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What it argues
Obviously Awesome is April Dunford's practical guide to product positioning — the often misunderstood discipline of defining where your product fits in the competitive landscape so that the right customers immediately understand its value. Dunford spent twenty years as a marketing executive at enterprise software companies and repositioned their products multiple times. The book is a crystallization of what she learned: most tech companies ship positioning by default rather than by design, and default positioning is almost always wrong.
Dunford defines positioning as the context in which customers understand your product. Position a product in the wrong context and its value becomes invisible — not because the product is bad, but because customers can't see it clearly. Her diagnosis is that founders and product teams confuse positioning with messaging, taglines, and value propositions. These are outputs of good positioning, not positioning itself. Positioning is the upstream decision that makes everything else downstream — messaging, sales plays, pricing, and even product roadmap — clearer.
What it gets right
- 1.
Positioning is the context you set for customers to understand your product's value. Wrong context makes your product invisible no matter how good it is.
- 2.
Most companies ship positioning by default — they position products as the thing they most resemble rather than the thing that best captures their unique value.
- 3.
The five components of positioning: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, target customer segments, and market frame of reference.
What it covers
Who wrote it
April Dunford is a positioning consultant and advisor to B2B technology companies, with a client list including Postman, Aprimo, and many other enterprise software firms. She spent twenty years as a vice president of marketing at companies including Janna Systems, Entrust Technologies, and IBM, repositioning multiple products through acquisitions and pivots. She writes at aprildunford.com and speaks regularly at technology conferences. Obviously Awesome, self-published in 2019, became one of the most recommended books in startup marketing circles within months of its release.
