Product Management: Foundations to Practice · Product Strategy and Positioning
The Positioning Framework
Even a genuinely excellent product can fail if customers lack the right frame of reference to understand it. April Dunford's positioning framework gives product teams a repeatable process for fixing that.
April Dunford's 2019 book Obviously Awesome defines positioning as the act of deliberately defining how a product is the best at something a clearly defined market cares deeply about [8]. Positioning is fundamentally about context: even a genuinely excellent product can fail if customers are not given the right frame of reference to understand what it is and why it matters, while a well-positioned product can win simply by being obviously the right choice within its chosen frame.
- Positioning is the deliberate act of defining how a product is the best at something a defined market cares about.
- The true competitive set includes what customers would actually do without the product, not just named rivals.
- Dunford's ten-step process builds positioning from true alternatives and unique value, not from a statement written backward.
- Positioning works best as a cross-functional exercise, since no single function holds the full picture of customer perception.