You Might Be Positioning the Wrong Thing

Teams often say they need positioning when what they really need is a choice about scope.

They start a company-level project because that sounds more strategic. Then halfway through, the work gets dragged toward product details because sales needs something usable. Or the company acquires another product, launches a new module, or starts talking about a platform strategy and suddenly the original statement is so broad that it describes everything weakly and nothing clearly.

That is not usually a failure of the framework. It is a failure to decide what entity the work is actually about.

"The company narrative connects products. Product positioning sells them. When teams force those into one statement, they usually lose both."

— Jake McMahon, ProductQuant

The cost is immediate. Sales writes its own messaging. The website starts sounding like category wallpaper. Product marketing cannot tell whether it is speaking to a specific buyer or to an imaginary umbrella audience.

This confusion gets worse as soon as the company introduces a second structurally different offer. One team wants a product story that wins a live evaluation. Another wants a company story that sounds expansive enough for analysts, recruiting, or investor decks. Both needs are real. The mistake is pretending one statement can solve both at the same level of specificity. When altitude is wrong, clarity collapses first.

What Exactly Might You Be Positioning?

There are usually five distinct possibilities.

1. A single product

This is the cleanest case. One product, one buyer set, one main alternative set, one value delivery model. Positioning is most useful here because the competitive reality is still tight.

2. A product line

A product line can share an audience while still needing some internal structure. The positioning has to explain how the pieces relate and why buyers would want more than one.

3. A company

Company positioning matters for investors, analysts, recruiting, and enterprise vendor evaluation. It is usually broader and more narrative-driven than what a specific product buyer needs.

4. A platform

Platforms are positioned differently because the story is not just about direct user value. It is about extensibility, ecosystem logic, developer adoption, and third-party leverage.

5. A portfolio

This is the hardest case. A post-acquisition or multi-product portfolio may contain products with different buyers, different competitors, different pricing logic, and different growth motions. In that case, forcing one product-style positioning across the portfolio usually produces empty language.

How Can You Tell You Are Positioning the Wrong Entity?

There are three common signs.

First, the official statement works for too many different products. If you can swap product names and nothing meaningfully breaks, the statement is probably operating too high above the product's actual competitive reality.

Second, sales creates product-specific messaging within weeks. That usually means the market-facing teams still need product-level positioning, even if the company-level narrative exists.

Third, the competitive alternatives change by product. If one product competes against spreadsheets and another competes against enterprise suites, those are different competitive contexts. One statement rarely solves both cleanly.

The practical rule is straightforward: position at the level where the structural characteristics stay consistent. If buyer, competitor, pricing, or value delivery diverge, separate the positionings and connect them with a lighter company narrative above them.

What Should Teams Do Instead?

Run a short pre-check before any positioning project starts.

• Name the entity explicitly. Product, product line, company, platform, or portfolio.
• Check whether buyer, competitor, and value delivery stay consistent at that level.
• If they diverge materially, split the work.
• Keep company narrative and product positioning separate on purpose.
• Test whether a salesperson could actually use the final message in a real deal.

Most companies do need some kind of umbrella story. They just should not confuse that with the message that helps a buyer choose one product over its actual alternatives.

The cleanest mental model is this: company narrative explains the portfolio; product positioning wins the deal.