One of the most interesting things I have learned about product marketing is that positioning does much more than determine how a product is described. It influences how customers understand the product, what they compare it against, which problems they associate with it, and ultimately, who you are competing for. I experienced this firsthand while working on an AI product designed to help teams get more value from their meetings.
The product was initially positioned as an AI meeting assistant. On the surface, that made complete sense. It could record meetings, transcribe conversations, generate summaries, identify action items, and help users capture information they would otherwise have to take down manually. It addressed a very recognisable problem, and the category was easy for customers to understand.
But there was an unintended consequence. Once you describe your product as an AI meeting assistant, customers naturally place it into an existing mental category. They begin comparing it with the products they already associate with that category: Fireflies, Otter, Google Gemini, Zoom’s AI features, Microsoft Teams, Granola, and an increasingly crowded number of AI meeting tools.
The conversation therefore started to become about how well the product performed against other meeting assistants. How accurate was the transcription? How good were the summaries? Could it distinguish between speakers? How well did it integrate with different meeting platforms? Did it have the same features as the products customers were already using? These are all reasonable questions, but they also create a very specific competitive battlefield.
The more I worked with the product, the more I began to question whether the meeting itself was really the job customers were hiring the product to do.
People did not necessarily want another meeting assistant. They wanted the outcomes that happened because of the meeting. They wanted to remember what had been decided, capture important information, create action items without manually writing them down, preserve context, and avoid spending additional time on administrative work after the meeting. Ultimately, they wanted the conversation to contribute to progress rather than create another layer of work.
That distinction changed the way I thought about the product. The meeting was the input, but the desired outcome was much broader. The workflow could be thought of as conversation becoming context, context becoming decisions, decisions becoming actions, and actions eventually becoming work.
That opened up an interesting possibility around positioning the product less narrowly as an AI meeting assistant and more broadly around productivity.
The underlying technology did not necessarily need to change for the way customers understood the product to change. Instead of asking, “How well does this tool handle my meetings?”, a productivity-oriented positioning could lead customers to ask, “How much work can this remove from my workflow?”
Those questions sound similar, but they create very different conversations.
This is where I started to understand one of the most important implications of positioning: it also influences your competitive set.
If you position yourself as an AI meeting assistant, your most obvious competitors are other AI meeting assistants. But if the broader job is helping people turn conversations into productive work, the alternatives become much wider. Customers might otherwise take notes manually, write their own summaries, create tasks after meetings, update a CRM, copy information between different tools, ask an assistant to organise follow-ups, use ChatGPT to process a transcript, build their own automation, or simply rely on memory.
The competitor is no longer necessarily the product with the most similar feature set. It can be the behaviour, workflow, or alternative solution that customers would use if your product did not exist.
That also has implications for segmentation.
Positioning around meetings naturally attracts people whose problems are closely connected to meetings. But positioning around productivity and workflow can potentially expand the conversation to people who care about what happens after those meetings. A Product Manager might care about turning customer conversations into product insights. A Sales team might care about capturing follow-ups and updating the CRM. A Customer Success team might care about preserving customer context and next steps. A founder might care about reducing the administrative work created by meetings.
The underlying product can remain the same, while the job being emphasised changes.
This means positioning, segmentation, competitive analysis, and messaging are much more interconnected than they initially appear. A change in positioning can influence which customers you prioritise, which pain points you lead with, which competitors you study, which product capabilities you emphasise, and even which metrics you use to demonstrate value.
Looking back, one of the things I enjoyed most about working on the product was testing competing tools myself. I did not want to rely only on feature comparison tables. I wanted to understand the actual experience of using them: what happened before the meeting, what happened during it, what happened afterwards, how easy onboarding was, how quickly I could reach value, where information went after the meeting, whether it integrated naturally into existing workflows, and how much manual work was still required.
At the time, I thought of this primarily as competitive research. Looking back, I realise I was also trying to understand the job surrounding the product.
That has changed how I think about competitive analysis. A competitor is not always the company with the most similar product. Sometimes the more important question is what the customer is currently doing to accomplish the same job.
This is also why I have become increasingly interested in positioning as a strategic discipline rather than simply a messaging exercise. It is tempting to think of positioning as deciding what to put on a homepage or how to describe a product in a sales deck. But the deeper question is the context in which you want customers to understand your product.
That context determines the comparisons they make. And those comparisons determine what you are being judged on.
If you position yourself as a meeting assistant, you may be judged primarily on transcription accuracy, summaries, speaker identification, and meeting integrations. If you position yourself around helping turn conversations into productive work, the conversation could move towards time saved, workflow automation, adoption, and the ability to move information into action.
Neither positioning is automatically better. That is an important distinction. A broader category or more interesting framing is not valuable simply because it sounds more strategic. The product still needs genuinely differentiated capabilities that matter to the customers you want to win. The positioning has to be supported by reality.
What changed for me was the realisation that positioning is, in many ways, a choice of battlefield.
Before asking, “How do we differentiate from our competitors?”, there is another question worth asking: “Are these actually the competitors we want to be compared against?”
Sometimes the opportunity is not to become better at winning the existing comparison. Sometimes it is to understand the underlying customer job well enough to find a more valuable comparison to win.