Strategic Product Positioning
Define the context that makes your product's unique value obvious and undeniable
Help the user with strategic product positioning using insights from 20 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.
How to Help
- Audit current perception - Review existing sales decks or website copy to identify where customers are confused or miscategorizing the product.
- Identify the status quo - Guide the user to find the real competition, which is often a spreadsheet, a manual process, or doing nothing.
- Map unique attributes to value - Connect specific product features to the tangible outcomes and differentiated benefits that target customers actually care about.
- Draft a remarkable hook - Synthesize the positioning into a punchy one-liner that forces people to pay attention and share it with others.
Core Principles
The New Game Shift
Andy Raskin: "Every movie starts with some kind of shift in the world, and I call this shift the shift from the old game to a new game. The archetypal example of this, I think in the business world, is what Benioff did with Salesforce. This structure really is about defining a movement, and that's very different from, 'Hey, I'm going to solve your problem.'"
Effective positioning moves beyond the arrogant doctor model by framing the product as a vehicle for a broader movement or shift in the world.
The Foil Principle
Arielle Jackson: "The positioning was really that it was for brick and mortar businesses, particularly quick serve coffee, donuts, sandwich shops that kind of quick serve brick and mortars. And it was up against your ugly old point of sale. Your cash register effectively. That was our foil."
Identify a specific incumbent or outdated method to act as a foil for your positioning to clearly define what you are replacing.
The Better Trap
Christopher Lochhead: "The decision they make is, 'What I'm going to do, is I am going to compete in a market with demand, with a better product/service/brand, maybe a better business model, maybe a better set of growth hacking ideas that I learned on the Lenny Podcast. And when the world gets my better, the world will beat a path to my door.'"
Reject the assumption that you must out-feature incumbents in crowded markets. Focus on being different rather than just being better.
Positioning as a Team Sport
April Dunford: "So I think a lot of weak positioning comes from the fact that we don't have perfect alignment across the team on all these piece parts of positioning. So in the work I do, and even back when I was a VP marketing, if we're going to fix this thing, we can't just have the marketing department or just the product managers sit down and cook up new positioning and then heave it over the wall to everybody else, it actually needs to be a group effort."
Assemble a cross-functional task force including sales and marketing to ensure the positioning narrative is adopted across the entire organization.
Specific Value Vectors
Ayo Omojola: "Being different is not enough, because it's very easy to build a thing that's different from what exists today, because you just have to look at what exists today and build something else. Being better is not enough, because it's also easy to say, 'Hey, I'm going to make this thing better, and just charge you more money for it.' It has to be better than what exists today in a way that matters to the end user, and for us for a long time it was when someone says, 'Hey, why are you betting on Venmo?' I'd be like, 'Try and send me a dollar that I can use now,' and there was only one app you could do it with."
Differentiate by being fundamentally superior in a specific, tangible way, such as instant availability, that provides immediate value.
Verticalized Horizontal Tools
Ivan Zhao: "If you use Notion, Notion are more understood as the productivity suite, but our intent, and if you use Notion, more you discover intent, which is that it has a no-code developer power into it and you can create almost any kind of productivity software using Notion itself."
Position highly flexible or horizontal software within well-understood categories to make it accessible to less-technical audiences.
Aspirational Transformations
From "Essential reading for product builders—part 2": "Being successful at selling horseback riding means they grow the market for their product while giving the perfect context for talking about their saddles. It lets them position themselves as the leader and affords them different kinds of marketing and promotion opportunities. It lets them think big and potentially be big."
Sell the aspirational outcome or transformation your product enables rather than focusing strictly on the utility of individual features.
Questions to Help Users
- "If your product disappeared tomorrow, what would your customers use instead, including spreadsheets or manual work?"
- "What has changed in the world, such as technology or regulations, that makes your solution possible and necessary right now?"
- "Who is the villain in your story: the outdated way of doing things that you are specifically designed to replace?"
- "What is the one specific value vector where you are fundamentally superior to every other alternative?"
- "Does your team describe the product consistently, or is there a disjointed narrative between sales and engineering?"
- "What is the job your users are hiring your product to do in their specific daily workflow?"
Common Mistakes to Flag
- Falling into the Better Trap - Attempting to win by being slightly better on features rather than being different or creating a new category.
- Ignoring the Status Quo - Failing to realize that your biggest competitor is often a good enough manual process or a legacy spreadsheet.
- Arrogant Doctor Syndrome - Jumping straight into your solution and features without first establishing the context of a fundamental shift in the customer's world.
- Rigid Early-Stage Positioning - Investing in formal and expensive positioning before identifying consistent patterns in customer needs and competitive behavior.
Deep Dive
For all 50 sourced insights from 20 guests, see references/guest-insights.md
Related Skills
- Defining Product Strategy
- Product Vision
- Pricing Strategy
- North Star Metrics
