This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

"Be different" is not advice. It is a restatement of the problem, and it never says in which dimension.

Why differentiation usually fails

Because it gets invented in a room. Someone books an offsite, the team lists adjectives, and the output is a positioning statement that every competitor could sign without changing a word — quality, service, expertise, partnership. It is not that the people in the room lacked imagination. It is that differentiation is not an act of imagination at all. It is derived: from a problem stated precisely enough to be tested, from evidence about what customers actually want rather than what they say in a meeting, and from a method that searches beyond the first three obvious answers.

What this course covers

Forty-five lessons along that chain. Your own reasoning first, because a strategy session inherits every bias in the room: deduction, induction and abduction, strong and weak arguments, confirmation bias, anchoring and framing, fact against opinion, source evaluation, and decision models for incomplete information. Then stating the problem: telling a symptom from a problem, the problem-goal-constraint-metric frame, stakeholder mapping, reconciling people who disagree, writing requirements that can be tested, modelling current and target state, systems thinking, and holding scope. Then evidence: survey types and which one answers a positioning question, question and scale design, how long a questionnaire can be before answers stop being honest, getting genuine participation, and analysing the open-ended responses where the useful material always is. Then structured invention: 5W1H and SCQA, MECE trees, five whys and Ishikawa, Pareto and the theory of constraints, the impact-cost matrix, SCAMPER and six hats, and TRIZ — the ideal final result, resolving contradictions without compromise, and Altshuller's forty principles applied commercially. Then the offering: product-market fit and how it is lost, the portfolio decision including when to retire, Jobs to be Done, journey mapping, hypothesis validation, the North Star and pirate metrics, monetisation models, growth loops and unit economics. Finally taking the position to market: competitive analysis including estimating a rival's unit economics, 4P, STP and Ansoff, budget and return, brand architecture, and channels.

A note on what this is not

This is not a course on any single named strategy framework, and it does not teach a branded canvas. It builds differentiation from four things that are more durable than any framework: clean problem statements, real customer data, systematic invention, and honest unit economics. One block — the survey material — was recorded for a people-function audience, so its catalogue of survey types includes internal ones alongside customer research; the method of asking a question well does not change with the audience.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 45 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working models: the problem-goal-constraint-metric frame, MECE, 5 Whys, Ishikawa, Pareto, the theory of constraints, SCAMPER, six hats, TRIZ and the forty principles, morphological analysis, Jobs to be Done, the portfolio matrices, unit economics, 4P, STP, Ansoff

• Differentiation treated as something derived rather than declared

Where to start

Take your current positioning statement and cross out every word a direct competitor could also use truthfully. Whatever survives is your actual differentiation. For most companies nothing survives, and that is a better starting point than it sounds. Enrol now and start today.