Insights Into Building Product Positioning

Someone once said to me, “You aren’t expected to know everything. Part of your journey is to learn along the way and if you need a little help getting started, it’s okay!”.

That’s always stuck with me for three reasons:

1. We are humans and not always geniuses that have an answer for everything.
2. We are always given opportunities to learn and we should take them.
3. There is no harm in starting your path with established boundaries, templates or skeletons.

I started my journey as a Product Marketer not too long ago. While it has been a great journey so far, I acknowledge that there are lots of things yet to be learned.

Last year I had the chance to attend some Pragmatic Marketing classes in Toronto that provided a good perspective and starting point for my initiatives as a product marketer.

Side Note: If any of you are interested in learning about how Product Management and Marketing work together, these one-day classes are the way to go! Best part, these courses are offered all over North America. You can’t find out more here: https://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/

One of my biggest takeaways from these classes was a product positioning template (shared below). This template helps any product marketer get started with developing messaging and positioning for upcoming products, features, releases and more!

Template:

1. TARGET MARKET:
   Who are the potentials users?
   Who are the potential buyers?
   Can the users influence the buyers in the process?
2. FRAME OF MARKET:
   Which markets are this relevant for?
3. TYPES OF PROBLEMS:
   What problems do the members of our target audience currently face and requires solutions for? (Identify at least 5)
4. PROBLEM-ORIENTED FEATURES:
   From these problems, what are problem-oriented features that you can outline? (for the 5 user problems)
   Note, these are not product features, but ideas that can solve the problem at hand. Try to stay away from how we can solve the problem but focus on what can be done to solve the problem.
5. OVERALL PROBLEM:
   Summarize your outlined problems in 2–3 sentences that showcase what people in the industry feel. State the pain points and have an impact statement (how are the pain points impacting their work?)
6. SOLUTION:
   Summarize your solution to the overall problem in 1–2 sentences (Describe the solution we are proposing)
7. POSITIONING STATEMENT:
   In 25 words or less, describe what you offer that will help solve the overall problem.
   Don’t focus on the ‘how’ but the ‘what’ will solve the problem. Try to link this back to your problem-oriented features. This almost acts like a market statement/tagline.
8. PRODUCT DESCRIPTION:
   In 50 words or less describe what the product can do for them?
   Go into more detail from above here.
9. FRAME OF REFERENCE:
   What does this solution substitute for?
10. POINT OF DIFFERENCE:
    What is the one key value of this solution?
    What are the top three differentiators for this solution?
    What benefits are the users/buyers getting?

These are just guidelines that can be changed as needed. As you can see some questions may seem repetitive. This template can be applied to feature releases, product releases, changes and more in various different ways.

It’s meant to act as a skeleton to get you started on what is at the core of the product you are talking about.

Hope this is a good starting point for all your aspiring Product Marketers!

Anjali Arya is a Product Marketer at RL Solutions and a budding Medium blogger from Toronto, Canada. Have something interesting to share? or just curious about her work, follow her on LinkedIn, Medium and Twitter and start a conversation!

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