Understanding the positioning canvas
What, exactly, is the ‘deliverable’ of a positioning exercise? Whether you work with a consultant or do it yourself, the deliverable should be a positioning canvas that captures everything you’ve uncovered during the positioning exercise. If you’re curious, the template I use for positioning canvases is available here.
The positioning canvas is about capturing everything that a positioning exercise uncovers. Having a positioning canvas to fill out, especially if you’re working on positioning yourself, also helps keep the discussion on track and helps ensure that you don’t miss any key points.
What’s in the positioning canvas
The positioning canvas is basically a place to record all of the things you should be determining while you’re working on positioning. It includes:
The product’s market category (ie: continous integration platform, endpoint encryption tool, persistent storage, etc)
Your point of view. You should have a clearly articulated point of view related to the market you’re aiming to win. Your point of view is part of how you differentiate between your product and other alternatives as well as part of how you qualify prospects.
The user persona and the buyer persona. Somethings these two personas will the same, which makes your life simpler. Regardless, you should have clarity about who the user and buyer are.
The characteristics of companies in your target market. How would you know that a company is going to get loads of value out of your product?
The types of workloads that will get the most value out of your product. This is critical for developer/engineer-focused products, because it’s how you’re determine who the ideal user and ideal companies are. Not all workloads are the same — some are I/O bound, some are in scope for compliance frameworks, some are revenue-producing, some require ultra low latency… etc.
The competitive alternatives to your product. You’re selling software to software engineers, so “DIY” is always going to be an alternative. Understand and record what all the alterntives are.
The pain points you solve. Be specific here, and include both user pain points and buyer pain points.
Your unique attributes mapped to your unique value and proof points. This is going to become an important part of your strategic narrative and your overall messaging and will inform your marketing and sales. It’s also a key part of the positioning workshop that informs everything from the market category to the target workload type. Nonetheless, understanding and communicating unique value and attributes is important in and of itself, so make sure to record it here.
Lastly, common objections and how to respond. How do people generally try to poke holes in your product? What can you do to proactively address concerns about the product? Include it here. We’ll always talk about weaknesses in a positioning exercise, and this is related. (oh, your product doesn’t have any weaknesses? Hmmmmmm)
Why it matters
One of the outcomes of a positioning exercise is internal alignment. Just the workshop itself is generally enough to get the leadership on the same page about what the product is and where the company is going. That is important but it’s also not enough. Positioning is something that needs to be communicated with every single person who has a stake in your company’s success and/or is doing any kind of activity that is supposed to help drive growth. This includes:
Every single employee, down to your interns
Any freelancers or consultants you work with
Your PR firm and any other professional services firm you work with
Your board
Having a positioning canvas also ensures that your positioning doesn’t slip unintentionally over time. Positioning can and should change in some cases, but you don’t want those changes to be unconscious. If you have a written document that the entire company can refer to, the risk of that happening is much lower.
Questions about what’s in a positioning document, why it’s important or even how to find the information for each section? Respond to this email and I’d be happy to chat.