Product Positioning Doc Skill

This skill produces a complete product positioning document following the April Dunford positioning methodology. Output covers category definition, target customer, unique attributes, proof points, and a messaging hierarchy — ready to align GTM, marketing, sales, and product teams.

Required Inputs

Ask the user for these if not provided:

• Product name and what it does
• Target customer — who is it for? (role, company type, size)
• Problem it solves — what pain or goal does it address?
• Key alternatives — what do customers use today instead? (not just direct competitors — include status quo, spreadsheets, DIY)
• Differentiation — what does this product do that alternatives cannot? (not features — capabilities that produce different outcomes)
• Proof points — any customer data, case studies, metrics, or validation?
• Business goal — is positioning for a new category, expansion into new segment, or repositioning away from a declining category?

Output Structure

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Positioning Document: [Product Name]

Version: [1.0] Owner: [PMM / Founder / Marketing lead] Date: [Date] Status: [Draft / Reviewed / Approved] Approved by: [Names — this document must be signed off by product, marketing, and sales leadership before use]

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1. Background & Context

[2–3 sentences describing why positioning is being done now. Is this a new product, a pivot, a segment expansion, or a rebrand? What triggered this work?]

Positioning objective: [e.g. Move from being perceived as a reporting tool to being the category leader in revenue intelligence for mid-market SaaS]

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2. Market Category

What category does this product compete in?

This is the frame of reference your customer uses to understand what the product is. Choose the wrong category and everything downstream — competitors, value, messaging — is wrong.

Category: [e.g. Customer data platform / Revenue intelligence / No-code automation / Modern data stack]

Why this category, not [alternative category]? [1–2 sentences on why this framing serves the customer's understanding better than adjacent categories]

Category maturity:

• New category (we are creating it — high education burden, high upside if it works)
• Growing category (fast-growing segment — compete on differentiation)
• Mature category (well-understood — must disrupt with clear superiority or narrower niche)

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3. Target Customer

Be precise. Vague targeting produces vague positioning.

Who this is NOT for: [Be explicit about who to exclude — this sharpens the positioning for those who are a fit]

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4. Competitive Alternatives

What do buyers use today when they don't have your product? List all real alternatives — not just direct competitors.

Key insight: [What does this competitive landscape tell you about what your positioning must emphasise? e.g. "Every alternative either costs too much or requires too much manual work — positioning must nail 'fast time to value' and 'right-sized for mid-market'"]

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5. Unique Differentiated Attributes

These are the features or capabilities your product has that alternatives genuinely cannot match — or cannot match at the same level. Do not list features that competitors also have.

The core differentiation thesis: [1–2 sentences that unite the above attributes into a single "why we win" statement — this is internal language, not customer-facing yet]

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6. Value Proof Points

Back up the differentiation claims with evidence:

Proof gaps: [Are there claims you're making that you don't yet have evidence for? List them — they are either research projects or risks to the positioning]

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7. Positioning Statement

The classic positioning template — internal only, never used verbatim in marketing:

For [target customer] who [trigger event or problem statement], [Product name] is a [category] that [primary differentiated value — the outcome, not the feature]. Unlike [primary alternative], [Product name] [the key thing that makes you different and better].

Draft positioning statement:

For [VP Revenue Ops at B2B SaaS companies with 50–500 reps] who [struggle to forecast accurately as the sales team scales], [Product Name] is a [revenue intelligence platform] that [gives every rep and manager accurate, real-time pipeline visibility without any analyst overhead]. Unlike [Salesforce dashboards and manual reporting], [Product Name] [syncs automatically, surfaces risks before they become missed quarters, and needs no configuration by IT or data teams].

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8. Messaging Hierarchy

Translate the positioning into customer-facing language at three levels:

Tagline (5–8 words)

[The simplest possible statement of what you do and for whom. Used in ads, hero sections, email signatures.]

Options to test:

1. [e.g. "Revenue intelligence for scaling sales teams"]
2. [e.g. "Forecast with confidence. Close with clarity."]
3. [e.g. "The revenue platform your whole team will actually use"]

Value Proposition (1–2 sentences)

[Used in the hero section of the website, email subject lines, and sales decks. Must be instantly clear.]

[e.g. "[Product Name] gives revenue teams real-time pipeline visibility and accurate forecasting — without spreadsheets, custom reports, or waiting for an analyst. Get live in 4 hours, not 4 months."]

Full Description (3–5 sentences)

[Used in PR, partnership briefs, longer sales emails, and About Us pages.]

