Positioning is not a marketing problem

I’ve made this point before, and I’m going to make it again: Your positioning is not a marketing problem. It is a business strategy problem.

So if everything in your business is going smoothly, there’s no need to mess around with your positioning.

If you have a positioning issue, it will often manifest itself as a marketing problem — for example, zero percent of your web traffic is converting. It will also often manifest as a sales problem — for example, a very low conversion rate from initial sales calls and salespeople who feel like prospects are coming to the call fundamentally different expectations about what the product is supposed to do.

But it can also be a product problem. Especially in an open source company, if you don’t know how to divide up and prioritize features between your project and product, you have a positioning problem… Is marketing going to determine your project’s roadmap?