Positioning is customer informed, not customer driven

In order to position a project or product well, you need information from actual users and actual customers. Sometimes, particularly if you’re positioning an enterprise software product with a high-touch sales process and an active customer support team, you don’t need to do any extra customer interviews before you start the positioning process, because you already have people on your team who talk to customers every day.

But if you’re positioning an open source project, or a self-serve SaaS product, or positioning the ‘standard’ open-core suite of products that includes an open core, a cloud-hosted SaaS and an enterprise distribution, you should make sure you talk to some customers. It’s important to know what your users/customers care about, how they perceive the project/product and what they would do if it disappeared. Since often people say, in response to questions about what they’d do if the project disappeared that they’ve chosen something open source precisely because it can’t disappear, I encourage them to imagine a magical scenario where the project is wiped from their servers overnight — because we want to know what they would do in that case.

BUT… we do not want to just copy-paste words from users’/customers’ mouths and use them to position a project/product. That’s why I think of positioning as customer informed, not customer driven. You get information from the users and customers, but you have to remain in control of the process. Ultimately, you know your project and your product better than anyone.

Pay close attention to what your users and customers say, but make sure that throughout the positioning process you remain in control, and you decide what context you want to put around your project and product.