[e.g. "[Product Name] is the revenue intelligence platform built for mid-market SaaS teams. Unlike legacy BI tools that require analyst configuration or CRM dashboards that only show what's already happened, [Product Name] automatically syncs your entire revenue stack, surfaces AI-driven risk signals, and lets any rep or manager ask questions in plain English. [X] customers use [Product Name] to call their quarters with confidence. Average time to live: 4 hours."]

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9. Persona-Specific Messaging

The core positioning is the same, but different buyers care about different aspects:

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10. Messaging Do's and Don'ts

Do say:

• [Specific, outcome-focused language — what the customer achieves]
• [Comparative language grounded in evidence]
• [Language your target buyer uses to describe their problem — not language you invented]

Don't say:

• ["Best-in-class", "innovative", "cutting-edge", "game-changing" — unless followed by evidence]
• [Feature lists without outcome context]
• [Jargon your buyer doesn't use themselves]
• [Claims your competitors could also make]

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11. Distribution Plan

Positioning only works if it's implemented consistently:

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Deeper Materials

This skill ships with support files — use them when they are available:

• references/category-choice.md — Choosing Your Category: the Highest-Leverage Positioning Decision. Apply it while producing the output; it carries the calibration and judgment calls the method summary above compresses.
• templates/positioning-canvas.md — a fill-in version of the deliverable with the quality gates inline. Offer it when the user wants to work the document themselves rather than have it generated.

Scoring Rubric (0–40)

Score any output of this skill before handing it over; 32+ is ship-quality.

Quality Checks

• Positioning statement has exactly one A — the product is accountable to exactly one primary differentiated claim
• Competitive alternatives include the status quo — not just named competitors
• Differentiated attributes describe outcomes, not features
• Every proof point cites a source — not "customers say…"
• Persona messaging uses the buyer's language, not the company's
• At least two people from product, marketing, and sales have reviewed and approved

Anti-Patterns

• Do not write positioning that could describe any competitor — differentiation must be specific, provable, and hard to copy
• Do not mix category design with category entry — know whether you are creating a new category or competing in an existing one
• Do not create persona messaging that uses the same headline for all personas — each persona has different priorities
• Do not include proof points that are claims without evidence — every proof point needs a supporting data point or reference
• Do not skip the "not for" section — defining who this is not for sharpens targeting and prevents off-persona deals

Example Trigger Phrases

• "Write a positioning document for [product]"
• "Build a messaging framework for our B2B SaaS tool"
• "Define our product positioning — who is this for and why should they care?"
• "Create a positioning statement and messaging hierarchy for [launch]"
• "Help me articulate our differentiation vs [Competitor]"

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Supporting file: references/category-choice.md

Choosing Your Category: the Highest-Leverage Positioning Decision

Positioning isn't the tagline — it's the mental filing cabinet you ask buyers to put you in. The category choice silently sets your competitors, your price anchor, your must-have features, and who evaluates you. Most positioning docs skip it; it's the whole game.

Your three options, always

1. Enter an existing category ("we're a CRM") — instant comprehension, inherited buying process and budget line, but you inherit the feature checklist and the incumbent's shadow. Right when: the category leader under-serves a segment you can own.
2. Sub-niche a category ("the CRM for law firms") — comprehension + differentiation, smaller-but-owned demand. Right when: a segment's workflow genuinely diverges from the mainstream product's assumptions. This is the default best answer for most products.
3. Create a category ("we're not X, we're the first Y") — no checklist, no anchor, total narrative control — and total education cost. Requires: years of runway, content muscle, and a real discontinuity (new behaviour, not new packaging). Most "new categories" are option-2 products with expensive branding.

The decision inputs

• What budget line does the money come from today? Position where the budget already exists unless you can afford to create one.
• What do buyers type when the pain hits? Search/AI-assistant queries are category votes. If they ask for "CRM for firms", option 2 is chosen for you.
• Who wins a bake-off in the incumbent category? If a checklist eval kills you, don't enter that category — reframe to an eval you win.

Anchor mechanics

The category sets the price anchor: "a CRM" anchors to Salesforce's per-seat; "a revenue intelligence layer" floats free (and must justify itself alone). Pick the anchor you can beat or escape — never one that halves your price by association.

Commitment test

The doc's category claim must survive: the homepage H1, the sales deck's slide 2, the analyst call, and the pricing page — all saying the same filing cabinet. Four surfaces, four different categories = no positioning, just words.

