How to position your product for a future nobody can predict - April Dunford (Author of Obviously Awesome)

April Dunford is the positioning expert behind Obviously Awesome and a former repeat vice-president of marketing across seven venture-backed startups, most of which were acquired. Over the past decade she has advised roughly 300 B2B technology companies, all with sales teams, on how to position themselves against the competition. In this episode she joins hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver to explain why so many companies are repositioning at once, how a strong point of view on the future underpins good positioning, and why the story a company tells about itself is a decision for product and sales, not just marketing.

We're refreshing The Product Experience and want your input. Take our two-minute survey and help shape where the show goes next! 

Key takeaways

1. Positioning is a company-wide decision, not a marketing exercise. Dunford's own experience repositioning a spreadsheet tool as an embeddable database shows how it reshapes pricing, sales motion and even the product roadmap, not just the words on a website.
2. Major shifts such as the move to AI force widespread repositioning because customers no longer have a stable set of alternatives to judge value or price against, and both AI-native companies and traditional SaaS businesses are wrestling with where they now sit.
3. Intercom's rebuild of its support product around Fin shows how staying anchored to the customer's underlying job, resolving a ticket, can guide a genuine AI-first redesign rather than a bolt-on feature.
4. Companies need a clear, credible point of view on the future of their market, or customers facing genuine uncertainty will simply freeze and delay buying decisions.
5. A compelling vision of the future has to flow from a company's real differentiated value, not be reverse-engineered to flatter its current position.
6. Selling too far into a hyped future risks stalling deals, so the message needs a maturity model that shows customers a credible, low-risk path from where they are today to where the market is heading.
7. Positioning should be revisited on a disciplined schedule rather than settled by whoever argues loudest in the room, and Dunford recommends a structured check every six months on competitors, differentiators and value themes.
8. Customer advisory boards, quarterly executive account calls and a company's own sales team are the most reliable early-warning systems for shifts in budget, buying process and competitive threats, long before they show up as lost deals.

Chapters

• (00:00) Introduction to April Dunford 
• (01:53) The story behind Obviously Awesome 
• (05:33) Positioning as a cross-functional decision 
• (07:23) Why everyone is repositioning right now 
• (09:32) Intercom, Fin and the AI-native rebuild 
• (11:53) Building a point of view of the future 
• (16:52) Is the vision genuine or self-serving 
• (18:00) How to develop your point of view 
• (22:13) Stack Overflow, Salesforce and staying silent 
• (23:45) Hyping the future without stalling sales 
• (27:01) When positioning needs to change 
• (28:42) Running a regular positioning check-in 
• (30:29) Customer advisory boards and voice of customer 
• (34:47) Predicting change after covid and AI 
• (37:20) Wrap-up

We're refreshing The Product Experience and want your input. Take our two-minute survey and help shape where the show goes next! 

Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. 

Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

You've got to decide, like you're making a bet. Right now, your product team is building a bunch of stuff, right? And you've got a vision of where this thing goes, and you've got a product roadmap that's going somewhere. You've planted a flag whether you want to or not.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

April, thank you so much for joining us here today. How are you doing? I'm great. Thanks for having me. This is cool. Um, so I know you from before. We've had a chat before on the podcast. But for anyone who hasn't heard of you and read your amazing book, Obviously Awesome. Um, and you are Obviously Awesome, but that's not I'm just fangirling now. Um, please give us a quick intro to yeah, who you are and um what you do in this crazy product world.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Yeah, so um I guess I'm a positioning expert. Uh I spent 25 years as a repeat vice president of marketing and a series of venture back startups. I think I did seven of those. Most of those companies got acquired. So through acquisition, I ended up with a bunch of big companies. So I did that for 25-ish years. I started in product marketing, so that I still kind of consider myself product marketing very hard. About 11, 12 years ago, I made the switch to consulting. And now what I do is very narrowly focused. So I only do positioning work. I only work with tech companies. Even more specifically, I only work with B2B tech companies that have a sales team. I've been doing that for 11, 12 years. So I've worked with 300-ish companies at this point. Yeah, so that's me.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

