Most companies treat positioning as a noun. It's a document. A slide deck. A "positioning statement" that sits in a brand guidelines PDF that nobody reads. This is a waste of everyone's time.

Positioning is a verb. It's the active, ongoing work of placing your product in someone's mind relative to the alternatives. And the key word there is "alternatives" — because positioning only makes sense in contrast.

You're not positioned in a vacuum. You're positioned against something. Against competitors, sure. But more importantly, against the way people currently solve the problem. Which might be a competitor. Or a spreadsheet. Or nothing at all.

Slack understood this. They didn't position against other chat apps. They positioned against email. "Be less busy" wasn't about features. It was about the alternative — the endless, soul-crushing inbox that everyone already hated. Slack didn't need to explain what it was. They needed to explain what it replaced.

This is the part most companies get wrong. They position by describing themselves. "We're a cloud-based platform for X." Nobody cares. What they care about is: what does this replace? What do I stop doing if I start using this? What gets better in my day?

The exercise is simple but uncomfortable. Write down the five things your potential customer could do instead of using your product. One of them is always "do nothing." Now ask: why is your product better than each of those alternatives? Not in general. For your specific customer. With their specific constraints.

If you can't articulate why you're better than the alternatives for a specific person, you don't have a positioning problem. You have a product problem. (And if your "specific person" is still "everyone," start with Your Customer Is Not Everyone.)

Positioning also changes. This is the other thing companies miss. They do a positioning exercise once, engrave it in stone, and never revisit it. But your market shifts. Competitors launch. Customer expectations evolve. Your product gets better at some things and worse at others relatively. Positioning is not a one-time activity. It's maintenance.

Superhuman repositioned several times in its early life. First it was "the fastest email app." Then it was "email for high-performers." The product didn't change much. The positioning changed because they learned more about who actually valued what they built.

Here's my test for whether your positioning works: can a stranger who's never heard of you understand what you do and why it matters to them within 10 seconds of landing on your website? If not, you have work to do. Not on your website. On your positioning.

Stop writing positioning documents. Start positioning. And remember — this work is inseparable from copy, because the words you use to describe your product are your positioning.