Why Great Launches Fail Without Real Positioning (And How to Fix It)

Let's be honest: most positioning work ends up as a slide. Maybe it's titled "Value Proposition" or "Messaging Framework". It might even get a polite nod in a GTM meeting. But if you've ever been in a launch that felt like echoing back at yourself, you know this truth: positioning is a strategic weapon, not a simple slide.

When it's done right, it becomes the lens through which product, sales and marketing make decisions. It's the difference between a feature customers ignore and a product they obsess over.

My take on what most teams get wrong

I once worked with a team that had built a truly impressive AI-powered document analyzer. It could summarize contracts in seconds. But the first launch was a total failure because their positioning focused on speed and automation, but legal teams (target audience) didn't care. Their top concern was risk. They were worried about missing clause exceptions and regulatory red flags. We had the wrong promise.

We reworked the positioning using a simple framework: Pain -> Priority -> Promise. Here is every one of these explained:

• Pain: Legal teams drowning in dense, manual contract reviews;
• Priority: Reduce legal exposure, not just save time;
• Promise: "Surface red flags before your team even opens the file".

The next launch had 3 times more demo requests in the first two weeks. Same product. Different story.

How I co-own positioning with PMs

Product Managers know the roadmap. PMMs know the market. Good positioning happens when both sides meet in the middle. One of my favorite rituals is a 90-minute workshop I call "The perception fit session".

It's not rocket science. Here's how I run it, in 3 simple steps:

1. Start with the pain by asking PMs to list 3 key use cases they're building for. PMMs share top pain points from win/loss calls;
2. Map the priority by asking which of those pains are actually urgent for our audience;
3. Craft the promise: what's the simplest, boldest way to describe how we solve it?

By the end, we have messaging rooted in reality, tailored for our customers' needs and pain points, not only internal alignment.

Positioning mistakes that kill great launches

Here are three I've seen firsthand in my PMM career:

• Confusing features with value. Customers don't care that it's AI. They care that it catches errors before a client does;
• Too many personas, not enough clarity. If your positioning tries to speak to everyone, it connects with no one!
• Messaging in a vacuum. One team I worked with positioned their mobile feature for "on-the-go productivity", except most users only used it at their desks. A single user interview would've saved that misfire.

A quick win you can try this week: if you're feeling misaligned, schedule a 1-hour workshop with your PMM. Talk about one feature and one user persona. Walk through Pain -> Priority -> Promise together. You'll be amazed at how quickly clarity shows up.

A best-practice example I can share with you is when we were preparing to launch an internal comms tool aimed at remote-first tech companies. The PM team positioned it as "Slack for HR," focused on async updates. But after running the Positioning Workshop with PMs and a few sales reps, we realized the true pain wasn't about async, it was about visibility and accountability on sensitive updates like performance reviews. Using the Pain -> Priority -> Promise model, we shifted the narrative to: "Never miss a critical HR update again". That one pivot helped us land a Fortune 100 pilot and reposition our GTM messaging across channels. This workshop saved us from launching a feature that sounded like a copycat, and helped us sound like a category creator. You can now use the framework that I am using to run this type of workshop with my teams.

Final Takeaway

You can have product/market fit, but without perception fit, it won't land. Make positioning the start of the conversation, not an afterthought.