A positioning review exercise

The exercise should be executed once, and then regularly as assumptions are validated or proven false, new information is acquired, your product evolves, and so on.

It is designed to minimize effort for the highest return. Rather than a theoretical positioning statement, the output is a concrete starting point to refine your target audience and ICP and to sharpen your messaging.

How information is gathered

• Structured interviews with customers (if any)
• Structured interviews with executives
• Structured interviews with product team
• Review of website, sales material, marketing collaterals

Customer interviews are the best source of information.

Pre-revenue, you work with your own assumptions. It is important to continuously validate those as you progress and win (often unexpected types of) customers and partners.

Process

1. Start by identifying the “Unique Attributes” that you possess right now
1. Characteristics of your company and/or your product that are unique and no one else has
2. It can be product features, company’s history/background, people, specific partnerships, processes, etc
3. Ideally, those attributes should be hard to replicate by potential competitors
4. You should list everything which is unique. Do NOT yet think of the value they may or may not bring. Some of what’s unique may even bring disadvantages. If something ends up not bringing differentiating value, you can keep it and just don’t use it to define your positioning.
2. Detail the “Value” those attributes create
1. What can be done (features) and achieved (capabilities, benefits) by leveraging the attributes, individually or in combination
2. You should not yet worry about who could benefit, just focus on generic value that can be created.
3. Profile “Who cares more than anyone else”
1. This is the most important and difficult step, because you will tend to identify any addressable audience
2. Resist the temptation to list everyone who may care about the value. Only list those who care “more than anyone else”, and explain why
3. By doing this, you maximize ROI (of product development, marketing, sales)
4. Start with high-level characteristics (i.e. “Someone who is utterly concerned about privacy”) and then refine it with “how to identify those” (i.e. “governments, financial services“)
5. The narrower, the better
4. Update your “Product-Market dimensions”
1. Refine your best understanding of each dimension
2. Rate each dimension from 1 to 5. Rate it higher when
1. You are confident you identified the dimension well
2. The dimension explains your uniqueness well to someone who does not know anything about you
5. Choose the best Category (market frame of reference)
1. Try to forget about the market you think you have been been in so far, or you want to be in the future. Don’t worry: this will evolve over time.
2. The category should make your value obvious to the prospects that care the most. It should bring your current unique differentiated value right in its center for the “most interested” audience you identified
3. Based on this category, and on what they already know about the market, prospects will make assumptions on what you do and what you don’t, alternative products, value, use cases, pricing, etc
4. You have essentially 4 strategic options for framing
1. Use an existing frame (your prospects are familiar with) and dominate that category. Most useful for established market leaders.
2. Use an existing frame, but narrow down on a niche: a specific industry, a specific context, and so on. This helps because prospects will be familiar with the category but will pick you for your specific relevance and focus.
3. Use an existing category, but reframe its perception by challenging the status quo. This makes sense if your capabilities are extremely innovative and your novel solution provides advantages compared to established alternatives.
4. Create a new category. The most difficult to execute, because you need to explain the problem and create a need. Also most rewarding, because you potentially tap into a blue-ocean market
6. Choose Product-Market dimensions you want as anchors
1. See Structuring your Go-to-Market: a practical framework for product and market analysis
2. Your positioning consists of all those dimensions. However, you want to choose dimensions you use prominently to communicate your positioning to your audience
3. Choose what
1. Is confidently defined (either by data or trusted assumptions);
2. Is the clearest and most relevant to your audience;
3. Shows your uniqueness.
4. Most of the time, you should avoid Problem and Benefit, especially if high-level: they apply to every product out there
5. Capabilities is usually a good start: it is often unique and often very clear, even before your have product-market fit
7. Analyze alternatives in your reference market
1. These are possibilities your audience has to “get the job done” if they don’t use your product
2. You can see this as a drill down into the “Current way”

Workshop templates

Examples are provided in the context of a fictitious company which product does email encryption.

Differentiated value

Product-Market dimensions and Market Category Frame of Reference

Alternatives within the reference market

What your audience can do to “get the job done” if they don’t use your product

Next steps

You defined your positioning:

• Your market category frame of reference;
• Your differentiated value within that category;
• Who cares a lot about that value;
• Which alternatives they have.

You can now use those as input to iterate on important assets of your go-to-market strategy:

• Refine your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
• Main input: list of “Who cares more than anyone else?”
• Refine your messaging
• Main input: your differentiated value, list of alternatives
• Update your main assets: website, pitch deck, etc