And tell us a bit about your book because it is amazing. Um, I absolutely loved it. It kind of opened up a world of just language and understanding for me. Um it's all about positioning. So tell us about the book and about positioning.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Yeah, so here's what frustrated me and how the book came about. So I started out in product marketing, and one of the things I was responsible for was positioning. I didn't know anything about positioning when I had my first product marketing role. I had no idea. In fact, we repositioned a product that nobody ever used that word because we didn't know what we were doing. We were like, okay, this sucks. Let's try something else, you know. So I think we called it a pivot, but what we were really doing was repositioning. Um, and at some point I realized, wow, this is kind of a fundamental thing. Like we do this for products, and it can really make the difference between a product that's successful and product that's not successful. So I decided, wow, I better figure out what this positioning thing is. And so I went down the rat hole. I took a bunch of classes, I talked to a bunch of smart people about it. And what I found was we all understood kind of what positioning was. There was a seminal book at the time called Positioning the Battle for Your Mind by These Guys Reason Trout, which is still a great book. Like everyone should read that book. But it was written in 1982. Wow, okay. Before the internet. And so all the examples were like, I don't know, they were positioning Rice Aroni or something like this. Crystal Pepsi was one, and I was like, I don't know what that is. Um, and uh they they repositioned the country of Jamaica, that was one of the case studies. And I was working on a database, and I was like, I don't know, I think a database is different than the country of Jamaica, but you know, and what really frustrated me about that book is it did a decent job of defining what positioning is, getting you excited about it, showing you, you know, here's what bad positioning looks like, good positioning looks like with a bunch of different examples, mainly consumer stuff. But what it didn't do is tell you how to do it.

SPEAKER_02 3:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

And so I was in a company and we had a whole bunch of products and we were trying to get the positioning tight. And I was like, well, this feels like a skill we need to build internally. Like we should know how to do this. And maybe there isn't a way to, you know, completely systematize it, but we should have some to start with. So that kind of became this thing for me for years after this. Like, how could we build some kind of a repeatable process to actually do positioning? So let me define positioning. So positioning defines how our product is the best in the world at delivering something, some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. That's a bit of a mouthful. Like, I usually like to think of it as context setting for products. Um, context is really important, particularly when it's something brand new that a customer's never really encountered before. If they don't know what it is, they will look for clues in the context. It's a little bit like the opening scene of a movie. Like the job of the opening scene of a movie is to get your big questions answered. Like, where are we? What's going on? What time frame is this? Who are these people? Is this happy or sad? You get your big questions answered and then you can settle in and pay attention to the details of the story. Positioning's a bit like this. It's like, what is this thing? Where is it? Who should I be comparing this to? Why should I pay attention? Is this for me? Like, what is this thing? So positioning answers all those big questions.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

And one of the reasons why I love it is because it kind of initially, I think it I thought it was like a branding, like a marketing, like a purely marketing thing. But actually, it's so useful as a product person to be able to articulate your product in that way of like how it sits within the market and who it's for and everything. So it's really, it's not just for marketing, it really is for the product teams as well.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Right. And and sales and and everybody else. Like, so I learned this on the first product I ever worked on. We we had this thing and we thought it was desktop productivity software. What we thought it was was like a souped-up spreadsheet. It was just spreadsheet where you could do SQL queries. And this was, you know, 20 years ago, we thought that was a genius idea. Um, and and it failed. Like some people bought it, but nobody really used it. We never really thought about what the value of this thing was. We ended up repositioning it as an embeddable database for mobile devices, completely different positioning, uh focused on a completely different part of the market. And when we did that repositioning, it wasn't just a marketing thing. Like we didn't just change what we called it, we changed everything. Like you can imagine, desktop productivity software, 200 bucks downloaded off the website, onesie twosies. I'm now I'm selling embeddable database for mobile devices. I'm going in, I'm selling the entire sales team. So I've got, I've now got direct sales, I've got pricing that does bulk pricing, I'm selling them 100 at a time or a thousand at a time. Um the product itself, like the the roadmap for what we were doing, obviously changed a lot because it was like, okay, now this isn't a bettable database for a mobile device. So there's it we would assume that that mobile device has to sync back to another database somewhere else. So we had to build all that stuff. So, you know, that's not a decision the marketing department is going to wake up one day and say, hey, I think we're gonna do it like this. I mean, it changed the whole structure of the company, how we sold, what we were building, everything.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

