Obviously Awesome

Obviously Awesome is the rare book in the product canon that's actually about marketing — specifically, positioning — written by someone who's done it for twenty-five companies and has the receipts. April Dunford built her career as a positioning consultant for B2B tech companies, and the book reads like a distillation of two decades of client work. It's short (under 200 pages), tactical, and almost aggressively unglamorous.

Its central insight is that positioning is not branding, not messaging, and not a tagline — it's the act of placing your product in a market category that makes its strengths look obvious to the buyer. Most products fail at this not because they have a bad positioning but because they have a *default* positioning, inherited from the founder's first elevator pitch, that no one ever revisited. Dunford's five-step process exists to make repositioning a deliberate exercise rather than a vibes-based debate.

Timing made the book influential. It came out in 2019, just as the B2B SaaS landscape was getting crowded enough that 'positioning by feature differentiation' stopped working — most categories had 50+ competitors with similar feature lists. Buyers were making decisions on whether they understood what a product was *for* within 30 seconds of landing on the homepage. Dunford's argument that the category you choose to compete in matters more than how you describe your features inside that category landed hard.

The most common misreading is treating positioning as a marketing-team problem. The book is most useful when read by PMs and founders who own the product strategy, because positioning decisions cascade into product decisions: who you target shapes what you build, and a misaligned position generally means you're building the wrong features for the wrong audience. PMs who outsource the positioning conversation to marketing usually inherit a product whose value proposition doesn't match its actual capabilities.

Its main limitation is that it's heavily B2B-focused. The case studies are all enterprise or SMB SaaS companies, and Dunford's frame of reference is sales-led GTM where positioning surfaces in pitch decks and sales scripts. The book is still useful for consumer products, but you have to translate — for consumer apps, 'positioning' shows up in the app store description and the first three seconds of the onboarding flow, not in a sales narrative.

For Indian product teams, the book is most useful for SaaS companies selling globally and for D2C brands trying to break out of crowded categories. Indian buyers, both B2B and B2C, are notoriously feature-comparison-obsessed at the early consideration stage, and Dunford's argument that you should compete on a different axis than your competitors is genuinely strategic advice for the Indian market — most Indian product marketing in 2026 still pattern-matches to feature listing rather than category positioning.

Pair with Product-Led Growth — Dunford's positioning framework is what you need to nail before you ever start optimizing the onboarding funnel that PLG depends on. And pair with The Mom Test on the discovery side: positioning is downstream of understanding what customers actually care about, and most positioning failures are really customer-understanding failures wearing a marketing costume.