🚀 How to nail product positioning?

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3 tactics to nail product positioning

💡 Research your audience, market and product

• Create a prioritized list of audience segments, and a clearly defined primary audience to focus your positioning on (don’t be afraid to get narrow)

  • Understand firmographics for each target company and demographics for each contact

  • Map your entire TAM (total addressable market)

• Map competitors (a 2x2 competitive matrix can work)

  • Analyze competitors, complementary products and the ecosystem

• Produce a clear definition of the primary problem your product solves today

  • Align internally (product, GTM, customer success and support) on:

    • Problem(s) you are solving for your audience

    • Jobs to be done or use cases

    • Personas that your product can serve

    • How your product is different from alternatives

    • Product roadmap and features

• Research is an ongoing process; refine continuously as you grow

🔎 Identify product type and determine comparator

• Choose from 4 main product types: 10x better, new way, vertical solution or buy vs. build

  • Match product type based on your audience, market and product

  • Don’t try to beat incumbents on everything; focus on an audience or use case you can outperform 

  • If stuck between types, choose “vertical solution” over “new way” or “10x better” and “buy vs. build” over “new way” as they lead to more effective positioning

  • If no type fits, two issues may exist: lack of product and/or GTM differentiation, or audience is too broad

• Anchor to the right comparator: what is the alternative to your product? Is it building internally, stitching together tools, buying from an incumbent, or using a horizontal generic solution?

  

✍️ Write clear positioning that shapes product story

• Make it abundantly clear how you’re different from the (appropriate) alternative

• Answer these questions:

  • Who is the product for?

    • Be specific and stack rank potential ICP; Go too broad and end up saying nothing to no one

    • Use language they will use to describe themselves (e.g. replace jargons like “distributed knowledge workers” with “fully remote employees”)

  • What exactly is the product?

    • Your audience does not know your product; use plain English and keep it clear, not clever 

    • E.g. instead of “AI-powered revenue design,” say “AI code editor” or “manage your business mail online”

  • Why is it better?

    • Pick the reason your product is better than what the majority of ICP(s) will compare it to (the comparator matched with the product type):

      • If the alternative is building internally: “Save months building X yourself.”

      • If the alternative is a mix of internal tools and expensive service providers: “Save $X in annual legal fees.”

      • Don’t say: “Unlike competitors, we offer XYZ and ABC.”

2 traps to avoid

🚨 Mistaking product positioning with brand story and messaging

• Product positioning should be done for each individual product and is a subset of overall brand story 

• It can be done before figuring out the overall brand story or vice versa

• Messaging = adapting positioning to each audience, funnel stage, and channel

🚨 Overly focusing on competitors when positioning “new way” product type

• Most early customers are using nothing, not a competitor; messaging should make your audience aware of the new way

• Position against using “nothing” or the “old way”,  not against other emerging products

• Early competitors in the same emerging category typically help you grow, not hurt you; they can help define and establish a new way of solving an existing problem

1 tool to leverage

📖 Best practice on product positioning

• “Positioning” exercises that are 10 pages or 30 slides long are generally not helpful

• Focus on getting clarity around who products are for, what the products are, and how they are different 

• Use tools like Ignition and Apollo.io to help with research on total addressable market and competitor landscape

Bonus: 1 trend to spark startup ideas

📈   Manufacturing operations are bleeding billions to preventable downtime

• The world's 500 largest companies lose $1.4 trillion yearly (11% of total revenues) when production lines stop

• Manufacturing faces an efficiency crisis; automotive plants lose $2.3M per hour of downtime while 80% of manufacturers experienced unplanned outages lasting average 4 hours each 

• Manual processes, reactive maintenance, and disconnected systems create cascading failures across complex supply chains

• Opportunities capturing massive savings:

  • Predictive maintenance: Preventing failures before they happen through AI-powered condition monitoring (early adopters cut downtime incidents from 42 to 25 monthly)

  • Connected factory orchestration: IoT-enabled production lines reducing downtime through real-time anomaly detection and self-correcting processes

  • Supply chain resilience: Digital twins and predictive analytics eliminating single points of failures that cascade through interconnected manufacturing networks