Okay, and so in terms of today, everyone is repositioning themselves. Everybody is repositioning. I think everyone.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

Everybody's positioning houses on fire right now. Like it's like I'll kind of creating this. Right. So what we have, like we see this when there is big, big stuff going on in the market. Like we saw it during COVID, right? So COVID happened, a lot of things shut down. So, you know, I was working with companies that were in travel and hospitality space, and there was no travel happening, there was no hospitality happening. I was working with a company that did um systems for big stadiums, the stadiums were all closed. Like you can imagine there was a lot of repositioning that was happening because of COVID. We saw it when we did the move to the cloud, where things were on-prem and then things were on the cloud. And so people, you know, people were talking about, you know, cloud native was a different thing and not cloud native, things like that. Now we've got AI. So AI is a big, big, big change. I mean, a lot of people would argue we've never seen such a big change in tech before. And it impacts a lot of companies. So if you're, let's say, a traditional SaaS business, there's this question in the market. Well, hang on a second, can't I just vibe code that? Like, aren't we just gonna be able to like whip something up on the fly? Like, why would I invest in that for the long term if there's potentially this thing that's gonna disrupt it? If I'm an AI native company, I'm trying to figure out, well, who exactly am I trying to disrupt in here? Am I trying to disrupt everybody? Is this a consumer thing, a B2B thing? Is this just for developers? Because these tools can do a lot of things. And so everybody's wrestling with the positioning right now because so much stuff fills up in the air. If you're an AI company, you've got to get something tight so that you can sell this stuff in a way that customers are actually gonna use it because it's usage-based pricing. If you're a SaaS business, you're trying to explain why you even exist in five years to a customer that might be worried about making continued investment in a platform that, you know, you know, if I just read the tech press, maybe I think that's gonna go away.

SPEAKER_01 9:32

I intercom is one of my favorite companies. Right. Um I remember they were like the the kind of top, top of the class kind of example of how to apply jobs to be done to like a landing page and to explain your product to customers. This is going back like a really long time, maybe 15 years ago. Yeah, yeah. And it was funny because I had a look at their website today and I think it said something like AI platform. And I was like, Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

I would argue now, I've been following them. Everybody's been following them because they've been, and did you see the announcement today? They've been acquired by Salesforce. Oh, no, congratulations on the COVID. Yeah, three billion, three and a half billion, something like that. So they're a really interesting case study of a company that very early, you know, like two years ago, went all in on AI and looked at it and said, wow, like if we were to design this product from the ground up, knowing what we know about AI and what's possible with AI, would this product be really, really different? Like, not just we're gonna bolt some AI onto it, like we're gonna actually re-architect the way this thing works and everything else. And in the end, um build a completely separate product. And I thought they did a great job, at least whenever I saw the CEO talking about it, of really focusing in on what exactly does the customer want to get done? Like, what is the job here? The job here is to resolve a ticket. Yeah. So shouldn't we price around that? Shouldn't we have the whole thing oriented around that? And so I thought they actually did a really good job of being, I don't know what their website looks like and whatever. And who knows today, you know, today they don't care. They're sitting around counting their cash. But um, but um, but I thought they've actually done, at least in the way I've seen um uh Des and the CEO talk about that stuff. I thought they've been uh they've done a great job of thinking about AI from first principles, yeah, but never losing sight of what exactly is the customer trying to do here. Like we're not just doing AI for AI's sake here. Like at the end of the day, we should be doing a better job of resolving tickets. We should be resolving tickets faster. Like this is our whole reason this thing exists.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

And so I thought they'd actually done a great job.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

I mean, but I definitely think their strategy was sad. Maybe not the best. Maybe not the best strategies.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

I don't know. Yeah, that I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

Um, so one of the things that you kind of talk about is having a strong point of view for your future and the future of the market that you're operating in.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

What does it mean to have a strong point of view? Like, what does that look like within your business and how you kind of talk to customers? Right. Um, and also like how do you develop that?

