TURKEY_SCRAPS_v170

This positioning process assumes you have enough happy customers to see a pattern in who loves your product and why. Until you can see that, you will want to hold off on tightening up your positioning.

Good positioning sets off a set of assumptions about my product that are true. Bad positioning sets off a set of assumptions about my product that aren’t true—leaving your sales and marketing teams to do the work of undoing the damage your positioning has already done.

Modern product marketing managers represent the market to the product team—the positioning, the messaging, and a winning go‐to‐market plan.

However, keep in mind that most of your target customers have never heard of you or your rival startups—they simply want to know how your product compares to what they use today. Customer-facing positioning must be centered on a customer frame of reference.

The common failure in both of these traps is not deliberately positioning the product. We stick with a “default” positioning, even when the product changes or the market changes. I believe this happens because we haven’t been taught that every product can be positioned in multiple ways and often the best position for a product is not the default. W