How do you decide product positioning?

Other than building a good product that solves real problems for customers, positioning is probably the most important thing to get right, because it's so strategic and foundational to how you go to market. At its core, positioning is an internal construct. It’s what you tell yourself internally to align on your strategy, the perceptions you want to create, your differentiated role in the market, and your relevance to your customers.   I think about 5 main inputs when shaping positioning: Market ...Read More

This is a big question! I’m assuming we’re talking about new product positioning vs re-positioning an existing product. If you’re working on a mature product, it will be very difficult to change the position of that product in the market. For a new product, I would research and consider the following perspectives: Company vision, narrative, and category - What is the vision for the company? What’s the narrative? Is there a category you’re trying to create or win? How does this product fit into t ...Read More

Positioning isn't about being better, it's about being the best fit for a specific problem.   Here how I would approach this:   Try to identify the ‘real enemy’. This usually is not a competitor, it's a status quo. In my world of cyber security it could be manual workflows or alert fatigue. So, we would position against the pain of the old way. Then you want to find an unfair advantage. I will look for one technical truth that our engineers built that will solve a CISO’s biggest headaches. If ev ...Read More

This is something I've become much more opinionated about over the years. I don't start with the product or the feature list, I start with the customer's reality. For example, when I was working at DebtStream, we initially thought customers would get excited about the capabilities we had built. But in customer conversations, we realised buyers weren't questioning the technology itself. They were struggling to understand how it fit into their existing collections and recovery workflows. That chan ...Read More