SPEAKER_00 12:28

Yeah, great question. So when we have these periods where there's big, big, big changes, it starts becoming really important that you can walk in and say, we think the future is gonna look like this. Not our product, for everything around our product, for the whole space the product is in. So if we use the intercolumn or fin as an example, you know, in the future, there's gonna be a great deal of customer support that happens using agents. There will still be people involved, but they will only be involved in these types of situations. Like, I mean, I think they do a really good job of having a point of view of what does this look like in the future. If you look at the big AI platforms, for example, so OpenAI, when they talk about their point of view of the future, they often refer to electricity. They're like, this is going to be like electricity, and we're gonna be like the electric company, and you just buy it from us on a meter. That is a very consumer-centric view of the world. That is very different from the way Anthropic talks about their vision of the future, it is very B2B oriented. Like they talk a lot about you know, Claude being able to do all the things that a programmer can do and things like that. And so those two points of view on the future are actually quite different and they map to what each of them is really good at and where their strengths are. If you look at another like AI native company like Replit's a good one, usually one of these vibe-coding platforms, they talk about you know, there won't be any need for SaaS software anymore. You'll just spin these things up on the fly and they'll get created on the fly as you need them to do exactly what you want. That's a really compelling view of the future, and that is very different from what you're hearing from uh OpenAI, for example. Now, if I'm over on the SaaS side of the business, I got to react to that. So I'm a I'm a company like Microsoft or Salesforce, and I have a big customer that says, look, like I'm spending a million bucks on this stuff. Should I be? Aren't we just gonna spin this stuff up on the fly? Like maybe we should be getting all our people trained up on that Replit stuff because I don't know if you guys are gonna exist. And if I'm Mark Benioff, I've got to be able to stand up there and give a compelling version of what does Salesforce look like in the future? Do we believe in agents? Do we think agents are gonna do stuff? Are there still gonna be people with end user licenses of Salesforce? And so that's where we see Salesforce talking about a headless Salesforce. So they're pointing out this idea that, you know, there's gonna be lots of things touching Salesforce. Some of those things might be agents, but look at the value in the back end, all that data, the logic, the workflows, all these things that are very, very difficult to vibe code. And, you know, and of course, in their version of the future, that does not go away. If you listen to Satchin Adela talking about, you know, what does the future look like? He says, models, they're a commodity. Like we're gonna have lots of them. And you'll pick and choose whichever one is the right one. And he's kind of like model schmodels. Yes. Baby in the corner, right? And he says, what's really hard is context. Models are only as good as the context you feed them about your business and your processes and what's going on in there. Well, where does that live? It lives in documents, it lives in PowerPoints, it lives on SharePoint, it lives in the in your inbox. This is all Microsoft controlled.

SPEAKER_02 16:04

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

So, so one, I think you have to have a compelling version of the future to talk to customers, um, particularly if you're selling enterprise stuff, they're gonna say, well, wait a second. Otherwise, the customers are just gonna freeze and say, we don't know how this looks, and let's not buy anything this year because we don't know what next year that we don't know if this is a good investment or not. So you got to give them a compelling reason to buy now. And then the second thing is like how you develop this point of view. This point of view, you know, because it's yours, it's gonna put you in the middle. Yeah. And it's gonna put all your strengths on display and say, look, you should invest in us. Like, you know, if it's Microsoft, you should invest in us because we're the center of this thing. We are the sun and the other things are planets that revolve around us.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

So uh being okay, so being really slightly cynical about that then. Yeah. Is do you think that's how they approach it? Like, you know, when they're thinking of that vision of the future, are they thinking, like, what vision of the future puts us in the middle? Or I think what they're thinking is, you know, what are we really good at?

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Right. Right? What problems do we solve for customers? What is the core of the value that we deliver? And then there's then they're leaning back and saying, well, how does that look in the future? They clearly don't believe it's going away. Yeah. If they thought it was going away, they'd be busy building something else or acquiring other things or doing whatever. But like if we look at the Salesforce acquisition of thing right now, that's a doubling down of the on their core business and showing this is what it looks like in a world where it's all agents.

