Why Illumex Built Depth Instead of Breadth in a Crowded Market

Why Illumex Built Depth Instead of Breadth in a Crowded Market

When you enter a crowded market with established competitors, the pressure to match their feature sets is overwhelming. Every sales call surfaces another capability gap. Every competitive evaluation reveals features you don’t have. The natural response is to start building everything.

Illumex ignored that pressure entirely.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ina Sella, CEO & Founder of Illumex, explained why her data observability company deliberately chose to go deeper on specific capabilities rather than chase feature parity with better-funded competitors. The decision shaped everything from product roadmap to competitive positioning—and it’s why they win deals despite having fewer checkmarks on comparison sheets.

The Feature Parity Trap

Data observability is a mature category with established players who’ve had years to build comprehensive feature sets. When Ina started Illumex, she could have spent years trying to match every capability competitors offered: monitoring for every data source, integrations with every tool, alerts through every channel, dashboards for every use case.

Instead, she focused on one specific problem that her experience at Meta taught her actually mattered. “I was building a lot of pipelines for business teams and data science teams,” Ina recalls. “And very often I would get paged in the middle of the night because something broke in production and I need to go and fix it.”

The insight was critical: data observability tools were good at telling teams something broke. They weren’t good at helping teams fix it quickly. That gap—between detection and resolution—became Illumex’s entire focus.

The Depth-First Decision

Rather than building a monitoring platform that covered every possible data source with adequate capabilities, Illumex built specifically for troubleshooting speed. “We started working on building our data observability solution that is more focused on helping data teams to troubleshoot and resolve issues as fast as possible,” Ina explains.

This meant making specific architectural choices that competitors hadn’t prioritized. Full column-level lineage that shows exactly how data flows through systems, not just table-level visibility. Actionable recommendations for fixes, not just error messages. Deep integration with orchestration tools to understand context around failures.

Each of these capabilities required significant engineering investment. Building column-level lineage at scale is technically complex. Generating truly useful recommendations requires understanding data pipeline patterns across many customers. These weren’t features that could be built quickly to check boxes on comparison sheets.

But the depth made Illumex dramatically better at the specific problem they solved. When a data pipeline breaks at 3am, teams don’t need dashboards showing them every possible metric. They need to understand what broke, why it broke, and how to fix it—fast. Illumex optimized entirely for that moment.

Why Depth Beats Breadth in Competitive Deals

The counterintuitive result is that going deep on fewer capabilities often wins more deals than having more features. When prospects evaluate data observability platforms, they’re not looking for the tool with the longest feature list. They’re looking for the tool that solves their most painful problem.

For teams that spend too much time debugging data issues, troubleshooting speed matters more than monitoring breadth. They might have alerts from ten different sources already—what they lack is the ability to quickly understand root causes and implement fixes. Illumex’s depth on this specific capability makes them dramatically more valuable than competitors who do monitoring adequately across more dimensions.

This dynamic plays out repeatedly in competitive evaluations. Prospects compare feature lists and note that Illumex doesn’t have certain capabilities competitors offer. But when they evaluate which platform actually helps them resolve production issues faster, the depth advantage becomes obvious. One capability done exceptionally well beats ten capabilities done adequately.

The Resource Allocation Advantage

Building depth instead of breadth also creates better resource allocation for startups competing against well-funded competitors. Every feature Illumex builds receives significant engineering investment because they’re building fewer things overall. Competitors with larger teams spread their resources across more features, which means less investment in any single capability.

This shows up in product quality. Illumex’s column-level lineage works better than competitors’ because the team spent months optimizing it rather than treating it as one item on a roadmap checklist. Their recommendations are more accurate because they’ve invested in the ML models and pattern recognition that power them. The depth of execution in their core capabilities is visible to technical evaluators.

For prospects doing deep technical evaluation, this matters enormously. They can see the difference between a feature that exists to check a box and a capability that’s been thoughtfully built and refined. The companies that win technical buyers aren’t usually the ones with the most features—they’re the ones where individual features show craftsmanship and deep understanding.

