Obviously Awesome

April Dunford's Five-Step Positioning Framework

Position a product by starting from what you must beat, not from a market category.

Leadership4 steps

Areas of Responsibility (AORs) for Cross-Functional Ownership

Publish a beyond-titles list of who's the DRI for what, so product and marketing always know who to go to.

Sales3 steps

Arming the Champion

Win the champion first, then pre-load them to defeat every other stakeholder's objection

Assessing Whether SEO Is Right for Your Product

Judge SEO fit by two signals — a large addressable market and existing domain authority.

Productivity4 steps

Async Priority Codes for Small Teams

Tag every Slack message with a response-window code so nobody has to monitor the channel.

Strategy4 steps

Bowling Pin Market Entry

Dominate one underserved niche, then knock over adjacent segments until you can challenge the leader

Strategy6 steps

Customer Job Prioritization Criteria

Five tests for choosing which customer job to lead with when research surfaces more than one.

Strategy3 steps

Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)

Find the one or two questions whose answers collapse a complex decision into clear quadrants.

Freemium Decision Framework (What to Make Free)

Make a feature free if it drives your growth model; gate it if it creates friction for growth.

Fuel and Engine Model of Marketing

Reduce all of marketing to two questions: do you lack valuable things to say, or a way to distribute them?

Impact Goals Over Activity Goals

Judge a marketing team by big bets and full-funnel conversion, not by how many blog posts they shipped.

Productivity5 steps

LNO Framework

Match your effort to each task's leverage, neutrality, or overhead

Strategy4 steps

Measurements Are Not Insights (Instrumentation for Analytics)

Turn raw metrics into segmented, causal insights you actually act on.

Communication4 steps

Mochary's Script for Difficult Conversations

Defuse the amygdala by warning first, delivering the message, then letting the person release emotion.

Pi-Shaped Marketer Hiring

Your first marketer needs two deep spikes plus strategy skills — not one spike, and not a generalist smear.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Product-Market Yourself as a Functional Angel Investor

Package your functional expertise into one clear, repeatable value-add so founders pull you into deals.

Leadership4 steps

PSHE Career Growth Framework

Evaluate talent by how far up the Problem-Solution-How-Execution ladder they operate.

Marketing3 steps

Support-Rotation Content Backlog

Mine support tickets for recurring confusion, then rank-order self-serve landing pages that answer them

Sales4 steps

Teaching the Customer How to Buy

Beat indecision by de-risking the buyer's decision, not by piling on FOMO

Communication3 steps

The 20/80 Marketing Review Checkpoints

Two aligned checkpoints — strategy at 20%, execution at 80% — so process speeds you up instead of slowing you down

The Best-Customer Research Survey

Survey only recent, happy, paying customers, with questions that reconstruct their decision.

Sales5 steps

The Best-Rep Pitch Pilot

Roll out a new sales pitch by piloting it with your best rep, then let sales sell sales

Leadership3 steps

The Comb-Shaped (Chameleon) Marketer

Move from T-shaped to comb-shaped — multiple deep skills you deploy on-demand via diagnosis

The Customer-Led Growth Loop

Understand best customers, map their value journey, measure it, fix what's misaligned.

The DATE Framework for Marketing Strategy

Diagnose, Analyze, Take a different path, Experiment — an engineer's anti-playbook for marketing

Communication3 steps

The Expectations-Reality Delta

Unhappiness is the gap between expectation and reality — and expectations are far easier to change

Leadership4 steps

The Four Things a Product Manager Brings to the Team

Prepare to contribute by mastering users, data, the business, and the competitive landscape.

The GACCS Marketing Brief

A five-part brief — Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, Stakeholders — to align before you make anything big.

The Messaging Guide That Rolls Up to the Job

A 5-7 page guardrail doc: value prop, competitive edge, ranked emotional and functional benefits.

Sales5 steps

The Setup-and-Follow-Through Sales Pitch

Structure a sales pitch as market setup then differentiated value, not a feature walk-through

Marketing6 steps

The Six-Milestone Customer Journey Map

Struggle, evaluation, growth — six value milestones that replace the funnel as your growth model.

The 'So What?' Ladder to Differentiated Value

Ladder a differentiated feature up through repeated 'so what?' until you reach value rivals can't match

Innovation3 steps

The Three B's of Behavior Change

Change user behavior by picking a specific Behavior, removing Barriers, and adding immediate Benefits.

Marketing6 steps

Value-Moment KPIs and the Win-Back Loop

Tie each milestone to a compound usage metric, then use it to catch people when they fall.