SPEAKER_02 17:42

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

That makes sense. So what you really have to understand first is you, like the executive team of the company, is building the product today with a set of assumptions about what the product what the future of the product looks like. And so you just need to articulate that.

SPEAKER_01 18:00

Okay, so how do you develop that sense of what the future is going to be? I mean, you mentioned there about kind of looking at the strengths of your business, but I think also you have to have a bit of a visionary, a visionary perspective, potentially.

SPEAKER_00 18:15

Definitely. Yeah. Like I think what you want to do is you want to look back and say, okay, we're really amazing. Like if I'm Microsoft, right? What is the value of all this stuff if we if we're all just going to be agents and we're all just going to whatever? Are you really just going to spin that all up?

unknown 18:30

No.

SPEAKER_00 18:30

If you're Microsoft, the answer is no. Absolutely not. Are you kidding? Like, do you know how people use SharePoint? Do you know all the stuff that's in SharePoint? Do you know how people do email? Do you think email is going away? Do you think we're not sending emails anymore? All that stuff is super important. And if you look at agents, what are the agents actually doing? Well, they're just hitting our stuff. Yeah. Now, if I'm open AI, I'm like, I don't care, man. I'm just the electric company. As long as I get my bit, that's good. So these are not actually at odds, these two things. And it, you know, it's not unsurprising. There's a partnership there, right? But there's also a partnership with Anthropic. And so again, Satcha is like, there's lots of models. We don't have to have one model, just models, models. They're all over the place. But notice how that's very different from like a vibe coding tool that says, oh, well, I don't know. Do we really need SharePoint? Do we really need, do we really need email? Maybe we just vibe code up a little email thing when we need to email. That's really different. These things are at odds. And so you've got to decide, like you're making a bet. Right now, your product team is building a bunch of stuff, right? And and you've got a vision of where this thing goes, and you've got a product roadmap that's going somewhere. You've planted a flag whether you want to or not. Yeah. So what you're trying to do is explain to customers why you're making the decisions you're making. And typically companies do a terrible job of this. They'll just say, oh, this is what we've got right now, and these are the things in the pipeline. You figure it out. You figure out why those things in the pipeline are important. You figure out whether or not this is going to get vibe coded away in two years. You figure it out. When there's big changes like this, we got to come and explain it.

SPEAKER_01 20:15

Yeah. And but uh just kind of going back a little bit, that point of view, you know, how should CEOs, founders, people in this, you know, mid-tier of businesses, like how should they be uh deciding on that point of view? Or do you think it's just innately inside of you anyway?

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Well, here's the thing often it's difficult to articulate this point of view because we are a little mushy on what exactly the core of our differentiated value is. Right. Right. So most of the companies that I work with, we will work on the positioning first. Right. And the hardest step in that positioning is this differentiated value. So here's who we compete with, this is how we're different. This is the value that only we can deliver. Once we get very, very tight on that, we can lean back and say, well, what does a customer need to understand in order to understand why that value is so important? And if you can do that, then you can do it. But a lot of the times people are like, oh, we're not really sure how to talk about this point of view. And it's because there is an agreement across the executive team on what exactly that core differentiated value is. Once we get agreement on that, then we can then we can back up and say, okay, the differentiated value is this. We are the only people that can do this. Why is this important? Like what does what does this value mean to a customer? And why is it that customers gotta have this value? Because when we're the only ones that can deliver it. Then you gotta kind of back up and say, look, like in the future, does that go away? No, it doesn't. And in fact, most of the companies I'm working with now, if we get really tight. On the differentiated value, then we can lean back and weave the story about how you only need that more five years from now, not less. And this is why it's good for you to get started on this now and not wait for two years. Blah, blah, blah.

SPEAKER_01 22:13

Yeah. It makes me think of um Stack Overflow and you know, the obvious hit that that um business took, you know, because everyone started using LLMs for their advice or local code, whatever it was. And I feel like they they were a bit too slow to figure out what I mean. I actually don't know what's going on with that business. Maybe it's fine, but um it's a good thing.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

Well, this is the this is the other thing is we we are in this period of big change. You'll get that. Nobody knows.

