# Strategic product positioning Human Guide

## What This Is For
Help users define the strategic context for their product by identifying the right competitive alternatives, unique value drivers, and target segments to win a market category. It gives the agent a clearer input/output frame for brand and messaging: what context to ask for, what decisions to make, and what usable artifact to return.

Use this as a human-readable version of the Strategic product positioning agent skill. It is meant for marketers, operators, founders, and other non-coders who want the workflow without reading agent-specific implementation instructions.

## When To Use This
- Use this when you need a repeatable process for strategic product positioning.
- Use this when the task needs judgment, examples, constraints, or a clear output format rather than a one-off prompt.
- Use this when you want to hand an AI assistant enough context to produce a usable marketing artifact.

## When Not To Use This
- Do not use this when you only need a quick factual answer.
- Do not use this when the work depends on private data you cannot share with the assistant.
- Do not use this as a replacement for legal, compliance, financial, or medical review.

## What You Need Before Starting
- The goal or business outcome you want.
- The audience, customer segment, or market context.
- Any source material the assistant should respect, such as notes, briefs, examples, URLs, or brand guidance.
- Constraints such as tone, length, channel, deadline, region, or approval requirements.
- A clear definition of what a good final answer should look like.

## Step-By-Step Workflow
1. State the job clearly: "Use the Strategic product positioning guide to help me with..."
2. Add context: audience, goal, offer, channel, source material, and constraints.
3. Ask the assistant to identify missing inputs before producing the final output.
4. Have the assistant follow the skill-specific guidance below.
5. Review the result against the final checklist and ask for revisions where needed.

## Skill-Specific Guidance
- **Audit current perception** - Review existing sales decks or website copy to identify where customers are confused or miscategorizing the product.
- **Identify the status quo** - Guide the user to find the real competition, which is often a spreadsheet, a manual process, or doing nothing.
- **Map unique attributes to value** - Connect specific product features to the tangible outcomes and differentiated benefits that target customers actually care about.
- **Draft a remarkable hook** - Synthesize the positioning into a punchy one-liner that forces people to pay attention and share it with others.
- "If your product disappeared tomorrow, what would your customers use instead, including spreadsheets or manual work?"
- "What has changed in the world, such as technology or regulations, that makes your solution possible and necessary right now?"
- "Who is the villain in your story: the outdated way of doing things that you are specifically designed to replace?"
- "What is the one specific value vector where you are fundamentally superior to every other alternative?"
- "Does your team describe the product consistently, or is there a disjointed narrative between sales and engineering?"
- "What is the job your users are hiring your product to do in their specific daily workflow?"
- **Falling into the Better Trap** - Attempting to win by being slightly better on features rather than being different or creating a new category.
- **Ignoring the Status Quo** - Failing to realize that your biggest competitor is often a good enough manual process or a legacy spreadsheet.

## Decision Points And Nuance
The original skill emphasizes: How to Help, Core Principles, The New Game Shift, The Foil Principle, The Better Trap, Positioning as a Team Sport, Specific Value Vectors, Verticalized Horizontal Tools, Aspirational Transformations, Questions to Help Users.

Use these questions to steer the work:
- What is the intended audience or buyer?
- What source material must be preserved?
- What should the assistant optimize for: clarity, persuasion, accuracy, speed, creativity, or conversion?
- What examples represent the desired quality bar?
- What should the assistant avoid?

## Common Mistakes
- Reject the assumption that you must out-feature incumbents in crowded markets. Focus on being different rather than just being better.
- Step 4: REACH — Find your early adopters by doing things that don't scale
- Step 2: Key Unique Attributes — What makes you different? Identify key product capabilities, features, or functions that the competitive alternatives don't have.
- Don't nail positioning too early
- 'leader at delivering' — you must be demonstrably the best at something
- 'cares a lot about' — the value must matter deeply to those customers
- How it works: Hierarchy (must be done in this order):
- Positioning (foundational layer): Defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a well-defined set of companies care a lot about. Must be figured out first.

## Copy-And-Paste Prompt
```text
Use the Strategic product positioning human guide.

My goal:
[Describe the business outcome]

Audience:
[Describe who this is for]

Context and source material:
[Paste notes, examples, links, or existing copy]

Constraints:
[Tone, length, channel, timeline, must-include items, must-avoid items]

Before producing the final output, ask me for any missing information that would materially improve the result.
```

## Final Checklist
- [ ] The output matches the original goal.
- [ ] The audience and context are reflected in the answer.
- [ ] Important constraints and source material were preserved.
- [ ] The assistant made the relevant decisions explicit.
- [ ] The final artifact is ready to use, review, or hand to the next person.

## Source
This guide was generated from the refoundai/lenny-skills skill entry for `positioning`.

## Source Skill Notes
These notes preserve the nuance from the original skill. Use them as supporting reference when the workflow above feels too generic.

