Is your growth because of, or in spite of, your positioning?

I had a lot of amazing conversations at Fosdem and State of Open Con, but the one that’s stuck with me the most was talking with Peter Zaitsev about trying to parse out whether a result you’re getting in your business is in spite of your strategy or because of your strategy.

This is a really important question to ask yourself, actually! Normally when I talk about positioning I say that if you aren’t experiencing any pain, you don’t need to mess around with your positioning. Mostly this is true: If you’re satisfied with your growth, you’re good to go.

Where you should be very aware, though, is if you have a problem that’s a sign of poor positioning even though your overall growth numbers are fine. Does your team struggle to articulate your project/product’s differentiated value? Do you get a lot of business from word of mouth but have marketing that doesn’t perform? Do you know what features belong in your product and what belong in your project?

Because it’s also possible — and this is the dream, of course — that your growth would be much better if you did fix your positioning, because your current growth is in spite of terrible positioning, and if you fixed it things would really take off.