SPEAKER_02 22:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

Right? Like so you're looking at it and you're like, Stack Overflow dead or not? Right? And if you're Stack Overflow and you're not communicating anything, then maybe everybody thinks you're dead, even when you're not. Yeah. It's the same thing with Salesforce, right? Like their stock is taking a beating, even though they're having quarter after quarter revenue looks great. Because, you know, I I might argue that they're not doing an amazing job. And I think it's turning now, but they're not doing, you know, up until now haven't been doing an amazing job of giving a very clear story. And yes, there's agents, but what does this what does CRM fundamentally look like in the future with agents? And I'm a customer, I just bought 50 seats. Am I stupid? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

Should I be buying 50?

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Do they go away? Like what happens here?

SPEAKER_01 23:35

You gotta have this clear story because nobody knows what's going on. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about hype. Yeah. How you hype, how you hype your future.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Well, so this is the thing. The trick with this is that if I talk too much about specific product features in the future, then I run the risk of stalling all my deals. So if I come in and say, oh my gosh, in two years, we're gonna have this thing, it's AI native, it's gonna be amazing, all singing, all dancing, it does all the thing. What does the customer say? Great, great. Where is it? I want to come back, come back in two years when you got it, and I'll buy it. But I'm not buying your old crap right now. So this is tricky. This is a line to walk. So our point of view really has to be about the future of the market, but it has to involve our product the way it looks right now, right? So I need to hype where we're going, but I've got to kind of root it in the present day, otherwise, you're not gonna buy. You're just gonna delay everything. So, what really works when we have a situation like this is things like a maturity model, which is kind of like a pathway that says, look, like in the future we're gonna have all singing, all dancing, and an agent is gonna do everything. Agents talking to agents, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you're trying to sell a thing right now to a company that doesn't have a single agent there, like, dude, that sounds scary, or whoo, that sounds amazing, but you don't actually have that yet. Yeah. Yeah. So what am I supposed to be doing? And so what works really well is when you have a maturity model or a pathway that says, okay, step one, if we want to get to agents, what's the first thing we got to do? We got to model the processes, right? How do we do that? Oh, we have this product that's gonna help you model the processes. Then we're gonna decide which of those processes are low-hanging fruit we could put an agent on it right now and have it done, and it's like super low risk, right? So maybe we do that, and we do that with human in the loop at the beginning because you're scared, right? So nothing happens until a human checks, and then when you've done it three times or something, then it's gonna automate. You know, lots of companies are doing this. And then you say, okay, so that's step one, figure out the processes and what you could put an agent on. Step two, let's do baby step. We'll do the easy stuff and we'll make sure every no, nothing's going crazy here. Then step three, you have these ones, and maybe you can start doing exception handling with the agent as well for some stuff, right? So gonna have the humans for the really tricky dicky stuff. And then maybe the next step after that is I got agents doing everything that agents could possibly do. But it's not going from here I am right now and I don't have any to everything, all agents all the time, fire all the people, everything's just the machines talking to the machines. You gotta show them the pathway to get there that isn't scary and delivers enough value right now that you actually, you know, are motivated to do it now and not just wait for two years and see how this all shakes out. So it's tricky, right? It's dance, you gotta do that.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

And in terms of like when we think about the sort of the positioning of your company along that journey as well. Yeah, how do you decide when is a good time to think about how you talk about your business and change it, you know, along that path. Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

So sometimes your positioning is going to change, but but it doesn't necessarily, right? So where it really needs to change is if there's a step on that path where either the value you're delivering is different, uh, that's one thing, or you've kind of, and the the value is different, but you've stepped into another market category that changes the competitors you get compared to. Right. In that case, you're gonna have to adjust the positioning because you know, on step one, they only compared you to folks that look like this, but then you get to step two, and all of a sudden people are comparing you to the vibe coders or they're comparing you to this other set of. And so it is not unusual that if you paint that picture of the journey, you're gonna have step one, we're positioned this way and the value is this. Step two, we're positioned in a different way and the value is different. Step three, it's different, it's different. And so we can map that out and expect to have the positioning change. The other thing is that, you know, the whole rest of the market doesn't stand still, obviously. So you, you know, I can't predict the market, you can't predict the market, your product's changing, all your competitors' products are changing too. So when all this stuff is changing a lot, you have to be sure that you are doing a regular check-in on your positioning to make sure that it hasn't gone stale because you're positioning around a thing you thought was differentiating, but now the competitor's caught up. Or you put out a new release and that puts you somewhere else. Now I got to reposition because of that. Or now I'm kind of breaking into a new market category, customers are making a different comparison, I got to adjust the positioning to take care of that.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

