Obviously Awesome Summary by Karthik Chidambaram | April Dunford

Obviously Awesome is a simple and great book. The theme of this book is ‘How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love it. I would say it is more like a practical guide on how you position your product, what are your options and after you position, how do you go about it? 

Here are some of my notes and learnings from the book (in no particular order)

What is Positioning? Per the book, ‘Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about’. There are some interesting choices of words here. Deliberate and defined market. We have to be deliberate about positioning and who also need to be clear on who we are positioning the product or service for. 

 

1. Context Setting: When we sell a product, customers usually look for a context on why we need the product (or) they also look for related products which compete in the same space so they can understand the product better. E.g April writes about a musician whose concerts are always sold out, however if the same musician performs in the streets , he does not make any money. The context here is the concert hall. The author writes that as product creators the choices we make in positioning and context can have a huge impact on our business. The author also shares her personal experience where she worked at a start-up and they were positioning the product they were selling as a database. There were tons of database companies out there and well established leaders. They could not penetrate. On further work and talking to customers, they repositioned their product as a ‘Data Warehouse’ where they are able to analyze a lot of data and provide results for better decision making. This is what their product actually does. However they had positioned it incorrectly.

2. How to position?:  You do not want to create a positioning statement for the sake of creating one. There are 5+1 components of creating an effective positioning statement. 1. Competitive Alternatives (Let us say if your product does not exist, what are the customer’s alternatives?) 2. Unique Attributes (What makes our product unique, our key differentiators)? 3. Value (Because of these attributes, how does it help the customer, what value does your product provide), 4. Target Market (Our customers who love and buy our product and rarely ask for a discount), e.g if you are integrating Quickbooks with Shopify, only if a customer uses both QB and Shopify will they be our target market  5. Market Category (What market category are we competing in), This makes it easier for customers to understand your product (similar products who solve the same problem) and 6. Trends. If we are able to  align our product to relevant trends, will be a big bonus (e.g. AI is a trend)

3. Product Vs Company Positioning: The author writes about single vs multi product approach. If it is a single product, positioning the product and the company as the same thing is the easiest path to take. Salesforce was a single product company for 10 years before moving to additional products. Slack, basecamp, box are all single product companies. The author recommends positioning your product and focussing on that. For start-ups this is the easiest way to go. However if a company offers multiple products, we need to worry about company positioning as well. To keep it simple, as a start up position your product and that becomes your company positioning as well.

4. Positioning Team: To position a product, you need stakeholders from across the board (usually 1 person each representing product, sales, marketing etc). 

5. Let go of the past: Even if you had positioned a company a certain way in the past, it does not mean you have to keep doing it the same way. Let go of the past. The author shares an example of Arm & Hammer who invented baking soda in 1846 and changed their positioning in the 1970s to deodorizer for refrigerators. 

6. Talk to Customers: The author suggests that we talk to customers and ask the relevant questions. What will they do if our product does not exist? Why do they use us? Who else exists in the market? This will help refine your positioning and will also help in choosing the market category.

7. Consideration Vs Retention Attributes: Once we identify our unique features , isolate and highlight them. The reason why customers choose us is different than the ones they will consider for retaining us. When you are positioning your product, focus on the consideration attributes. Once you have the attributes, map them to themes. Because of this attribute, how does it make the customer life, better? (e.g 15 megapixel camera  is a feature. Benefit of it is sharp photo images and value is images can be zoomed in and and printed on large format and will look sharp. 

8. Three approaches to positioning: 1. Head to Head, 2. Big Fish, Small Pond (Positioning to win a subsegment of an existing market) and 3. Create a new Game (similar to Zero to One, this is a market you create). The head-head approach will be very challenging for small companies and startups. The reason one would do a head-head approach is when the category is understood well by markets and a clear leader has not emerged. E.g smart glasses is a category. One advantage here is that you do not have to teach your customers. However the expectations are high and hard to compete. There will also be established players in the market eyeing for the same set of customers.  The second approach is to choose a subset of customers. There could be a large category and an established player doing things. However they may not be able to solve the problem for everyone. You choose a subset of the market (e.g let us say plumbing distributors) and go target them.
   
   The author also shares an example of how a Canadian start-up(Janna Systems) she worked at tried to position their product as CRM and Siebel was the leader then for Enterprises. The start-up solved a unique problem on how customers interact with each other. However they could not make any big moves. However, they changed the positioning to CRM for Investment Banking (They had a chat with an investment bank and this led to this change) and they were able to sell better and eventually got acquired by Siebel (for $1.7B).
   
   Here you have special capabilities to meet the needs of a subsegment much better than a category leader. One thing which we need to be careful about with this approach is that a large player (category leader) may end up buying a small company (turn their attention towards this segment) that does this and throw resources. Let us say you need 100 customers and if there are 1000s of customers already existing, this is great. However if there are only a handful of customers, you need to broaden your target. However, this is the easiest way to position a product. Word-of-mouth marketing is very powerful in this approach. The third approach is to create our own category or zero-to-one approach. Here we define the game, the problem has not been solved and your product is one of its kind. You need to educate the market. This is hard. However, the rewards are handsome. 

9. Trends: You can also ride on the trends (It is not necessary to do this) , however it helps.

10. Training & Implementation: Write this down- Once you have a clear position statement and understand your positioning, write this down. Capture it on a single page and make sure everyone is aware of it. Create a messaging doc. Have a global messaging doc. so it is captured accurately in all your materials and everyone is on the same page and communicates information on your product clearly. The positioning not only affects Sales and marketing, but also the product roadmap. Train your team and positioning will change over a period of time. Keep revisiting it so you can decide if you want to expand to adjacent markets. Reevaluate.

How did I discover this book?

Our team at DCKAP attended the SaaStr conference in San Francisco last month. After the conference, Shiva Kumaar, who runs strategy for us, messaged me about a session he attended on ‘Positioning’ hosted by April Dunford. Later that week, I attended a Round-Table product meet-up in Chennai and Vignesh Girishankar , Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Rocket-Lane recommended a book called ‘Obviously Awesome’, by April Dunford. At this meet-up, Dipthi Rajagopal, our HR Leader also mentioned about the same session she attended along with Shiva Kumaar at SaaStr.  I decided to buy the book and read. 

My Take on the Book:

There were a lot of practical learnings on reading Obviously Awesome that we can put to use right away. Reading this helped me think better on how we approach our product. I took notes from the book and sent it to our team to refine how we position and approach the product and market so we get our positioning right. Thanks April Dunford for writing a great book.