Positioning sprint

What positioning is

Context. The frame a buyer arrives with, the assumptions loaded before you say a word, and the reason two products with identical features are read completely differently. Not a tagline, and not a document: a decision, made by a group of people agreeing out loud.

This board walks the methodology April Dunford sets out in Obviously Awesome. The credit is hers; the sweat is yours.

The one rule: run the components in order, starting from what your best customers would actually do if you did not exist. Attributes only mean something relative to those alternatives. Value only flows from attributes that survive. The category is chosen last, to frame the value. Start anywhere else and you will write the old positioning again in nicer words.

How to think about it

• Best customers, not average ones. The people who bought fast, stayed, and can say why. Positioning built from the average customer averages you into the noise, and the average customer is the one least sure why they are here.
• An alternative is what they would do, not who you benchmark against. The spreadsheet, the agency, the intern, doing nothing. In most categories one of those is the market leader, and a rival that appears in no real customer story is not an alternative, it is an insecurity.
• An attribute has to pass two tests: the alternatives lack it, and you can prove it on request. "Easier" and "more powerful" are claims. "Installs without IT in twenty minutes" is an attribute, because somebody can go and check.
• Value is the so-what ladder, climbed until you reach something a buyer would pay for. Attribute, then what it lets them do, then the business outcome. Most claimed differentiators die on the second rung, and that is the phase working.
• A characteristic that cannot be targeted is not a characteristic. "SMBs" is a mood. "Teams of two to ten running their own paid social without a designer" is something an ad platform or a salesperson can act on.
• Consensus is the deliverable. Each phase closes with an explicit human agreement before the next opens. Positioning that lives in one person's head is not positioning; it is a preference the rest of the company keeps contradicting.

Failure modes worth naming: starting at the tagline; letting a favourite feature survive the attribute test on seniority; adding a fifth value theme so nobody's work is excluded; and choosing the category out of habit, which is how a genuinely different product ends up compared to the thing it was built to replace.

Numbers to hold it against

Positioning has fewer clean numbers than a channel does, and pretending otherwise is its own failure mode. These are the ones that hold.

• Work from eight to fifteen best customers. Fewer than five and you are generalising from anecdote; past twenty you are collecting rather than deciding.
• Ten to fifteen recent win/loss conversations, wins and losses in roughly equal number. Interviewing only losses produces a confident account of why you never win, which is a different thing from the truth.
• Themes stabilise fast. By roughly the eighth to tenth conversation you will mostly be hearing repeats. That is the signal to stop interviewing and start deciding, and it arrives earlier than most teams expect.
• Two to four value themes, and two strong ones beat five thin ones. Buyers retain roughly one. Every theme added dilutes the others in the only memory that matters.
• The five-second test is the cheapest instrument here. Show the headline to five to ten people who match the best-fit profile, ask what it does and who for. If fewer than half get it, the headline is the problem, not the traffic.
• Three to five working days, then revisit quarterly or on a trigger. Positioning debated for a quarter is positioning avoided, and the debate does not converge on its own.
• Category creation costs years and a marketing budget most teams running this sprint do not have. It is a real move and occasionally the right one. For almost everyone here, the honest answer is the subsegment.

What moves these: how many customers you have, how well documented your losses are, and whether the buying decision involves one person or six. In a committee purchase, the value theme that wins is often the one that de-risks the decision rather than the one that excites the user.

What has to be true before a card is agreed

Alternatives. Drawn from a real customer's history, with the evidence named: an interview, a lost deal, a review. Honest about what the alternative does well, because customers chose it for reasons and pretending otherwise blinds the sprint.

Attributes. Passes both tests, with the proof written down, not gestured at. The honest-doubt line filled in rather than left blank, because an attribute that thrills only us should die in the Value phase, and it can only die there if the doubt was recorded here.

Value themes. The ladder written out in full, and a customer quote or a number at the top of it. A theme with no evidence at the top is an aspiration and belongs in the roadmap, not the positioning.

Best-fit customers. Characteristics an ad platform or a salesperson could act on today, a trigger that says when the positioning gets heard, and an anti-profile naming who predictably churns. The anti-profile saves more time than the profile does.

The messaging hierarchy. Every line traces to a card on this board. A claim no attribute supports is either an unrecorded attribute or a lie, and it is worth finding out which before it reaches the homepage. This is the one card that goes through the gate, because approving it is the organisation deciding its positioning.

The seed cards are the first instance, not the ceiling

Seven cards show the shape. This board is the one place in the library where the count is meant to shrink as it moves right, and that funnel is the method working rather than a phase going thin.

Alternatives holds three to six cards, including the one that is not a company. Attributes holds six to fifteen, deliberately more than will survive, because a filter needs something to filter. Value holds two to four themes and no more, orphaned attributes archived rather than quietly carried. Customers holds one to three best-fit cards plus the anti-profile, Category one decision, Message one hierarchy.

A board with two attribute cards has not been generous enough at the top of the funnel to have chosen anything at the bottom of it.

The layout is one arrangement, and here the order is load-bearing

On most boards in this library the phase order is a convenience and you should rearrange it freely. This is the exception, and it is worth saying plainly: each component is defined in terms of the previous. Attributes are meaningless without agreed alternatives. Value cannot be climbed from attributes nobody accepted. A category chosen before the value exists is a category chosen out of habit.

So rename the phases, split them, add a column for a second segment or a second market, run two hierarchies side by side. All fine. What does not survive is running them out of order, and the usual way that happens is starting with the tagline because somebody needs one on Thursday.

When this is the wrong playbook

If the product genuinely has no attribute the alternatives lack, this sprint will surface that in a day and no amount of messaging will fix it: it is a product problem, and finding it out cheaply is still a good outcome. If you have no customers yet, there are no best customers to start from, and the honest first move is customer discovery. If the real constraint is distribution rather than comprehension, better positioning will make a message nobody sees slightly clearer. And if what you need is one campaign's argument rather than the company's frame, that is a campaign brief's through-line, and it takes an afternoon rather than a week.