Obviously Awesome by April Dunford is a book about product positioning - how you define what your product is, who it is for, and why they should care. Positioning sounds like a marketing concept, but it affects everything: your messaging, your feature roadmap, your sales process, and how customers perceive your product.
I read it because I kept seeing products (including my own side projects) that were good but struggled to explain themselves clearly. The book gave me a framework for fixing that.
What Positioning Actually Is
Positioning is context. It defines how your product is perceived by framing it within something the customer already understands. Dunford uses a simple example: imagine you discover a new food item. If I tell you it is a "muffin," you expect certain things (sweet, soft, breakfast food). If I tell you it is a "cake," you expect different things (dessert, frosting, celebration). The product is the same. The positioning changes everything about how you evaluate it.
Bad positioning makes customers confused about what your product does. Good positioning makes the value immediately obvious. The title of the book comes from this: your positioning should make your value proposition "obviously awesome" to the right customer.
The 5 Components of Positioning
Dunford breaks positioning into five components that build on each other in a specific order:
1. Competitive Alternatives
What would your customers use if your product did not exist? This is not just direct competitors. It includes doing nothing, using a spreadsheet, hiring a person, or cobbling together a workflow from existing tools.
Understanding competitive alternatives is the foundation because it defines what you are being compared against. If your customers' alternative is a spreadsheet, your messaging needs to emphasize why a dedicated tool is better than a spreadsheet. If the alternative is a competitor with more features, your messaging needs to emphasize why fewer, better features matter.
2. Unique Attributes
What features or capabilities do you have that the alternatives do not? These must be things you actually have, not aspirational features. Be honest and specific. "Better user experience" is not a unique attribute. "One-click import from Salesforce" is.
3. Value
What benefit do those unique attributes provide to the customer? Features are what you built. Value is why the customer cares. A unique attribute might be "real-time collaboration." The value is "your team stops working on outdated versions of documents."
4. Target Customer
Who cares most about your unique value? Not everyone will care equally. The best customers are the ones whose hair is on fire - they feel the problem acutely and will pay to solve it immediately. Define this segment tightly. "Small businesses" is too broad. "B2B SaaS companies with 10-50 employees who have outgrown spreadsheets for managing customer data" is actionable.
5. Market Category
What market does your product belong in? The category you choose sets customer expectations about features, pricing, and competitors. If you position your tool as a "CRM," customers expect contact management, deal tracking, and integrations with email. If you position it as a "sales productivity tool," expectations shift.
Choosing the right category is one of the highest-leverage positioning decisions. It determines which shelf customers find you on, and which products they compare you to.
Why Default Positioning Fails
Most products start with accidental positioning. The founder had an idea, built it, and described it based on what it technically does. This is almost always wrong because it describes the product from the inside out (what we built) instead of the outside in (what the customer gets).
Dunford gives the example of a database product that was positioned as "an enterprise database." Customers compared it to Oracle and found it lacking. When they repositioned it as "an embedded database for mobile applications," suddenly its small footprint and simplicity became advantages instead of weaknesses. Same product, different positioning, completely different customer reception.
The Positioning Process
Dunford recommends running positioning as a team exercise, not a solo brainstorm. The process:
- List your competitive alternatives. Talk to recent customers and ask what they were using before your product.
- List your unique attributes relative to each alternative. Be ruthlessly honest.
- Map attributes to value. For each unique attribute, write down the benefit from the customer's perspective.
- Identify your best-fit customers. Who gets the most value? What characteristics do they share?
- Choose your market category. Which category makes your value most obvious to your best customers?
The order matters. You cannot pick a market category before you understand who your best customers are and what they value.
Three Types of Market Categories
Dunford identifies three strategic approaches to market categories:
- Head to head - compete directly in an existing category. Works when you have a genuine advantage over the leader. Risky because the leader has more resources and brand recognition.
- Big fish, small pond - take an existing category and narrow it to a subsegment where you can dominate. "CRM for real estate agents" instead of "CRM." This is the safest strategy for most startups.
- Create a new category - define an entirely new market. This is the hardest path because you have to educate the market on why the category exists. Only worth it when your product genuinely does not fit any existing category.
What I Took Away
The biggest lesson: positioning is not something you figure out once and forget. As your product evolves, your best customers change, and competitors enter the market, your positioning needs to evolve too. The five-component framework gives you a repeatable process for re-evaluating it.
For developers building side projects, the book is a wake-up call. We spend months on features and minutes on positioning. Flipping that ratio - even slightly - would make most products more successful.