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Supporting file: references/worked-example.md

Worked Example — Product Positioning Doc Skill

The brief

Clausebridge is a four-year-old legal-tech company ($6.2M ARR, 84 customers) selling contract review software to in-house legal teams at 200–2,000-employee companies — teams of one to eight lawyers drowning in NDAs, MSAs, and DPAs. The product encodes the team's own negotiation playbook, clears routine contracts automatically, and routes only true deviations to a lawyer. Positioning work was triggered by a Series B close and a sagging win rate: the website says "CLM companion," sales says "contract AI," and the CEO has said "your AI legal team" on two conference stages. Lost-deal interviews (14 in Q2 2026) show buyers either lumping Clausebridge in with CLM suites it can't out-checklist, or recoiling from replaces-your-lawyer framing. The newly hired PMM owns the doc; the CEO is attached to the big framing.

The output

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Positioning Document: Clausebridge

Version: 1.0 Owner: Renata Okonkwo (PMM) Date: 2026-07-10 Status: Draft — pending sign-off Approved by: [Requires sign-off from CEO, VP Product, VP Marketing, VP Sales before any external use — the category decision in §2 supersedes prior stage language once approved]

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1. Background & Context

Clausebridge closed its Series B in May 2026 and is scaling the sales team from 4 to 11 reps, but win rate fell from 31% to 22% over the last three quarters. Lost-deal analysis shows the problem is not product: it is that prospects cannot place us. We are evaluated against CLM suites on repository and e-signature checklists we deliberately don't build, or dismissed as an "AI lawyer" experiment that legal buyers don't trust. This document exists to pick one frame and arm every team with it before the new reps ramp.

Positioning objective: Move from being perceived as either a CLM also-ran or an AI novelty to being the default choice in contract review automation for small in-house legal teams.

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2. Market Category

What category does this product compete in?

Category: Contract review automation

Why this category, not "AI legal assistant" or "CLM"? The "AI legal team" framing has genuine long-term appeal and has tested well on stage as a vision statement — we recommend keeping it in keynote and fundraising language, where it belongs. As a buying category today it works against us: 12 of 14 lost-deal interviews surfaced trust objections to anything resembling replaces-your-lawyer claims, several GCs raised professional-responsibility concerns, and no budget line exists for it. CLM is the opposite problem — a mature category owned by suite vendors, where we would be scored on repository, workflow, and e-signature checklists we have chosen not to build. Contract review automation is the frame in which our strongest capability is the whole point of the category.

Category maturity:

• New category (we are creating it — high education burden, high upside if it works)
• Growing category (fast-growing segment — compete on differentiation)
• Mature category (well-understood — must disrupt with clear superiority or narrower niche)

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3. Target Customer

Be precise. Vague targeting produces vague positioning.

Who this is NOT for: Law firms; enterprises with 20+ lawyer teams and an entrenched CLM suite (their problem is workflow, not triage); regulated industries requiring on-prem deployment (not on the 12-month roadmap). Reps who chase these deals lose four months to security review and churn risk — the "not for" list is a qualification tool, not a modesty exercise.

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4. Competitive Alternatives

What do buyers use today when they don't have Clausebridge?

Key insight: Every alternative either applies generic judgment at scale (suite AI, chat) or your judgment without scale (GC, outside counsel). Positioning must own the intersection: your playbook, applied to every contract, with lawyers touching only what deviates.

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5. Unique Differentiated Attributes

The core differentiation thesis: Clausebridge is the only product where the unit of automation is the team's own negotiation judgment, not a generic risk score — which is why it removes lawyer work instead of re-routing it.

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6. Value Proof Points

Proof gaps: We have no defensible data yet on negotiation outcomes (e.g. concession rates vs. manual review) — do not let sales claim "better deals" until the Q4 outcomes study lands. We also lack a named customer in logistics, our fastest-growing segment; treat as a customer-marketing priority, not a positioning claim.

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7. Positioning Statement

For GCs and first legal hires at 200–2,000-person companies who have just had contract turnaround escalated as a sales-cycle blocker, Clausebridge is a contract review automation platform that clears routine contracts against your own playbook in minutes and routes only true deviations to a lawyer. Unlike CLM suites' generic AI risk flags or ad-hoc AI chat, Clausebridge encodes your negotiation positions and keeps an audit trail of every accepted fallback.

The single claim this product is accountable to: only deviations reach a lawyer. Every message below must survive tracing back to it.

