In your opinion, how much time and effort does messaging & positioning for a product take?

This can really depend on what the product is, how large and complex it is, how well defined the challenges and use cases are. In terms of thinking about messaging and positioning of a product from scratch (in an ideal world), you should think about giving yourself time to go through a few steps: 

1. Market research to understand your target audience, their needs, pain points, and preferences. This often involves customer surveys, 1:1 interviews, focus group, competitor analysis, and analyst reports and marketing trends. This can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months, depending on the depth of research required.

2. Forming your messaging and positioning: Based on step 1, start to formalize your product positioning and messaging, including taglines, elevator pitches, challenges, use cases and benefits. 

3. Testing and refinement: Now that messaging and positioning is formally documented it’s time to start testing it. Test it internally and externally. And try to do a mix of quantitative and qualitative testing. For qualitative - talk to your go-to-market teams and get their feedback, pitch the messaging to analysts and get their early feedback, talk to a few customers and get their feedback. For quantitative - you can test using tools like UserVoice for customer feedback and surveys, and tools for A/B testing your messaging like Optimizely and Google Optimize to name a few.

Once your new messaging is launched, think about how to monitor and optimize that messaging over time as the product evolves which affects the positioning, or its differentiators, or the main challenges it’s trying to solve. A couple of ways I’ve done this in the past is (1) quarterly surveys to customers to help validate our messaging still holds true, (2) quarterly check-ins with analysts to make sure the messaging still resonates with what the market needs, (3) ad-hoc check in with go-to-market teams to get their feedback on how the content (ex: pitch decks) is performing with customers. 

Simple answer—it takes as long as you want it to take. That's not necessarily what anyone wants to hear, of course. But the reality is that positioning and messaging can take way longer than it should if you don't have a deliberate process and there's no clear decision-maker. What's important to remember is that positioning always comes before messaging. Positioning is strategy, and it drives everything from messaging to product strategy. From my perspective, I would emphasize positioning and weight it more heavily in your process. Getting messaging right is hard if you don't get positioning right. Once you've locked in positioning, then move onto messaging, but only once you've gotten the necessary alignment. A minor change in positioning might lead to major changes in messaging. This is where the deliberate process and clear decision-maker makes the difference. Socialize the process and get buy-in on the decision-marker (use a RACI or DACI model). At each phase, define the stakeholders who should contribute to the process, and then define the point at which a decision is made. When a decision is made, keep the process moving forward and try not to look backward. Ultimately, the amount of time and effort it takes will depend on your timeline and your ability to manage the process.

Similarly to sizing a launch, I would consider a tiering calculator to help assess effort v. impact for product messaging and positioning as it really depends on product complexity. A tier 1 launch can take anywhere from 10-12 weeks (post dev complete stage), so knowing there is a significant lift and corresponding impact, the messaging and positioning work will inherently be more consuming than a tier 2, 3 or 4 product launch. Fortunately, there are tools to help expedite composition and validation so Product Marketers can quickly get to 0-1 on messaging and positioning. For example, a PMM could save time by using a combination of:

• AI for content ideation inspiration

• Wynter for messaging tests

• Gong for social listening/proof

across compositional stages: build, test, ship, refine

In general, creating the initial messaging framework typically takes 4–8 weeks and requires a lot of effort upfront. This is where we do the heavy lifting—researching the market, understanding customer personas, analyzing competitors, and identifying the product’s unique value. It’s foundational work that informs everything else.

After we have the bones in place. It's time to test and iterate alongside the market. We use the above tools along with win/loss analysis and first-hand feedback to revisit quarterly or bi-annually, to incorporate customer feedback, adapt to market trends, or support new product updates. This phase takes less time than the initial setup but still requires a solid investment to keep messaging relevant and effective.

Once the core messaging is in place, it needs to be tailored for different formats like sales decks, website copy, email campaigns, and social media. This can be time-consuming since each channel has unique requirements, and you need to ensure consistency while adapting the tone and style.

For a company like ours at Enable, which operates in a specific niche, I’d estimate our team has a 70/30 split of effort—70% upfront work to establish solid foundational messaging and 30% for ongoing refinement and channel dissemination.