April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome is what many would consider the holy grail of positioning in product marketing. Spending some time to actually read this book, I found that it really earns its reputation. It’s a staggeringly technical piece of information that is clear, short, and informational, and uses clear-cut examples taken from the real world to showcase its ideas.
Going deeper into the key points discussed in the book that lead up to the now-iconic 10-step positioning process is also valuable for product marketers. The importance of positioning is undeniable, as even a world-class product with poor positioning can fail.
“If you’re a baker, making bread, you’re a baker. If you make the best bread in the world, you’re not an artist, but if you bake the bread in the gallery, you’re an artist. So the context makes the difference.”
— Marina Abramović
As per the author, there are two major traps to avoid:
- You are stuck in the idea of what you intended to build, and thus you are oblivious to the fact that the product has become something else.
- You have carefully crafted a product for a market, but the market has since changed.
As a reader, this makes sense to me, especially considering being innovative and adaptive is one of the more valuable skills sought within a product marketer. Being stuck in what was, or what was intended, is not the way to succeed in this fast-paced world. Our markets are changing fast, and customers operate in a context different from our (the marketers’) perspectives.
The 5 Components of Effective Positioning
April Dunford also lists five components for effective positioning:
- Competitive alternatives – what the customer would do if your solution didn’t exist.
- Unique attributes – features and capabilities you have that alternatives lack.
- Values and proof – the benefit that those features enable for customers (notice this can be different from what the business owner initially intended).
- Target market characteristics – characteristics of the group of buyers that lead them to care for the value you are offering.
- Market category – the market you describe yourself as being part of.
- Bonus – trends – trends that your audience understands, which can in turn make your product more relevant right now.
The 10-Step Positioning Process
Then we have the meat of the book: the 10-step process for positioning that is still being used worldwide for a plethora of product categories and genres.
Step 1 – Understand the customers who love your product
Identify what it was about our offering that made them so happy with it. What is it about those customers that made them a good fit for us? Answering these questions will be key to understanding the positioning direction a company needs to take. Best-fit customers hold the key to understanding what your product is. Best-fit customers also tend to be easier to read than the whole customer base.
“Think of your product as a fishing net. You have a theory that your net is good for catching grouper, but you haven’t fished with it yet so you aren’t certain what you might catch. At first, you’ll want to go where there are lots of different fish and see what you pull up. If you notice over time you’re pulling in a lot of tuna, not grouper, you can move to the tuna spot and do the same amount of work to get a lot more fish. Positioning your net broadly as a ‘fish net’ when you have little market experience is the best way to keep your options open until you have enough customer experience to start seeing.”
Step 2 – Form a positioning team
A positioning process works best when it’s a team effort, ideally across different functions within the company, ranging from sales to marketing to customer success. It is also vital that the business owner — whoever that may be — believes in the positioning strategy, otherwise it will fail. The importance becomes apparent when you consider that messaging, audience targeting, sales and business development, account strategy, onboarding and account expansion strategy, roadmaps, and prioritization are also important parts of positioning.
Step 3 – Align your positioning vocabulary and let go of your positioning baggage
One of the valuable skills for a product marketer is adaptability and keeping an open mind. To see the new ways in which the product can grow and develop, we have to consciously set aside our old ways of thinking about it. At least the team has to be on the same page regarding what positioning means, how we define product category, and competitive landscape. Because the goal of the 10-step process is to find the best position for a product — one that puts the product in the context of a market where it can easily win because of the obvious advantages over alternatives — it’s imperative that the team is aligned on this process and keeps its options open for the future direction of the product. Although a product was created with a certain market and audience in mind, it may no longer be best positioned that way. Understanding this as a team and building from there would be the best approach.
Step 4 – List your true competitive alternatives
The important thing to realise is that customers don’t always see competitors the same way we do, and obviously their opinion is the only thing that matters during positioning. All the value we provide is only valuable when a customer perceives it in relation to the alternatives. Failing to identify the competitors from the eyes of the customer will directly lead you to bad positioning.
