Positioning Prep Part 1: Decisions to Make Before a Positioning Exercise
Everything is easier if you make these decisions before you start.
As I mentioned in the last newsletter, a new, updated, and revised edition of Obviously Awesome is coming in mid-February. As part of the book launch, I’ve decided to launch a new mini-podcast series and a set of newsletter posts that cover the new content added to the book. Today, we will examine “Positioning Prep Work,” a new section in the book's second edition.
But first, where was the prep work in the last book, and why did this change in the second edition?
The Obviously Awesome Positioning Process: From 10 Steps to 5
The first edition of Obviously Awesome had 5 positioning components but 10 steps. A lot of people HATED that the number of components did not match the number of steps in the process. If you’re one of the many people who emailed me about this discrepancy—I hear you, and I’ve fixed it!
The new edition restructures everything into:
Prep work (the decisions and preparation you need before starting)
5 core steps (matching the 5 positioning components)
Post work (how to make your positioning real)
Ultimately, this made more sense to me too, and I think it makes the process easier to follow. In the first edition, I felt I underemphasized the decisions that needed to be made before the team began a positioning exercise. The new book addresses this by covering it in a separate section.
In my opinion, there are critical decisions that should be made before the team begins a positioning exercise. Making these decisions before you convene a group will often save you conflict and heartache down the road. Once you have assembled a team and begun a positioning exercise, the last thing you want to do is call a timeout to make critical decisions, then backtrack and redo the work you have already done. Getting clear on these things before the exercise starts ensures you have the right folks in the room, that expectations are set realistically, and that we don’t have to do any rework down the road. Here are the key decisions you should make
Is now the right time to tackle positioning?
Who is the positioning for?
What exactly are you positioning?
Which persona are you positioning for?
Decision #1: The Positioning Readiness Check
Is now even the right time to do positioning work?
If your product hasn’t launched yet, what you’re actually creating is a positioning thesis, not true positioning. You’re making educated guesses about competitors, differentiation, value, ideal customers, and market category. As you bring on a first wave of customers, the thesis will either hold or will be proven to be false.
In the 16 product launches I drove (back when I was an in-house marketer), we never got the positioning exactly right before launch. Sometimes we were close, sometimes way off, but it was never perfect.
If we accept that pre-launch positioning is just a thesis, then there is a risk of over-tightening the positioning too soon. If we launch and proudly proclaim that we are only for insurance companies, only insurance companies will try the product. If we fail, what have we learned? Insurance wasn’t it. Instead, I think it makes more sense to launch with our positioning a little loose so we can feel where the market naturally pulls us. We can review a thesis internally to verify its accuracy, but if we keep it a little loose externally, we can see if something unexpected happens. For example, it could be that banks love our stuff and insurance companies don’t. Once we understand what works, we can focus on tightening our positioning.
My advice: You can use my method to create a positioning thesis, but keep your positioning loose pre-launch. Launch the product, see where the market pulls you, then tighten up your positioning based on what you learn.
Decision #2: Who Is This Positioning For?
The methodology in Obviously Awesome is designed specifically for customer positioning—not investor positioning, not employee positioning, not partner positioning.
These are fundamentally different:
Customer positioning focuses on now and the immediate future: What do customers get for their money today versus available alternatives?
Investor positioning focuses more on the future. Investors want to understand the vision and the path you will take to become a big, market-leading company in the future.
Employee positioning focuses on career growth, learning opportunities, mission, and compensation. Employees want to work on great products at companies that are going to be around in the long term - just like customers do- but they also want to grow and thrive in an environment that suits them.
The process in my book is focused on customer positioning. It’s important that the team agrees to focus on customer positioning rather than on other audiences. If you don’t make that decision up front, you risk half the team trying to make the story work for investors, and you will either end up with mushy positioning or have to backtrack and restart the process with a focus only on customers.
Decision #3: What Exactly Are You Positioning?
The team will also have to decide what exactly we are attempting to position. Are we positioning a product? The company? A suite of products?
For single-product companies, our product positioning and company positioning are the same thing. Don’t overcomplicate it. When (and if) you get to product #2, you can separate them.
For multi-product companies, there are choices to make. You need to decide whether you’re positioning:
A single product (that you sell separately)
The entire company (including all product capabilities)
A suite or platform of products
Some combination of the above
This decision often turns out to be a nested set of decisions related to your go-to-market strategy:
Do you always lead with one product, then cross-sell others? If you do then you should make sure the lead product positioning is solid for new customers. Next you can position the other products with the assumption that the customer has already purchased the lead product.
Do you have a set of products where customers can choose many different first products or a combination of products? In that case, you might want to position certain products together or separately, depending on how you want customers to purchase your products.
Do you sell everything together as a platform? Often, companies have products that are components of a platform or suite and need to be positioned as a single integrated offering, even if customers may choose to omit certain parts of the platform.
I’m going to talk more about positioning in multi-product companies in an upcoming newsletter, but here, my main point is that you need to make a set of decisions before you bring a team together to work on positioning.
Decision #4: Which Persona Are You Positioning For?
Once you know what you’re positioning, agree on the specific persona you’re targeting—specifically, the deal champion.
In B2B purchases, many stakeholders are involved, but they’re not all equal. The champion is typically the person who:
Creates the shortlist
Ensures the right people are involved
Makes recommendations to the economic buyer
Your positioning must resonate with the champion. If it doesn’t, you never make the shortlist. You never get to meet the other stakeholders. You’re dead at step one.
Note: Sometimes you have co-champions (say, one on the business side and one on IT). That’s fine—just be clear about who they are. Often, these champions look for value that satisfies the other side’s needs, too, because they know both sides must agree for the deal to close.
Why These Decisions Matter
These decisions aren’t just bureaucratic boxes to check. They fundamentally influence:
Who you bring together for the positioning project
How you frame the project for your team
What everyone’s expectations should be
Whether you’ll actually complete the exercise successfully
Take the time to work through these decisions deliberately before you assemble your team and start the positioning work itself.
Want to go deeper on this topic? Check out this week’s edition of The Positioning Podcast - on Spotify, Apple, Youtube or the web.
In the next edition of this series, I’ll cover the prep work you need to do once these decisions are made—how to assemble your team and what preparation needs to happen before you dive into the actual positioning exercise.
P.S. The second edition of Obviously Awesome is coming in February 2026 (omg so SOON), and I’m incredibly excited to share it with you. Stay tuned for announcements and more insights from the updated book!
Have questions about positioning? Drop a comment!
The biggest question is how is product positioning actually different than the brand positioning. And are both the process different or require different processes?
Thanks / Sandeep.
That’s just simple but powerful decisions.
Simple as it has a non derivative understanding of what is needed to be done and powerful as it is, in fact, what will make we loose a screw and do lots of rework if not to be decided early.
Amazing that you will be delivering a second edition since the book it self, in that way, proves your statement that, the market pulls the product/brand/company and..book (why not?) into what resonates and for whom, changing the original thesis.
Great work.