Obviously Awesome
How to nail product positioning so customers get it, buy it, and tell their friends—the tactical playbook Ries & Trout never wrote.
Ries and Trout explained what positioning is. Dunford explains how to actually do it. Most products are positioned by accident—inherited from founding narratives, competitor comparisons, or sales team improvisation. The result? Confused customers, long sales cycles, and product-market fit that never quite clicks. Obviously Awesome provides a step-by-step process for deliberately positioning products so buyers immediately understand the value. It's positioning for practitioners—tactical, repeatable, and built from repositioning seven startups herself.
"Positioning isn't what you say about your product. It's the context you put it in. Get the context right and your value becomes obvious. Get it wrong and you're explaining features to people who don't care."
Understand the Customers Who Love You
Start with your best customers—the ones who get value fast and stay. They reveal what your product is actually good at, not what you think it should be good at.
Form a Positioning Team
Positioning isn't a solo exercise. Pull in sales, product, marketing, and customer success. Different perspectives reveal blind spots. Consensus creates alignment.
Align Your Positioning Vocabulary
Define the five components: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, target customer, and market category. Everyone needs to speak the same language before you can position effectively.
List Your True Competitive Alternatives
What would customers use if your product didn't exist? Not your direct competitors—the actual alternatives. Spreadsheets, manual processes, or doing nothing count.
Isolate Your Unique Attributes
What can you do that alternatives can't? Features matter here, but only the ones that create meaningful differentiation. Generic capabilities don't count.
Map Attributes to Value
For each unique attribute, answer: "So what?" Translate features into benefits. Benefits into outcomes. Outcomes into business value customers actually care about.
Determine Who Cares About This Value
Not everyone values the same things. Identify the customer segment that cares most about your unique value. They're your best-fit customers—the ones you should position for.
Find a Market Category That Makes Your Value Obvious
Categories set expectations. Choose one that highlights your strengths and makes your differentiation clear. Sometimes you need to create a new category. Sometimes you borrow from an adjacent one.
Layer on a Trend
Trends create urgency and legitimacy. If your positioning aligns with a broader market shift, lean into it. If not, don't force it. Trends amplify—they don't fix bad positioning.
Capture Your Positioning
Document everything in a simple format the whole company can use. Positioning only works if sales, marketing, and product all tell the same story consistently.
What customers would use if you didn't exist. This defines the playing field and sets the baseline for comparison. Your positioning is relative to these alternatives, not your direct competitors.
Features or capabilities you have that alternatives don't. These are the raw ingredients of differentiation. They answer: what can we do that they can't?
The business outcome your unique attributes enable. This is the "so what?" that turns features into value customers care about. Include proof points—metrics, case studies, data.
The customers who care most about your value. Not "everyone." The specific segment that has the problem you solve best, values your differentiation highest, and becomes your best customers.
The context that makes your value obvious. Categories come with assumptions about features, pricing, and buyers. Choose the category that best showcases your strengths and fits customer mental models.
Market category isn't just a label—it's the lens through which customers evaluate you. Put a great product in the wrong category and it looks weak. The same product in the right category looks like a no-brainer.
Companies inherit positioning from their founding story, copy competitors, or let sales teams improvise. Accidental positioning rarely aligns with where you actually win. Deliberate positioning does.
Your happiest customers—the ones who onboard fast, stay long, and refer others—are telling you what you're actually best at. Listen to them, not to your product roadmap or founder vision.
Listing capabilities doesn't position you. Customers need context: compared to what? Why does it matter? Who cares? Positioning connects features to outcomes in a way that makes value obvious.
Markets shift. Products evolve. Competitors change. Your positioning should too. Dunford repositioned seven companies—sometimes multiple times. Treating positioning as static is a choice to become irrelevant.
It's the tactical guide Positioning never was. Ries and Trout explained positioning conceptually. Dunford shows you exactly how to do it, step by step. The 10-step process works. Companies use it in positioning workshops, product launches, and rebrands.
It's written by someone who's done it repeatedly. Dunford repositioned seven startups herself—some multiple times. She's lived through bad positioning, fixed it, and seen the results. The advice comes from pattern recognition across dozens of B2B companies, not academic theory.
It makes positioning accessible. Positioning used to feel like art—mysterious, intuitive, reserved for agencies and consultants. Dunford turned it into a process. Product marketers, founders, and growth teams can now position products deliberately instead of accidentally.
It solves the most common go-to-market failure. Great products fail because customers don't understand them. Sales cycles stall. Demos don't convert. Marketing messages fall flat. Usually the problem isn't the product—it's the positioning. Dunford gives you a framework to fix it.
Who should read it: Product marketers launching new products. Founders struggling to articulate value. Growth teams facing long sales cycles. Anyone responsible for making sure customers "get it" quickly.
The B2B SaaS Explosion (2010s): By the late 2010s, every category had 20+ competing SaaS products. Buyers were overwhelmed. Sales cycles lengthened. Differentiation became harder. Product marketers needed frameworks to cut through noise—not just messaging tips, but strategic positioning processes. Obviously Awesome arrived at exactly the right moment.
Product-Led Growth Era (2015–2020): Companies shifted from sales-led to product-led models. Freemium, self-service, and trial-to-paid conversions became standard. This made positioning even more critical—you can't explain value in a sales call if users never talk to sales. Your positioning had to work immediately, in-product, or users churned.
The Gap Between Strategy and Execution: Classic positioning texts (Ries & Trout, Positioning; Moore, Crossing the Chasm) explained what good positioning looks like but not how to create it. Agencies offered expensive consulting. Dunford built the bridge—a DIY framework that product teams could run themselves. It democratized positioning.
Why It Endures: Obviously Awesome works because it's a process, not a philosophy. The 10 steps apply whether you're positioning AI tools, dev platforms, or enterprise SaaS. The five components—alternatives, attributes, value, segment, category—are universal. Markets change. The method doesn't. As long as companies struggle to articulate value, this book stays essential.