Step 5 – Isolate your unique attributes or features
Once you have the competitive alternatives, the next step is to isolate what makes you different and better than those others. Key thing to remember here: list everything you can think of, even if you are unsure of its value. Here, focus on the characteristics that drive a potential benefit — ideally objective facts that are provable. Focus on capturing the broader set without trying to decide what is important in step 5.
Step 6 – Map the attributes to value “themes”
In the list you should see a handful of themes start to emerge, along with the value they provide for customers. Next, we organize the list. The goal of this step is to see the patterns and shorten the list to one to four value clusters.
Step 7 – Determine who cares a lot
Once you have understood the value your product delivers vs. other alternatives, you can look more closely into the types of customers who really care a lot about that value. Always keep in mind that value can be totally different for different customers. Best-fit customers are easier to sell and retain. The broader you focus, the more difficult it is to connect with prospects and convince them that your solution is the best one above others. In this stage, target as narrowly as you can — we can broaden the target later if needed.
Step 8 – Find a market frame of reference that puts your strengths at the center
This step is about picking the market category that makes your value obvious to the customers who care about it most. A market has to be something that already exists in customers’ minds — you’re not usually inventing one from scratch. The category you pick sets off a whole chain of assumptions in the customer’s head about who your competitors are, what features to expect, and what a fair price looks like.
One thing that stood out to me: you can’t just ask customers what market you’re in and take their answer at face value. Customers aren’t positioning experts, and they’ll usually place you in the most obvious category they can think of — which is often not the one that shows off your strengths best. If anything, asking them can be misleading, especially if they’ve already tried (and failed) to make sense of your product one way.
From here, Dunford lays out three ways to actually compete once you’ve picked a category:
- Head-to-Head — you accept the market as it’s currently defined and try to win on the existing rules. This mostly makes sense when there’s no dominant leader yet, or when you’re genuinely stronger across the board.
- Big Fish, Small Pond — instead of fighting for the whole market, you carve out a subsegment with needs the leader isn’t serving well, and dominate that instead. It sounds like settling for less, but really you’re just deselecting the customers who were never going to buy from you anyway.
- Create a New Game — you build a brand-new category entirely. This is the hardest and riskiest option, and should only be used once every existing category has genuinely been ruled out.
The comparison that stuck with me: Head-to-Head is trying to out-Coke Coke. Big Fish, Small Pond is selling Coke for dogs.
Step 9 – Layer on a trend (carefully)
Aligning with a trend can help make your offering look current and relevant, particularly for customers who are interested in that trend. Trends can potentially give “boring” products an extra gloss of interest. Use them only when they have a clear link to your product — if we are not careful, trends can mess with your positioning.
Step 10 – Capture your positioning so it can be shared
It’s important to track and note its progress. It can be used to inform branding, marketing campaigns, sales strategy, and so on. It should be shared across the company to ensure the whole team has the same idea of who we are positioning as.
What Comes Afterwards?
Adapting everything based on feedback is extremely important for continuous improvement and staying up to date. As both companies and products change over time, the positioning process has to be updated to keep up with these changes happening in and around us. April Dunford recommends at least every six months, but personally I think it should be even more often in 2026. Also, the arrival of new competitors or major changes from existing ones calls for a revisit.
And of course: try, fail, learn, try again, rinse, and repeat.
The Reader’s Note
This is probably my favourite way of writing business books — practical, straight to the point, and compact. Her methodology is still one of the best, and we can use it for any kind of company by adapting it a bit to better suit our needs, but the quality of the frameworks and the 10 steps is impeccable. As an aspiring product marketer and an aspiring entrepreneur, positioning is extremely important to me, and this book has provided real, practical input on that topic in a way other sources have not. I highly recommend this book — not the summary, the book. Everything in this book earns its place to stay.