Okay, so what's the best way to kind of keep that temperature check on your positioning?

SPEAKER_00 28:46

Yeah, see, this is the reason why we need an actual positioning process, because if we're just vibe positioning, then it's just everybody's opinion, right? Like we just get everybody together to room and say, why is everybody on our stove? Oh man, it's gotta be this, you know, and everybody's got an opinion. And marketing product never win that fight. Um, if we have a process where we're developing the positioning in a disciplined way, then we can do a checkpoint on it. So most of the companies that I work with are doing a positioning checkpoint every six months. So we get the gang together, we run the positioning process, which is okay, let's look at if we didn't exist, what would a customer do? So, what are the competitive alternatives? What do we have capabilities-wise that's differentiated? And then can we map that to value themes? And then because this is the value, who cares a lot about that value, therefore, this is the market category we're in. So we can do that in a workshop, and then six months later, we can get a subset of the gang back together and say, okay, let's speed run the process and see what's changed. Competitors, we seen anybody new in sales? Anybody getting shortlisted that we didn't talk about the last time? Or maybe somebody's dropped off, something's changed. Differentiated capabilities. Have we added new stuff? Have they caught up to us? Is the list of differentiated things the same or different? And then if it's different, does that mean our value is different? And if it is, then we're gonna have to go back and adjust the positioning. If it's not, we go through and say, nope, same competitors, same capabilities, more or less, map into the same value themes. It's good. I'll see you in six months.

SPEAKER_01 30:29

And we were talking earlier about um customer advisory boards as a as a way to kind of keep close to the customer and how the customer talks. Because I feel like, you know, part of the positioning is that internal like understanding of what your product is in the market and how customers are thinking about it about you, but also the language that you're then using to communicate.

SPEAKER_00 30:52

Yeah, it's not just the language, like one of the things when we have a big upheaval like this, one of the things we really need to understand is like, are we making the right assumptions about customer priorities? Like, do we understand how they're allocating budget right now? Do we understand how a purchase process works right now? Has that changed from six months ago? Is everybody like, oh, we're not spending any money on this right now because we've got to spend money on this because everything's changing and everything's different? It's really hard to keep a finger on that if you don't have a systematic way of checking in with customers. And so that's where something like a customer advisory board is really, really useful because you could call the customer advisory board and say, hey, in the last six months, what's changed about the way you're allocating budget, the way you're looking shortlisting vendors, you know, have you got a strategic initiative around AI right now? If so, what does it look like? How are you doing that? Like these are things that are very hard to figure out until after the change has already happened, it's starting to impact you in sales. But if you have a customer advisory board, you know, you've got a bunch of customers, you can ask them that question. Even if you're thinking about things like voice of customer, which is how they talk about things in their language, I mean, you can do some things with mining customer reviews, looking at the way people talk about stuff online to get that. But what I'm not gonna see is has the purchase process changed? That's not public.

