positioning-and-pitch
Positioning and Pitch (Dunford)
This skill captures the strategic positioning framework from April Dunford's Obviously Awesome and the pitch construction model from Sales Pitch, combined into a single cohesive framework for product managers. It covers how to define where your product wins, for whom, and why — and how to translate that positioning into pitches that land with executives, boards, partners, and buyers. Positioning is not a marketing exercise. It's the upstream decision that determines what you build, who you build for, and how you talk about it.
Core Principle
PMs who can't articulate why their product wins in a specific market context can't make good roadmap decisions, can't align stakeholders, and can't enable sales — positioning is the strategic act that connects product decisions to market reality.
Positioning feels like a marketing deliverable until you realize it's the decision that shapes everything downstream. Your market category determines which competitors buyers compare you to and which features they expect. Your differentiated value determines which capabilities deserve investment and which are distractions. Your best-fit customer definition determines where discovery should focus and which segments your roadmap should serve. Your pitch — to executives, to the board, to partners, to customers — is just positioning delivered in context.
Most product teams skip positioning or treat it as a one-time launch exercise. The result is predictable: roadmaps that try to serve everyone, pitches that sound like every competitor's, stakeholder conversations where the PM can't explain why this feature matters more than that one. When positioning is clear, product decisions get easier. When it's absent, every decision becomes a negotiation without shared criteria.
Dunford's framework is built on a specific insight: positioning is not messaging. It's the set of assumptions — about your competitive context, your unique strengths, and your target market — that messaging is derived from. Get the positioning wrong and no amount of wordsmithing fixes the pitch.
Scoring
Goal: 10/10. When evaluating positioning and pitch quality, rate 0–10:
| Score | Description |
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