Obviously Awesome
Product positioning: unique value, target customers
Position your product so the right customers instantly understand its unique value. Based on April Dunford's methodology, this skill helps your AI agent define competitive alternatives, unique attributes, and the market context where you win.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/obviously-awesome --global 
Obviously Awesome April Dunford View on Amazon
02 What it is
What is the Obviously Awesome skill?
Obviously Awesome carries the methodology from April Dunford’s book of the same name into your AI agent as a repeatable five-step process. It works out what customers would use if you vanished, which of your attributes those alternatives lack, the value that unlocks, who cares most about it, and the market category that makes all of it obvious.
03 Key concepts
Five principles your agent applies.
Drawn from Obviously Awesome — not advice it repeats back to you, but decisions it makes while it works.
04 Fit
When to use it, and
when not to.
four symptoms it fixes, and four it doesn't.
Reach for it when
Prospects follow every feature in the demo and still ask what, exactly, they would be replacing.
Your win rate is respectable against one named competitor and hopeless against a spreadsheet.
You are compared against a category you do not belong in, and lose on the criteria that category is judged by.
Two people describe the product to strangers and produce two convincingly different products.
Reach for something else when
Positioning is settled and you need the homepage written. hand that to StoryBrand Messaging.
The real move is reshaping the market rather than placing yourself in it. see Blue Ocean Strategy.
You cannot yet say why customers hire the product. Jobs to Be Done gets you that before positioning.
Pragmatists still will not buy despite clear positioning. Crossing the Chasm handles the whole-product gap.
05 Prompts
Say it like this.
Name the skill at the end of a prompt and the agent applies the framework rather than a vibe. Or say nothing — it loads on its own when a task matches.
Run a positioning exercise for my project management tool using obviously-awesome skill
Identify our competitive alternatives and unique attributes using obviously-awesome skill
Define the market category that makes our strengths obvious using obviously-awesome skill
Write positioning-driven copy for our homepage using obviously-awesome skill
06 About the author
07 Same stack
The stack it sits in.
Six Marketing & Messaging skills. Most people run two: this one, and whichever fits the next problem.
All Marketing & Messaging skills08 Questions
Before you install.
How do I install the Obviously Awesome skill?
Run npx skills add wondelai/skills/obviously-awesome --global. It takes about 30 seconds and needs no account. The Obviously Awesome skill then works in Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw and Hermes Agent — anything that reads the open agentskills.io format — and your agent loads it on its own when a task calls for it. It is free and MIT-licensed, and the source is at https://github.com/wondelai/skills.
Which book is the Obviously Awesome skill based on?
It packages Obviously Awesome by April Dunford — world's leading product positioning expert, 25-year tech executive. The skill distils the book's method into instructions your agent follows while it works, covering competitive alternatives, unique attributes and value translation. It sits in the Marketing & Messaging part of the library.
Isn’t positioning just messaging by another name?
No, and Dunford’s book is largely an argument against that conflation. Positioning is the context you place the product in — the category, the alternatives, the segment. Messaging is the words that follow from it. Get the context wrong and better copy makes things worse, because you are being clearer about the wrong comparison. StoryBrand Messaging writes the words; this decides which words could possibly be the right ones.
What does the positioning canvas actually contain?
Ten components, five of them derived. You fill in competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value themes, best-fit customers and market category; from those come relevant trends, the positioning statement, proof points, the sales narrative and finally the external messaging. Dunford’s test is that everyone on the team fills it independently and arrives at the same answers. Divergence is not a wording problem — it means the company disagrees about what it sells.
Can an AI agent do this without talking to customers?
Only halfway, and it is worth being blunt. Step one asks what your happy customers actually switched from, and the book’s answer is to interview fifteen to twenty of them. An agent can structure the canvas, generate hypotheses, pressure-test your assumptions and draft the statement — but if your competitive alternatives are guesses, everything downstream inherits the guess. Use it to prepare and then process those interviews, not to skip them.
Should we invent a new category?
Usually not. Category creation is one of three positioning styles in the book, and it is the expensive one — you take on the cost of teaching a market that the problem exists before you can sell the cure. Winning the category you are already in, or carving out a subsegment you can dominate, are cheaper and available to nearly everyone. The skill picks the style your evidence supports rather than the one that flatters you most.
09 Guides that use it
Put it to work.
Long-form playbooks where this skill does part of the job.
One skill, one command.
Install Obviously Awesome, or the whole stack.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/obviously-awesome --global MIT licensed · Claude, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes · No account