I've used April Dunford's framework. Geoffrey Moore's. Dozens of templates. After 20 years, here's the one mental model that never fails me.
After 20 years of positioning enterprise products at Microsoft, Salesforce, and UiPath, the author argues that most positioning frameworks fail because they start with the product rather than the customer's existing belief. The framework that works: identify what the customer already believes to be true, find the tension between that belief and a new reality, and position your product as the resolution of that tension. Three real examples from Azure, Tableau, and UiPath illustrate the approach.
There's a positioning exercise I've run with PMM teams at three different companies. I give everyone a product and a target customer and ask them to write a positioning statement. It takes about twenty minutes. Then we compare results.
The outputs are almost always technically correct and strategically useless. They describe what the product does. They name the category it competes in. They list differentiators. They follow the template. And they would have zero persuasive effect on any real buyer in the world.
The problem is not the frameworks. April Dunford's work is excellent. Geoffrey Moore's category creation thinking is still relevant. The templates aren't wrong. The problem is where people start.
Almost every positioning exercise I've seen begins with the product. What does it do? What's unique about how it does it? Who benefits from what it does? Then it works backward to the customer.
Real positioning works in the opposite direction. It starts with the customer's existing belief — the thing they already think is true about their problem, their situation, or the category your product competes in — and it finds the tension between that belief and a new reality your product can unlock.
The structure is: Customer believes X. New reality is Y. Product is the bridge from X to Y.
That's it. That's the framework. Everything else — the category definition, the differentiators, the proof points — exists to serve that structure.
Positioning is not primarily a communications challenge. It's a cognitive challenge. You are trying to change how a person thinks about their problem and their options for solving it. You cannot do this by describing your product accurately. You can only do it by starting where they already are.
In my first year working on Azure, I kept wondering why certain product launches got traction and others didn't. The capabilities were often comparable. The teams were equally skilled. The ones that worked all had something in common: they were positioned against a belief the customer held, not against a competing product.
The Azure SQL Data Warehouse Gen2 launch worked because we positioned it against a belief enterprise data teams had held for years: that cloud data warehouses required painful trade-offs between performance and cost. The customer belief was "cloud analytics means compromising." The new reality was "elastic compute means you can have both." The product was the proof.
The launches that underperformed were positioned against competing products — "we're faster than Redshift, more flexible than Snowflake." This is not positioning. This is comparative marketing. It's useful in later stages of an evaluation when the customer is already choosing between options. It does nothing to create the initial belief that your product deserves to be in the evaluation at all.
When we relaunched Tableau as AI-first, the tempting positioning was to lead with what was new — the AI capabilities, the natural language querying, the automated insights. This is how enterprise software usually handles product evolution: here's what we added.
The belief we needed to work against was different. Enterprise analytics teams had a deeply held conviction that AI in BI tools was a feature for demos, not for daily workflows. They'd seen too many "AI-powered insights" features that surfaced obvious observations with high confidence scores. They were right to be skeptical.
The positioning that worked didn't argue with this belief. It acknowledged it and then made a specific, falsifiable claim: the kind of AI that matters for analytics is not the kind that generates insights for you. It's the kind that makes every analyst in your organisation as productive as your best analyst. That's not a feature. That's a workflow transformation.
The customer belief was "AI in BI is marketing theatre." The new reality was "AI that scales analytical capacity rather than replacing analytical judgment is different." The product was the demonstration of what that difference looked like in practice.
At UiPath, the positioning challenge is the hardest version of this problem I've encountered, because the customer belief we're working against is well-founded and widely held: enterprise AI projects fail in production.
You cannot dismiss this belief. You cannot argue against it. The data supports it. Most enterprise AI projects don't survive contact with real operational complexity. The belief is accurate.
The positioning work is finding the tension between that accurate belief and a specific new reality: the reason most AI projects fail in production is not the AI — it's the absence of a durable execution layer that can handle the exceptions, escalations, and governance requirements that production processes actually involve. That's a distinct claim. It accepts the premise of the belief and adds a cause that the belief didn't identify.
Customer belief: "AI projects fail in production." New reality: "AI projects fail in production when they lack an orchestration layer. With one, production-grade agentic automation is achievable." Product: the orchestration layer that makes this real.
Every positioning statement you write should be able to answer these three questions clearly:
What does the customer currently believe that makes them think the status quo is acceptable? This is the belief you're working against.
What is the specific, falsifiable new reality that your product enables? This is not a feature list. It's a claim about what's now possible that wasn't before.
What proof exists that the new reality is real? This is your evidence layer — customer stories, metrics, analyst validation, demonstrations.
If you can't answer all three clearly, the positioning isn't ready. Not because the template isn't filled out, but because you haven't yet found the tension that makes the positioning true and useful at the same time.
"Positioning is not about describing your product. It's about changing how a customer thinks about their problem. You can only do that by starting where they already are."
The frameworks all exist to help you find this. But the frameworks are scaffolding. The building is the tension between what the customer believes and what's now possible. That's what you're looking for.
Kuber Sharma leads platform product marketing at UiPath. He writes Positioned, a newsletter on AI-era product marketing strategy for enterprise PMMs.