Positioning determines messaging

I get a lot of questions about the difference between positioning and messaging. Here’s how I’d put it:

Positioning is the high-level strategy. It gives you your North Star and impacts decisions made in product development, sales and marketing. One of the outcomes of better positioning is knowing how to talk about your open source product and commercial product so that people get it right away, but positioning is not external-facing. Positioning matters even if you’re not talking to anyone outside the company.

Messaging is the more fleshed-out framework for how you talk about your company, your open source project and your commercial product. It is external facing. Messaging only matters once you’re having conversations with people outside your company — it would make no sense to review your messaging as you’re deciding on your product roadmap. But it would make sense to do so with your positioning. Messaging is also downstream of your positioning. You positioning is about making sure you’re clear on what ideas you want to get across, your messaging is about what language you choose to do so.

Positioning is about managing the context around your project or you product, so that your people in your market make assumptions that but your project/product in the best light possible.