Positioning shapes everything downstream

I'll never write a line of code without doing positioning first.

You have a positioning problem if I ask 10 of your customers or 10 of your employees what the company does or what the product does. And I get multiple answers.

One of the best things, honestly, that the early founding team at Slack did and were able to give to those of us who followed them was the understanding that this is a tool for work. And that made thousands of small decisions instant and obvious.

What we should be doing is giving them a way to think about the whole market and say, in the case of Help Scout, 'Look, there's shared inbox and then there's help desk software and then there's us. And I don't care who the vendor is, I'm going to put them in one of those buckets.'

What positioning today has become is essentially how do I tell a story about my shit in a unique way... If you're doing positioning in that context, you just decided you're fighting for 24% of the demand designed by somebody else.