Sachin Rekhi reviews April Dunford’s book Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It in his post Positioning for Product Managers:

While 2000’s Differentiate or Die spoke at length on why positioning is important, it never really went into detail on how to actually go about developing your product’s positioning. The traditional approach is to develop a positioning statement. While useful as an output to your positioning process, it really doesn’t describe the process one could use to come up with such a positioning statement. That’s why I was excited to read April Dunford’s new book entitled Obviously Awesome, which is an in-depth tactical guide on how to go about actually developing your product’s positioning.

The reality when it comes to positioning is that most companies end up with default positioning. This is simply leveraging the positioning that the original folks who came up with the product concept thought about when they conceptualized the product offering. But what’s important is to be deliberate about your product’s positioning because a great product could end up failing due to poor positioning alone.

He also discusses April’s advice to replace a “positioning statement” with a deeper 5-part positioning framework which defines the following for your product. This is a really good summary of the book.