SPEAKER_02 32:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:16

It's not public. The only way I'm gonna get it is if I've got some systematic way to pick up the phone and call customers. So, customer advisory board, great way to do it. Uh, a couple of companies I work with have um this executive sponsorship program where basically every executive in the company gets assigned a handful of accounts and it's their job to do a call with them every quarter. And so, what are you gonna talk about, right? So every quarter you're on one, you're building a relationship. Two, you're in there and you're asking them about this stuff. What's changing? What do you guys think about this? Hey, we think you guys think like that. Is that true? Do you? Are you making decisions like that? What do you, you know, like are you are you scared of this stuff? Are you not scared of this stuff? Um, there's other ways to do it too. Like, you know, it's funny. Like, I only work with B2B companies that have a sales team. If you were in consumer, you would be freaking out if you had a way to talk to people that talked to customers all day while a customer was making a purchase decision. Yeah, you would like be like, my gosh, what a source of information. We have that. It's called the sales team, and we never ask them anything. Everybody sits around a product going, uh, sales, they suck. But meanwhile, they're your early warning system for a lot of this stuff. Like, is this competitor all of a sudden showing up on short lists or not? If you don't have a systematic way of getting that out of the sales team, you don't see it until it starts really impacting deals. And then you go to sales and say, oh my gosh, we're losing all these deals to blah blah. And they're like, Yeah, I know, man. We started seeing them six months ago. It's like, well, it would have been cool to know about that six months ago. But there's kind of this, you know, again, we have to make an effort to systematize some of this stuff, yeah, especially when things are changing. Like we've gone through a period, like with the exception of COVID, we've gone through a pretty long period where the tech hasn't been changing all that much.

unknown 34:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

And so we could get away without all these things. We could get away with kind of, you know, ad hoc. I'm gonna talk to some customers, we're gonna do beta once in a while. We're gonna like, you know, we're gonna have some customer stuff. But when things are changing really, really fast, like putting some systems around this stuff so that we're not walking into a room and having half the people say, well, I think customer XYZ would do this. Well, I think customer XYZ would do this. Like, let's get customer XYZ in the room and let's ask them.

SPEAKER_01 34:47

Yeah. It's interesting because it makes me think, you know, with COVID that was not that long ago, and now the whole revolution, revolution, revelation, revolution, evolution, I don't know, of AI. Right. I wonder like the skills that people are developing and the you know, the experience that everyone's kind of racking up, like the whether the rate of change will stay the same, but actually will just be so much better at coping with it and of yeah, working with it.

SPEAKER_00 35:19

Maybe like that would be cool. That's an optimistic view.

SPEAKER_01 35:23

I feel like we can do it.

SPEAKER_00 35:24

Yeah, well when that's fine. Yeah. Because you know, I like some things in COVID really surprise me, right? Like where we ended up after COVID. Like, remember we all did everything virtual all the time. Nobody went into the office, and we all made that work. And then here we are five, six years later, and everybody's back in the office. Everyone's like, like in the work I do, it's uh I work with cross-functional teams with the executive team, and I did all workshops were virtual for a year and a half. We had an extraordinarily long lockdown in Toronto where I'm based. And so for a year and a half, I didn't get on a plane, I didn't do, I didn't do nothing. Everything was virtual. And I thought, okay, when we get back to the office, some of these will we'll do face-to-face, but we'll still do a good chunk of the virtual nobody. Nobody wants to do a virtual one. Like I think I've done three in the last three years.

SPEAKER_01 36:18

Yeah, we're the opposite in our company. So I and I'm maybe we have quite a young team. I'm like one of the oldest people, and I'm so young, really. Yeah. Um, and when we're doing workshops, we tend to do them online because it you have all the tools to hand, and you're writing everything down, and then you don't have to, you know, right, write it on post-it notes and then I don't know, copy it in or try and somehow get it into the computer. And so actually a lot of our workshops we'll do online, but we do go into the office and just hang out together and chat.

SPEAKER_02 36:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:51

Um, so yeah, it's but it's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 36:53

So some things like I felt like, you know, some of the progress we made during COVID was sticky, you know. Yeah. We're still online shopping more than ever. We're still, you know, some of that stuff was sticky, and some of it kind of backslid a little bit. And so again, we're terrible at predicting the future. Yeah. But we need to. Oh, not I mean, it's part of our job. We gotta have a point of view, we gotta look at it, but we have to accept the fact that we are often wrong.

SPEAKER_02 37:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:20

Well, on that note, thank you very much, April. It's been great chatting to you. All right, thanks for having me. The product experience hosts are me, Lily Smith, host by night, and chief product officer by day. And me, Randy Silver, also host by night. And I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work. Lou Ron Pratt is our producer, and Luke Smith is our editor.