Countdown of the top 10 episodes of the year

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:03)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny, and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Normally, I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful companies. But today is going to be a very different and unique episode.
We launched this podcast about six months ago. We've done exactly 50 episodes at this point.
We've also done over 2 million downloads since we launched. The podcast is a top 10 technology podcast across Apple and Spotify globally.
And I believe there's about 40 to 50,000 subscribers or followers of the podcast across Apple and Spotify, which is all very exciting and kind of blows my mind. And so what I decided to do with this final episode of the year is to look back at the 10 most popular episodes that we've done so far. So what I'm going to do is count down from the 10th most popular episode to number one and play a clip or two from that episode that I found to be most interesting or that's been the most popular. I've never done this sort of episode before. We'll see how it goes. I think it's going to be really interesting. If it's not, we will never do it again. And if it is, awesome. Either way, enjoy. We're going to get right into it after a short word from our sponsors.

**Adam Grant** (1:19)
Have you ever wondered what makes great minds tick? I'm Adam Grant, and on my new podcast, Rethinking, I'm trying to find the answers.
Every week, I interview some of my favorite thinkers to learn how we can bring out the best in ourselves and others. I talk to death-defying rock clappers, Oscar-winning filmmakers, creators like Lin-Manuel Miranda, entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban, and thought leaders like Grené Brown. You can find Rethinking on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:51)
This episode is brought to you by Notion. If you haven't heard of Notion, where have you been? I use Notion to coordinate this very podcast, including my content calendar, my sponsors, and prepping guests for launch of each episode. Notion is an all-in-one team collaboration tool that combines note-taking, document-sharing wikis, project management, and much more into one space that's simple, powerful, and beautifully designed.
And not only does it allow you to be more efficient in your work life, but you can easily transition to using it in your personal life, which is another feature that truly sets Notion apart. The other day, I started a home project and immediately opened up Notion to help me organize it all. Learn more and get started for free at notion.com/lenny'spod. Take the first step towards an organized, happy team today. Again at notion.com/lenny'spod.
Welcome back and let's kick off this countdown with the 10th most popular episode of the year. And that is with April Dunford. April is the author of Obviously Awesome. She in my opinion is the smartest person in the world on positioning and how to figure out positioning for your product. And here's April describing the five steps to figure out your product's positioning.
Say that you're a PM or founder that's ready to start figuring out their positioning for their product. What's the first thing that you do?

**April Dunford** (3:15)
I actually think the first step in a good positioning exercise is to really understand what do we have to position against?
So put another way, it's like saying, what do I have to beat in order to win a deal?
So in positioning work, we call this competitive alternatives. Now how people mess up this first step is, I say competitive alternatives and they think competition, so things that look exactly like me. But in B2B, we kind of have two sets of competitors. We have status quo, which is whatever the company is doing to attempt to solve the problem right now, even if it's crappy and not great. And then there's if the company does decide they're going to buy something different, they usually make a short list. So it's whoever else lands on the short list. So I need to be able to put a stake in the ground and say, I got to beat all that in order to win a deal. Now most folks will discount the status quo, but they shouldn't because in B2B, we lose about 40% of our deals to quote unquote no decision, which actually means we lost to the spreadsheet, we lost to pen and paper, we lost to interns. And if we're not positioning well against that, we're never going to get the customer to come off of that. So I got to win against status quo, but I also have to win if it's most of the time, if it's B2B, you don't just buy the first thing you come across, you make a short list of alternatives and I got to win against those as well. So step number one, what am I positioning against? Once I have that stake in the ground, then I can start thinking about what makes us different. So the easiest way to do this is, okay, this is what I have to position against, what have I got capabilities-wise that the alternatives don't have? So feature function or even capabilities of the company, which could be pricing or professional services or other things that you've got, but also capabilities of the product, what have I got that the alternatives don't have? I can make a giant list of these things and then I can translate that stuff into value by going down the list and saying, okay, we have this great feature, so what? Why does a customer care about it? What is the value that feature enables? When I do that mapping over to value, what generally happens is I end up with two or three value buckets or value themes, and quite often those value buckets or value themes are different than what I would have gotten if I got all the smart people in my company together and said, hey, why does everybody love our stuff? So, I'm going to start off, when I do it this way, I'm insured that those value themes are differentiated, and not just things that are generally valuable, but any alternative could get it done. So, why are we even talking about it? So, in my mind, that's kind of how we do it. Once I've got differentiated value, then I can start thinking about, well, look, I could sell this product to any company that has this problem, but not everybody cares about this value the same way. And so, what are the characteristics of a target account that make them really, really care a lot about that value?