How Depth Shapes Product Roadmap

The depth-first strategy fundamentally changes how Illumex approaches product development. Instead of asking “what features do we need to match competitors,” they ask “how can we make troubleshooting even faster?” Every roadmap decision filters through this lens.

This creates clarity that breadth-focused strategies lack. When you’re trying to build everything, every customer request seems equally valid. Every competitive gap feels urgent. The roadmap becomes a list of features ordered by whoever’s asking loudest.

When you’re focused on depth, roadmap prioritization becomes clearer. Does this capability help teams troubleshoot faster? Does it provide insight that accelerates resolution? If not, it doesn’t matter how many prospects ask for it or how many competitors have it. The strategic focus provides a filter that prevents feature bloat.

This discipline is hard to maintain. Prospects will ask for features Illumex doesn’t have. Competitive evaluations will highlight gaps. The pressure to expand scope is constant. But maintaining depth requires saying no to good opportunities in favor of great ones within your focused area.

The Communication Challenge

The hardest part of a depth-first strategy isn’t building it—it’s communicating it. When prospects compare feature lists, Illumex has fewer checkmarks. In early sales conversations, this looks like a disadvantage. The competitor with more features appears more capable.

This means Illumex has to change how prospects evaluate platforms. Rather than comparing features, they need prospects to evaluate outcomes: which platform helps you fix data issues fastest? Which one reduces your mean time to resolution most? Which one actually prevents the 3am pages?

Shifting evaluation criteria requires sales sophistication. It means asking better questions during discovery to understand what prospects actually care about versus what they think they should ask for. It means demonstrating depth through technical discussions that show understanding of edge cases and complex scenarios. It means using proof points from existing customers about resolution time improvements.

“Even now when I go to sales calls, I always try to learn something from the customer that I didn’t know before the call,” Ina explains. This learning orientation helps identify whether prospects care more about feature quantity or problem-solving depth. Not every prospect values depth—some really do need broader coverage. The depth-first strategy works best when you can identify prospects where it creates decisive advantage.

When Depth Becomes Its Own Moat

Over time, the depth advantage compounds. As Illumex continues investing in troubleshooting capabilities, the gap between their depth and competitors’ adequate coverage widens. Competitors would need to completely rebuild certain capabilities to match—not just add features, but rearchitect core systems.

This creates switching costs that breadth-focused strategies don’t. Once teams experience column-level lineage that actually works, table-level lineage feels insufficient. Once they’ve used intelligent recommendations that actually help, basic error messages feel primitive. The depth creates stickiness because going backward in capability feels painful.

The depth also enables capabilities that breadth-focused competitors can’t easily replicate. Illumex’s understanding of troubleshooting patterns across many customers—what breaks, why it breaks, what fixes work—becomes proprietary knowledge that improves their recommendations. This knowledge compounds as they serve more customers, creating a data advantage that competitors can’t quickly match.

The Strategic Lesson

The broader principle extends beyond data observability. In crowded markets, startups face a choice: try to match established players feature-for-feature, or go dramatically deeper on specific capabilities that matter most to your target customers.

Feature parity is a race startups usually lose. Established competitors have more resources, more time, and existing infrastructure. Trying to match their breadth means playing a game where they have structural advantages.

Depth is where startups can win. You can go deeper on specific capabilities than larger competitors because you can focus your entire company on them. You don’t have existing products to maintain or broad customer bases demanding different features. Your small size becomes an advantage because it enables complete focus.

The companies that win crowded markets are usually the ones that understood this principle. They didn’t try to build everything—they built something specific so much better that it became impossible to ignore. Illumex’s bet on troubleshooting depth over observability breadth is that strategy in action. Whether it captures the entire market or a valuable segment depends on execution, but the strategic clarity positions them to win their chosen battles.