Define the context that makes your product's unique value obvious and undeniable

Help the user with strategic product positioning using insights from 20 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

Andy Raskin: "Every movie starts with some kind of shift in the world, and I call this shift the shift from the old game to a new game. The archetypal example of this, I think in the business world, is what Benioff did with Salesforce. This structure really is about defining a movement, and that's very different from, 'Hey, I'm going to solve your problem.'"

Effective positioning moves beyond the arrogant doctor model by framing the product as a vehicle for a broader movement or shift in the world.

Arielle Jackson: "The positioning was really that it was for brick and mortar businesses, particularly quick serve coffee, donuts, sandwich shops that kind of quick serve brick and mortars. And it was up against your ugly old point of sale. Your cash register effectively. That was our foil."

Identify a specific incumbent or outdated method to act as a foil for your positioning to clearly define what you are replacing.

Christopher Lochhead: "The decision they make is, 'What I'm going to do, is I am going to compete in a market with demand, with a better product/service/brand, maybe a better business model, maybe a better set of growth hacking ideas that I learned on the Lenny Podcast. And when the world gets my better, the world will beat a path to my door.'"

Reject the assumption that you must out-feature incumbents in crowded markets. Focus on being different rather than just being better.

April Dunford: "So I think a lot of weak positioning comes from the fact that we don't have perfect alignment across the team on all these piece parts of positioning. So in the work I do, and even back when I was a VP marketing, if we're going to fix this thing, we can't just have the marketing department or just the product managers sit down and cook up new positioning and then heave it over the wall to everybody else, it actually needs to be a group effort."

Assemble a cross-functional task force including sales and marketing to ensure the positioning narrative is adopted across the entire organization.

Ayo Omojola: "Being different is not enough, because it's very easy to build a thing that's different from what exists today, because you just have to look at what exists today and build something else. Being better is not enough, because it's also easy to say, 'Hey, I'm going to make this thing better, and just charge you more money for it.' It has to be better than what exists today in a way that matters to the end user, and for us for a long time it was when someone says, 'Hey, why are you betting on Venmo?' I'd be like, 'Try and send me a dollar that I can use now,' and there was only one app you could do it with."

Differentiate by being fundamentally superior in a specific, tangible way, such as instant availability, that provides immediate value.

Ivan Zhao: "If you use Notion, Notion are more understood as the productivity suite, but our intent, and if you use Notion, more you discover intent, which is that it has a no-code developer power into it and you can create almost any kind of productivity software using Notion itself."

Position highly flexible or horizontal software within well-understood categories to make it accessible to less-technical audiences.

From "Essential reading for product builders—part 2": "Being successful at selling horseback riding means they grow the market for their product while giving the perfect context for talking about their saddles. It lets them position themselves as the leader and affords them different kinds of marketing and promotion opportunities. It lets them think big and potentially be big."

Sell the aspirational outcome or transformation your product enables rather than focusing strictly on the utility of individual features.

For all 50 sourced insights from 20 guests, see