# Strategic Product Positioning

Define the context that makes your product's unique value obvious and undeniable

Help the user with strategic product positioning using insights from 20 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

## How to Help

1. **Audit current perception** - Review existing sales decks or website copy to identify where customers are confused or miscategorizing the product.
2. **Identify the status quo** - Guide the user to find the real competition, which is often a spreadsheet, a manual process, or doing nothing.
3. **Map unique attributes to value** - Connect specific product features to the tangible outcomes and differentiated benefits that target customers actually care about.
4. **Draft a remarkable hook** - Synthesize the positioning into a punchy one-liner that forces people to pay attention and share it with others.

## Core Principles

### The New Game Shift
Andy Raskin: "Every movie starts with some kind of shift in the world, and I call this shift the shift from the old game to a new game. The archetypal example of this, I think in the business world, is what Benioff did with Salesforce. This structure really is about defining a movement, and that's very different from, 'Hey, I'm going to solve your problem.'"

Effective positioning moves beyond the arrogant doctor model by framing the product as a vehicle for a broader movement or shift in the world.

### The Foil Principle
Arielle Jackson: "The positioning was really that it was for brick and mortar businesses, particularly quick serve coffee, donuts, sandwich shops that kind of quick serve brick and mortars. And it was up against your ugly old point of sale. Your cash register effectively. That was our foil."

Identify a specific incumbent or outdated method to act as a foil for your positioning to clearly define what you are replacing.

### The Better Trap
Christopher Lochhead: "The decision they make is, 'What I'm going to do, is I am going to compete in a market with demand, with a better product/service/brand, maybe a better business model, maybe a better set of growth hacking ideas that I learned on the Lenny Podcast. And when the world gets my better, the world will beat a path to my door.'"

Reject the assumption that you must out-feature incumbents in crowded markets. Focus on being different rather than just being better.

### Positioning as a Team Sport
April Dunford: "So I think a lot of weak positioning comes from the fact that we don't have perfect alignment across the team on all these piece parts of positioning. So in the work I do, and even back when I was a VP marketing, if we're going to fix this thing, we can't just have the marketing department or just the product managers sit down and cook up new positioning and then heave it over the wall to everybody else, it actually needs to be a group effort."

Assemble a cross-functional task force including sales and marketing to ensure the positioning narrative is adopted across the entire organization.

### Specific Value Vectors
Ayo Omojola: "Being different is not enough, because it's very easy to build a thing that's different from what exists today, because you just have to look at what exists today and build something else. Being better is not enough, because it's also easy to say, 'Hey, I'm going to make this thing better, and just charge you more money for it.' It has to be better than what exists today in a way that matters to the end user, and for us for a long time it was when someone says, 'Hey, why are you betting on Venmo?' I'd be like, 'Try and send me a dollar that I can use now,' and there was only one app you could do it with."

Differentiate by being fundamentally superior in a specific, tangible way, such as instant availability, that provides immediate value.

### Verticalized Horizontal Tools
Ivan Zhao: "If you use Notion, Notion are more understood as the productivity suite, but our intent, and if you use Notion, more you discover intent, which is that it has a no-code developer power into it and you can create almost any kind of productivity software using Notion itself."

Position highly flexible or horizontal software within well-understood categories to make it accessible to less-technical audiences.

### Aspirational Transformations
From "Essential reading for product builders—part 2": "Being successful at selling horseback riding means they grow the market for their product while giving the perfect context for talking about their saddles. It lets them position themselves as the leader and affords them different kinds of marketing and promotion opportunities. It lets them think big and potentially be big."

Sell the aspirational outcome or transformation your product enables rather than focusing strictly on the utility of individual features.

## Questions to Help Users

- "If your product disappeared tomorrow, what would your customers use instead, including spreadsheets or manual work?"
- "What has changed in the world, such as technology or regulations, that makes your solution possible and necessary right now?"
- "Who is the villain in your story: the outdated way of doing things that you are specifically designed to replace?"
- "What is the one specific value vector where you are fundamentally superior to every other alternative?"
- "Does your team describe the product consistently, or is there a disjointed narrative between sales and engineering?"
- "What is the job your users are hiring your product to do in their specific daily workflow?"

## Common Mistakes to Flag

- **Falling into the Better Trap** - Attempting to win by being slightly better on features rather than being different or creating a new category.
- **Ignoring the Status Quo** - Failing to realize that your biggest competitor is often a good enough manual process or a legacy spreadsheet.
- **Arrogant Doctor Syndrome** - Jumping straight into your solution and features without first establishing the context of a fundamental shift in the customer's world.
- **Rigid Early-Stage Positioning** - Investing in formal and expensive positioning before identifying consistent patterns in customer needs and competitive behavior.

## Deep Dive

For all 50 sourced insights from 20 guests, see `references/guest-insights.md`

## Related Skills

- Defining Product Strategy
- Product Vision
- Pricing Strategy
- North Star Metrics

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## Supporting file: references/artifacts.md