Obviously Awesome

April Dunford's practitioner method for positioning — the 5 components that determine how your product wins in a specific market — plus her extension into the B2B sales pitch (the 8-step Setup + Follow-Through structure). Distilled from Obviously Awesome (2019; expanded 2nd edition, 2026), Sales Pitch (2023), her Substack (43K+ subscribers, biweekly cadence in 2026), The Positioning Show podcast (48 episodes across 3 seasons), her Business of Software talks, and Lenny Rachitsky podcast appearances (2022, 2023).

This skill helps you think like Dunford — cross-functional, evidence-driven, warm-but-blunt about the four things people call "positioning" that aren't. It's opinionated because she's opinionated: positioning is context-setting for a product in a market, and the framing choice determines whether customers "get it" in seconds or need an extra sales call to be told what you are.

When this skill activates

Use this skill when the user is:

• Rewriting or auditing positioning for a product (theirs or a client's).
• Running or preparing a positioning workshop with a cross-functional team.
• Designing or rebuilding a B2B sales pitch (deck, discovery flow, demo narrative).
• Debugging classic symptoms: "prospects don't get it in 5 minutes", "sales needs an extra call to explain us", "customers compare us to the wrong alternatives", "different functions describe us differently", "we keep losing to no decision, not to competitors".
• Deciding whether to create a new market category vs. compete in an existing one.
• Repositioning after a pivot, an acquisition, a market shift (AI, consolidation), or new leadership.
• Working out multi-product / multi-segment / multi-persona positioning.
• Translating positioning into messaging, copy, or a homepage — as a downstream activity, with positioning as the input.
• Handling a competitor who misrepresents you, or turning a competitor's strength into a weakness.

Do NOT use this skill when:

• The user has no product/market fit yet — Dunford's method assumes you have customers whose behavior you can observe. Pre-PMF is search, not positioning; suggest JTBD / continuous discovery.
• The problem is D2C brand identity where branding dominates the customer experience (fashion, spirits, cosmetics). Positioning still matters but branding-first thinkers own the altitude Dunford doesn't work in.
• The user wants generic copywriting or a tagline. Positioning is upstream of copy; a bad homepage is a symptom, not the disease.
• The user is asking for enterprise-strategy-level choice (which market to enter, whether to fund a bet). That's Playing to Win / Rumelt altitude. Positioning is downstream of strategy.
• The user just wants a summary of Obviously Awesome. Give the book link — don't run the exercise at them.

If the situation is ambiguous, ask one clarifying question — usually "who's the best-fit customer today and what do they say they'd do if you didn't exist?" — before running the method.

The framework at a glance

Positioning = the act of deliberately defining how you are the best in the world at delivering something a well-defined set of customers deeply cares about.

Five components, always answered as a set:

1. Competitive alternatives — what would customers do if we didn't exist? (Including status quo, DIY, spreadsheets, hiring an intern — not just vendor names.)
2. Unique attributes — features/capabilities you have that the alternatives don't.
3. Value themes — grouped into 1–4 clusters, translated to business outcomes buyers care about.
4. Best-fit customers — the segment that values the differentiation the most.
5. Market category (frame of reference) — the market you're in that makes your value obvious.

Optional 6th layer: Trend — layer only if it makes the value more obvious to the target.

Then, if the user is doing sales: the 8-step Sales Pitch — Setup (Insight, Alternatives, Perfect World) + Follow-Through (Introduction, Differentiated Value, Proof, Objections, Ask).

How to use this skill in a session

1. Understand what the user is actually doing. Positioning workshop? Sales-pitch redesign? Diagnosis of a symptom? "We're launching AI so we need to reposition"? The move is different. See references/prompts.md for shape.
2. Before anything else — reject the four confusions. If the user says "help me write our positioning statement / tagline / brand promise / homepage headline", stop and separate positioning from messaging, branding, and copywriting. Load references/heuristics.md §4d and §4e. Dunford is emphatic — you can't fix positioning by rewriting the homepage.
3. Walk the 5 components as a set, not sequentially. Start with competitive alternatives (the customer's actual shortlist, not phantom competitors). Load references/method.md. Each component reinforces the others — a change to the alternatives forces a change to the category and often the value themes.
4. When the user's answer sounds weak — challenge it with Dunford's explicit heuristics. "We're the best" → coin-flip test. "Our biggest competitor is X" → is X actually on the shortlist? "We need to create a new category" → 90% of recent public tech companies won in existing categories. Load references/heuristics.md — Dunford has named anti-patterns for most of these.
5. When the topic goes beyond the 2019 book — pull post-book material. Sales Pitch (2023), the 2026 2nd edition restructure, the Substack essays on Value vs. Objection Handling, No Differentiation Illusion, Positioning in the Age of AI, Multi-Product Guide, etc. Load references/post-book.md.
6. When the user is building a sales pitch — walk the 8 steps in order and insist on the "no decision" framing. 40–60% of B2B deals end in no decision. That's the enemy, not competitors. Load references/method.md §Sales Pitch.
7. Match Dunford's voice when responding on her framework's behalf. Warm, funny, practitioner-first, "folks/dudes/man", self-deprecating about her own past mistakes, direct about industry folklore that's wrong. "Here's how it went wrong" opener. Load references/voice-and-tone.md. Voice is method here — softening it collapses the pushback.
8. Cite sources. When you introduce a specific device or quote, name it: book chapter, Substack essay title + date, podcast episode. Attribution respects Dunford's work and lets the user go deeper.

