The flagship engagement

Positioning & Evidence Sprint

A four-week engagement to define one market position and put the evidence behind it to work — for one product, one use case and one primary buying group.

Discuss the sprint See an illustrative sample
Duration
Four weeks, subject to timely access
Scope
One product, one use case, one buying group
Led by
The founder, throughout
Price
Fixed scope, quoted after a fit discussion

Fit

Built for a technical company with one decision to make.

The sprint works when there is something real to position and a reason to decide now. It is a poor use of money when either is missing.

A good fit when

  • A product that can be demonstrated, with at least some test, pilot or customer evidence
  • One commercial decision to resolve within about 90 days
  • Access to the people who hold the evidence: engineering, product and someone close to customers
  • A budget owner who will make decisions across two review rounds

Not a fit when

  • The goal is a guaranteed investment, procurement award or AI recommendation
  • The product cannot yet be demonstrated in any form
  • The brief is to present planned capabilities as current ones
  • What is needed is a content, advertising or social-media retainer

Typical triggers

Why companies start one now rather than next year.

A first marketing or sales hire

Give them a position and an evidence base to work from, instead of asking them to invent both in their first quarter.

Pilots that keep stalling

Usually a sign that someone on the buying committee is missing something specific — a comparison, a requirement or a piece of proof.

A launch or a new use case

A product that can do several things needs one of them chosen and explained before the announcement, not after it.

A new market, partner or geography

The same product often needs a different alternative set, a different buyer and different evidence in a new market.

Investor or partner diligence

Claims that are about to be checked are worth checking first, and stating at the strength the evidence supports.

Deliverables

What you receive.

Each of these appears, on a fictional product, in the illustrative sample.

Buyer and alternatives map
The buying group by role — operations, engineering, finance, procurement or their equivalents — with what each needs to see, and up to five alternatives including the status quo.
Positioning brief
Market, buyer, problem, alternatives and differentiation in a few pages. Written to be repeated accurately by a founder, a sales lead and a website.
Claim-to-evidence register
Each important claim with its status — demonstrated, customer-validated, conditional, unvalidated, unsupported or roadmap — the evidence behind it, and how it may be published.
One application or positioning page
Written and implemented: the task, the environment, the workflow, the limits, the integration requirements and the next step.
Sales narrative and buyer FAQ
An outline for the first meeting and the answers to the questions that stall the second one.
AI-discovery baseline and 90-day plan
A documented sample of what assistants say for a fixed set of buyer questions, factual errors against your approved facts, and a plan for publication and re-measurement.

Process

How the four weeks run.

Two consolidated review rounds, at the end of weeks two and four. Feedback comes from one owner on your side, collected once.

  1. Week 1

    Read

    Kick-off, three internal interviews, evidence collection, a scan of the alternatives and the first run of the AI-discovery sample.

    Output Evidence inventory and baseline

  2. Week 2

    Choose

    Buyer or customer interviews if arranged, the alternatives map, and positioning options tested against what the evidence supports. First review.

    Output Draft positioning brief and buyer map

  3. Week 3

    Prove

    The claim-to-evidence register, engineering review of technical claims, and drafts of the page and the sales narrative.

    Output Register, page draft, narrative draft

  4. Week 4

    Ship and plan

    The application page implemented, the buyer FAQ finished, a second review, and the 90-day plan for publication, partners and re-measurement.

    Output Final materials and the plan

Your side

What we need from you.

  • A named owner who can make decisions
  • Three internal interviews of about an hour: commercial, product or engineering, and customer-facing
  • Up to two customer or prospect conversations, if you can arrange them
  • Existing material: decks, test reports, pilot data, customer feedback and technical documentation
  • Engineering review of technical claims before anything is published
  • Access to your website, or to the developer who manages it
  • Consolidated feedback within two business days of each review

How claims are graded

Six statuses, used everywhere.

  • DemonstratedShown under stated conditions, with dated material an engineer will sign off.
  • Customer-validatedConfirmed by a customer, with a baseline and their permission to say so.
  • ConditionalTrue within limits that must be stated alongside the claim.
  • UnvalidatedAn expected outcome not yet measured. Not published as a result.
  • UnsupportedNo evidence a buyer could check. Rewrite it or remove it.
  • RoadmapPlanned. Labelled as planned and kept out of current-capability claims.

Measurement

What gets measured, and what it can and cannot show.

Commercial signals

Qualified conversations, meetings booked, the objections sales hears and whether the team uses the material. These matter most and are the slowest to read; the 90-day plan names who tracks them and how.

AI discoverability, as a separate diagnostic

A fixed set of buyer questions — brand, category, problem and comparison — run three times each on the agreed platforms, recording date, prompt, answer, citations and factual errors. It describes that sample only. It is not a survey of all buyers, and a change between waves does not by itself show what caused it.

Related engagements

Before, after, or instead of the sprint.

BeforeMarket & Opportunity MappingWhen the market, use case or buyer is still an open question. After, or on its ownAI Search Visibility AuditA deeper or repeated version of the AI-discovery sample. BroaderPositioning & Category StrategySeveral products or audiences, or a category decision. Defense & dual-usePartner Readiness SprintThe same sprint, built around international buyers and partners.

Illustrative sample

What the deliverables look like.

A fictional vision-inspection product, taken through the sprint end to end. It shows the reasoning and the artefacts; it is not a client result.

Illustrative sample — fictional product, not a client result. Illustrative industrial-AI positioning sample A fictional vision-inspection product for warehouse dispatch, taken through the sprint: the rewrite, the buyer-question map, the claim-to-evidence register, the application-page outline and the AI-discovery questions. Open the sample

Questions

On the sprint.

Because the scope is deliberately narrow — one product, one use case, one buying group — and a position that takes a quarter to agree usually means the scope was too wide. Four weeks assumes the people and material described above are available on time. If they are not, the schedule moves; the scope does not quietly grow.

The sprint still runs. Conclusions about what buyers think are then marked as hypotheses in the brief and the register, and the 90-day plan includes how to test them. We would rather label an assumption than present it as research.

We write it and, where your site allows, implement it. If a developer or agency manages your site, we deliver production-ready copy, structure and metadata and work with them. A position delivered only as a slide tends to stay a slide.

The scope is fixed and quoted after a fit discussion, once we know which product, use case and buying group the sprint covers. We do not publish a rate card, because the access and evidence involved vary more between companies than the deliverables do.

Nothing automatically. If continued work is useful — publishing evidence, partner material, repeated measurement — it is scoped separately, with named monthly outputs and a defined end. Some companies will not need it, and the plan says so when that is the case.

It organises approved evidence and keeps the language accurate. It does not certify safety, provide legal or export advice, or determine procurement eligibility. Those sign-offs belong with your qualified specialists, and the register records who approved what.

Discuss the sprint.

Twenty minutes: the product, the buyer and the decision in front of you. If the sprint fits, we scope it and quote it. If it does not, we say what would.

Discuss the sprint Read the method

If we can help, you leave with one specific observation about your positioning. If we cannot, we say so.