April Dunford

April Dunford is a Canadian positioning consultant whose book Obviously Awesome is the clearest and most practical guide to product positioning available to technology marketers.

April Dunford has spent decades helping technology companies figure out how to position their products in the market, and Obviously Awesome distills that experience into a clear, direct, and remarkably practical framework. It is a short book — deliberately so — and every page earns its space.

The book’s central argument is that positioning is not a marketing exercise to be done once at launch but an ongoing strategic discipline, and that most companies do it badly because they define themselves relative to their own internal view of what they built rather than the competitive alternatives their customers actually consider. Dunford’s process for working through positioning — identifying competitive alternatives, mapping to differentiated capabilities, finding the value those capabilities deliver, targeting the customers who care most about that value, and selecting the market frame that makes the advantage obvious — is systematic and actionable in a way that very few marketing books manage.

Obviously Awesome is written for practitioners: founders, product marketers, and CMOs who need to actually do this work rather than just think about it. It is not a book for general business readers looking for big ideas. Within its target audience, it is close to essential — one of the few business books that delivers genuine process rather than repackaged common sense. The case studies are drawn from Dunford’s consulting work and are specific enough to be instructive rather than merely illustrative.