How to write a positioning statement

The nine steps

Steps 2 to 6 follow the positioning method April Dunford sets out in her book Obviously Awesome (2019). Her books page says the book breaks positioning into five component pieces (aprildunford.com/books, read 2026-10-14). The words below are ours. Steps 1, 7, 8 and 9 come from our own positioning method, the one the Positioning statement tool runs.

1. Load the context and name the seat. Read your current positioning and its date, then what the product does today in a user's hands, not on the roadmap. Date every source. Name the buyer's seat: "a care coordinator" is a reader, "healthcare" is a category.
2. List what buyers actually do instead. These are the competitive alternatives, and each one should carry evidence: a buyer quote, a review, a lost deal. The method always adds two alternatives: doing nothing, and a person plus a spreadsheet. An alternative with no evidence line is labeled ASSUMED and cannot be ranked first. The top-ranked one gets named in the statement.
3. Isolate the attributes only you have. Keep a fact only if someone outside the company could confirm it by looking, trying or reading. "Better UX" fails that test. The method's passing example is an agentless deploy in under an hour, documented step by step in public docs.
4. Turn each attribute into the value it gives. Write one line per attribute, in what the buyer gets. An attribute with no value a buyer would notice is trivia, so delete it. Two attributes that give the same value merge into one.
5. Find who cares a lot about that value. Write characteristics, not demographics: their situation, their constraint, the thing on fire this quarter. If this buyer differs from the one you sell to now, flag it for a person to decide.
6. Name the market category. Put the product in a candidate category, then list what a buyer would assume about price, the buying process and who signs. If those assumptions are wrong, the category is wrong. Claiming a new category is a strategic call, so the method escalates it.
7. Sort every claim by proof. Split the claims into three buckets: proven now with a source anyone can check, not yet proven, and required before you can say it at all. Name the artifact that would close each gap, and its owner.
8. Assemble the statement and keep the reasoning. Fill in For, Who, Is a, That, Unlike, and a closing line on the difference. For each of the five choices, write one line on the runner-up and why it lost. Add a short list of what you deliberately do not claim.
9. Hand back the open questions. Write each strategic question as a question, with both options and the tradeoff, and leave it unanswered. Then pass the ranked alternatives, buyer characteristics and evidence on to the messaging work.

The For, Who, Unlike sentence shape in step 8 comes from Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm (1991). Steps 1 to 7 decide what goes in it.

Worked sample: Linear's homepage

"The product development system for teams and agents"

"Purpose-built for planning and building products. Designed for the AI era."

Read on 2026-10-14. Source: Linear homepage

That is the H1 and its subhead. Further down, a section headed "Intake and integrations" says:

"Automatically turn conversations and customer feedback into actionable issues that are instantly routed, labeled, and prioritized for the right team."

Read on 2026-10-14. Source: Linear homepage

What the copy does well. The headline commits to a category, "product development system", which is step 6 done in three words. The subhead names the job, "planning and building products", so a reader knows what to compare it with. The intake line is the strongest sentence on the page for step 3. It describes a behavior an outsider could try.

What is missing, against the steps. The hero never says what the reader does today instead, so step 2 has nothing to work with and there is no Unlike. "Purpose-built" and "Designed for the AI era" fail the step 3 test as written, because nobody outside the company can confirm them by looking. In our reading, "teams and agents" names a setup, not a buyer in a situation, which is what step 5 asks for.

The fix, as a filled-in statement. Each slot uses the page's own words or stays a question. The public page does not say what Linear's buyers use today, so we do not guess.

For      teams who plan and build products with AI agents
who      [the pressure they are under: needs evidence]
Linear   is a product development system
that     turns conversations and customer feedback into issues routed to the right team
Unlike   [what these teams use today: needs evidence]
Linear   [the difference, traced to an attribute an outsider can check: needs evidence]

The method takes the evidence for step 2 from buyers: calls, reviews, lost deals, and step 5 builds on it. In our view a homepage is the seller's own account, so those slots stay open until someone brings that evidence. In the step 7 proof pass, the intake line needs a source anyone can check, such as a public doc, before it counts as proven now.

Common mistakes

• Writing "competitors" without naming one. The method's quality bar bans the plural, unnamed word in the statement. Name the single top alternative from step 2.
• Ranking a guess first. An alternative you cannot evidence gets the ASSUMED label and cannot be ranked first. Replace the guess with a call note or a review.
• Listing attributes nobody can check. "Intuitive" and "powerful" fail step 3. Rewrite each as a fact an outsider could test, or cut it.
• Leaving orphan attributes. The method maps every attribute to exactly one value line. One without a value line is either trivia or a value you have not written yet.
• Settling strategy inside the statement. The method treats a new audience, a new category or a dropped offer as a choice for a person. Put it in step 9 as an open question.
• Filling the template first. In our view, a statement written before steps 2 to 7 reads well and decides nothing. The sentence is the last thing you write.

Questions people ask

Can you walk me through writing a positioning statement step by step?

Yes. In our view, the order matters more than the template. In our method you load the context and list what buyers do instead, with evidence. You keep only attributes an outsider can verify, turn each into one value line, and describe who cares most. Then you test a category, sort claims by proof, assemble the six lines and hand the open questions back.

Do you still follow April Dunford's method for positioning?

We do, for steps 2 to 6. In our method, her five pieces are the core of the statement. In our view they need a frame. Date your sources and name a seat before you start, run a proof pass before you assemble, and hand the strategic questions back unanswered. Her books page now describes a newly updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome (aprildunford.com/books, read 2026-10-14).

What makes a positioning statement bad?

Our method's quality bar calls a statement bad when it says "competitors" without naming one, ranks an alternative nobody has evidence for, or claims an attribute no outsider could check. It also counts as bad when the proof is overstated, with no split between what is proven now and what is not. A strategic change slipped in without a question to a person fails the bar too.

Sources

• Obviously Awesome, April Dunford, 2019 (book)
• April Dunford, Books, https://www.aprildunford.com/books, read 2026-10-14
• Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore, 1991 (book)
• Linear homepage, https://linear.app/, read 2026-10-14
• Perplexity follow-up suggestions on "what is a positioning statement", https://www.perplexity.ai/, read 2026-10-13
• Reddit r/ProductMarketing thread "Do you still follow April Dunford strategy for…", seen in Perplexity's sources for "april dunford positioning framework", read 2026-10-13 (Reddit blocks logged-out fetches, so we could not record its address)
• Our positioning-statement method skill and the Positioning statement tool on this site (ours, read 2026-10-14)