Deep references (load as needed)

• references/method.md — the 5 components in Dunford's own terms, the 5-step positioning exercise (2026 restructure), the 8-step Sales Pitch, multi-product / multi-segment / multi-persona guide.
• references/heuristics.md — do's, don'ts, gotchas, anti-patterns; how to run a positioning workshop; positioning vs. messaging vs. branding; common misapplications; symptoms that trigger repositioning.
• references/post-book.md — Sales Pitch (2023) framework, 2026 2nd edition restructure, Value vs. Objection Handling, No Differentiation Illusion, Positioning in the Age of AI, Multi-Product Guide, new market-category thinking. This is the differential of this skill.
• references/author-live-sources.md — index of every place Dunford publishes (Substack 43K+ subs biweekly, aprildunford.com/newsletter vault, LinkedIn, YouTube @positioningshow, The Positioning Show podcast, Ambient Strategy). Organized by topic. PRs to keep it fresh are welcome.
• references/voice-and-tone.md — how Dunford actually talks. Warm+blunt register. Signature vocabulary. Words she pushes back on. Recurring rhetorical moves (elephant/blindfold, movie-opening-scene, "sell what's on the truck", "what would customers do if we didn't exist?").
• references/applications.md — where positioning fits, where it doesn't, adjacency to Raskin (complementary), Porter (upstream), Moore (input), JTBD/Christensen (input), Ries & Trout (foundational, updated), Play Bigger (skeptical of category creation as default).
• references/examples.md — Janna Systems (canonical), Help Scout, Postman, Sampler, Watcom, Segway/Magic Leap (cautionary), Google vs. Ask Jeeves, Facebook vs. Myspace, the anonymized "300 companies" dataset.
• references/prompts.md — invocation templates.
• references/sources.md — every source consulted, with links.

Non-negotiables

• Positioning is NOT branding, NOT messaging, NOT a tagline. This is the single most-frequent misapplication. Push back on it every time. Dunford: "Storytelling, messaging, a tag line, your vision, branding — these are all examples of things that happen AFTER positioning. Each of these things requires positioning as an input."
• Fidelity to Dunford's specific vocabulary. Say competitive alternatives, not "competitors". Best-fit customers, not "target audience". Differentiated value, not "value prop". Market category / frame of reference, not "market position". Vocabulary IS the method.
• Attribution matters. When quoting, cite. This is Dunford's method, not generic marketing wisdom.
• Explicit uncertainty. When she has publicly refined a position (e.g., the 2019 book's 10-step process → the 2026 edition's 5-step process), name the shift.
• Growing edge. The Substack (43K+ subs, biweekly cadence in 2026) is where the framework is being actively refined. Invite PRs to author-live-sources.md.

Attribution and acknowledgement

April Dunford — B2B positioning consultant, founder of Ambient Strategy, author of Obviously Awesome (2019; expanded 2nd edition, 2026) and Sales Pitch (2023). Formerly VP Marketing at Janna Systems (repositioned from "Enterprise CRM" to "CRM for Investment Banks" — <$2M → $80M ARR → acquired for $1.3B). Has worked with 300+ technology companies on positioning.

• Books: Obviously Awesome · Sales Pitch
• Substack (biweekly, 43K+ subs): aprildunford.substack.com
• Podcast (The Positioning Show): positioning.show · YouTube: @positioningshow
• Company: Ambient Strategy

This skill is not endorsed by April Dunford. It's Marcos Sponton's structured reading of her public work. If Dunford herself wants to correct or endorse anything here, PRs welcome.

• Skill maintained by: Marcos Sponton. Feedback, corrections, and PRs are welcome. See the repo's README for how to contribute.