#48: Strategy for Future Product Positioning with April Dunford

Your product vision is a position you aspire to have in the future: be the best solution for a problem a set of customers care about. That should drive your strategy. And I had the fortune of discussing positioning in detail with April, the biggest guru.

We started in a very controversial way: you should not base your strategy on your positioning! Wait, what?

• Positioning is an exercise to formulate how your current product is the best for a specific customer need.

• Strategy is not about your current product! It is about the value you want to create in the future.

Confusing those can get you in trouble.

But there is a catch. Product Strategy is about “how you will achieve your Product Vision.” However, if your vision potentially goes 3, 5, or 10 years into the future, your 6, 12, 18 months strategy is getting you closer to smaller milestones that still need to be differentiated and sellable!

These milestones have a “positioning thesis,” and your strategy needs to build a product that can deliver on the promise you aim to make.

Resources

• AprilDunford.com

• April’s newsletter and podcast

• Obviously Awesome book

• Sales Pitch book