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8. Messaging Hierarchy

Tagline (5–8 words)

Options to test:

1. "Your playbook, applied to every contract"
2. "Contract review that keeps deals moving"
3. "Lawyers for the exceptions, not the routine"

Value Proposition (1–2 sentences)

Clausebridge reviews every inbound contract against your own playbook and clears the routine ones automatically — so your lawyers only see the 20% that genuinely needs them. Median NDA turnaround across our customers: 9 hours, down from 6.5 days.

Full Description (3–5 sentences)

Clausebridge is the contract review automation platform for small in-house legal teams. Unlike CLM suites that flag generic risks or AI chat tools that start every review from zero, Clausebridge encodes your team's own negotiation positions, clears contracts that match them, and routes only true deviations to a lawyer — with an audit trail of every accepted fallback. 84 legal teams use Clausebridge to keep deals moving without growing headcount. Median time from upload to first-pass review: 4 minutes.

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9. Persona-Specific Messaging

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10. Messaging Do's and Don'ts

Do say:

• "Only deviations reach a lawyer" — the accountable claim, in the buyer's language
• "Your playbook / your positions / your fallbacks" — possessive framing is the differentiator
• Sourced numbers: 9 hours, 71%, −38% (each traces to §6)

Don't say:

• "AI lawyer," "replaces legal review," "your AI legal team" — trust-killer in 12 of 14 lost deals; vision-stage language only, never product marketing
• "CLM" in any self-description — it invites the checklist we lose
• "Better negotiation outcomes" — proof gap until the Q4 study (§6)
• "Cutting-edge AI" — every alternative says it; it differentiates nothing

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11. Distribution Plan

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Why it's shaped this way

• The category section does the political work in the open. The CEO's "AI legal team" framing isn't attacked — it's promoted to vision language and given a home (keynotes, fundraising) while the buying category is decided on lost-deal evidence. This resolves the "mix category design with category entry" anti-pattern without requiring anyone to lose face, and the distribution plan's CEO talk-track memo makes the handshake operational.
• The positioning statement is accountable to exactly one claim — "only deviations reach a lawyer" — and §8–§9 visibly trace back to it, per the Quality Check that the product carries one primary differentiated claim, not a bundle.
• Competitive alternatives include the status quo, outside counsel, chat, and build-in-house — not just VaultCLM — because the Quality Checks require the status quo and most of the ICP today buys nothing. The key insight line ("generic judgment at scale vs. your judgment without scale") is what makes the differentiation thesis non-generic.
• Every proof point cites a source with a date, and the Proof Gaps paragraph explicitly bans sales from the "better deals" claim until the Q4 study — per the anti-pattern against proof points that are claims without evidence. A positioning doc that hides its weakest claim gets discovered in a demo.
• Each persona gets a different headline in the buyer's vocabulary — including the commercial counsel's fear of being automated out, which is the deal-killer nobody puts in slides. Same-headline-for-everyone is a named anti-pattern; the user persona row is where positioning docs usually go dishonest.
• The "not for" section names the deals reps actually chase and lose (suite-entrenched enterprises, on-prem regulated) and frames exclusion as qualification, per the Quality Check — vague targeting was the original disease here.
• Attributes are written as outcomes with a "why competitors can't match it" column ("new counsel inherit institutional judgment on day one"), not feature names — the Quality Check demands outcomes, and the third column is what keeps the doc from describing any competitor.

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Supporting file: templates/positioning-canvas.md

Positioning: [product] — [date] · owner: [name]

The category decision (made explicitly — references/category-choice.md)

We position as: existing "[category]" / sub-niche "[category] for [segment]" / new "[frame]" Because: [budget-line + search-behaviour + bake-off evidence] Price anchor this sets: [what] — acceptable because [why]

Competitive alternatives (what buyers do WITHOUT us — incl. spreadsheets/do-nothing)

1. …

Unique attributes → value (attribute alone is not value)

Best-fit customer (be exclusionary — positioning that fits everyone moves no one)

Perfect fit: [firmographic + situational markers] Bad fit (say no to): [who we refuse and why]

The statement

For [best-fit], [product] is the [category] that [core value], unlike [primary alternative] which [gap].

Proof

[3 pieces max: number, name, demo]

Consistency check (all four must file us in the same cabinet)

Homepage H1: ✅/❌ · Deck slide 2: ✅/❌ · Pricing page: ✅/❌ · Sales talk-track: ✅/❌

Revisit when: [competitor move / segment shift / 2 quarters]