework Microsoft used to become "work infrastructure provider"
✅ Why Stripe became nearly impossible to displace
✅ Three failure modes that kill adjacency strategies (GE's Predix, WeWork)
✅ How to separate strategic adjacencies from dangerous distractions
Plus: Two Ready-to-Use Strategic Tools
📊 Adjacency Stack Mapping Worksheet — Map your workflow context, identify 8-12 adjacency opportunities, apply the "anti-sprawl filter."
📈 Adjacency Expansion Readiness Scorecard — Assess across 5 dimensions whether you're ready to expand—or if you'll weaken your core.
You can build the best X in the world. But if a stack player offers 85%-as-good X bundled with Y and Z, you lose—not on product merit, but on workflow gravity.
The adjacency stack isn't a growth tactic. It's the new logic of defensible competition.
Read the framework. Download the worksheets. Start Monday.
Because someone is building the stack that makes you a feature. The question is whether it's you or them. |
