Competition in a Positioning Exercise

In today’s episode, I dive into why competitive alternatives—not problems or future visions—are the right place to start a positioning exercise. I explain how different teams inside a company misunderstand competition in predictable ways, and why positioning must focus only on who shows up on customer shortlists right now. I also share how my thinking on this step has evolved since the first edition of my book, Obviously Awesome, and why getting this step wrong makes every other positioning decision harder.

You will learn:

(03:26) How competitive alternatives are broader than direct competitors but narrower than imagined threats.

(05:05) Why starting with “the problem” often leads to vague or misleading positioning inputs.

(09:21) How jobs-to-be-done thinking reshaped April’s positioning methodology.

(12:19) What the milkshake story teaches about customer comparison frameworks.

(14:46) Why sales teams are the most reliable source for identifying real competitive alternatives.

(17:52) How product, marketing, and founders each skew the competitive picture in different ways.

(24:49) Why AI tools like ChatGPT cannot accurately tell you who your real competitors are.

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