Why Positioning Is The Most Underrated Skill in the AI Era of UX

Sarah (00:00)

AI can build almost anything you need in seconds, whether that’s a landing page, a research plan, a slide deck, a survey. It’s wild. But here’s what AI cannot do. It can’t tell you whether that thing that you created was worth building in the first place. And that gap, that that blind spot is about to be the major differentiator.

Between who stands out in UX and product over the next few years and who gets left behind. So today I want to make the case for a skill that I think is wildly underrated right now and about to become one of the most valuable skills that you can invest and develop, whether you work in UX or not. And that skill is positioning. And

By the end of today, I want to give you a simple framework you can use in the next email you send, the next meeting you attend, the next report you create to help you improve how you position that thing with the goal that you are focused not just on telling people what you did or what is happening, but why it matters.

All right, so before I get to what I’m seeing with AI right now, I want to go back earlier in my career because I used to believe the myth, and maybe you do too, that good work will speak for itself. And it absolutely does not. Now, I learned that the hard way. When I was in college, there was actually a required public speaking class, and I was terrified of public speaking.

So somehow I managed to get out of the class. And I still graduated and I went into the real world and started working. And I quickly realized that the skill of public speaking is very, very important. Doesn’t matter if you’re speaking from a stage or on a podcast or in a meeting room, it still matters. Now, the people who get ahead are the ones

Who can make their case and get buy-in for their ideas. And then when I started to see people around me getting ahead and getting other people to say yes to their ideas, but not yes to mine, I realized I needed to develop this skill. Because here’s what kind of took me a while to understand. It was never really about the literal skill of public speaking. It’s

Actually, about the thinking that happens before a single word really comes out of your mouth. Anyone can take public speaking classes and learn how to sound polished. But what actually moves people, what actually captivates people, what actually results in a message that people remember and in some cases hopefully act on is

The work that came before you started speaking. In other words, knowing what you’re saying, why it matters to the person that you’re saying it to, and what you want them to do with that message. That’s positioning in a nutshell. And it it really starts way before you start speaking, like I said, or before you start typing words into a document, or you start designing a

Sales page, or you write that email. And I saw the same thing when I worked at startups when I lived in New York City for a long time. The ideas that got funded were not always the best ideas. They were the ideas with the best story. And two founders can have the same idea, but the one who frames it better is the one who’s more likely to get an investment.

Because it’s all about positioning to that investor, why this matters, what about it is going to solve a problem, who it is going to solve a problem for, what is the size of the business opportunity, all of that is very, very important. The thing that a lot of founders do when they’re pitching investors is they just go into a product demo.

For example, and that’s just focusing on the what, the product. But what investors want to hear about is things other than the what, the why. And that’s what sets investors who get funded apart. And for years, I’ve also seen the value of positioning when it comes to UX and product people navigating their job search, trying to get promoted.

Trying to get potential freelance clients to say yes to them. Their ideas get rejected, or they don’t even get heard. And maybe this is happening to you literally right now. Maybe you were in a meeting yesterday and you felt like you were just invisible, or you’re feeling invisible in your job search, and your ideas are getting passed over, or you yourself are feeling invisible as a candidate.

And it’s not because you lack merit or skill or good ideas. It’s because of how you are positioning those ideas and your experience and your value. And this is positioning again. And in a world where anyone can create anything very quickly, a positioning problem is about to become one of the most expensive problems in your career.

Because for a really, really long time, being the person who could just do the work was enough. You could, you know, design the screens, come up with the user flow, do the research, build the prototype, ship the product, whatever, that’s what made you valuable. But the thing is, AI is really starting to erase that. And what I mean is when everyone can build and produce.

Produce, producing is not what is going to help you stand out. So I want to focus on two things that actually will help you stand out in UX or product in the age of AI. And both of those come back to positioning. So point number one is all about knowing what’s worth building. Because when anyone can build anything.

The only edge is really knowing what is worth building in the first place.

So I want to give you an example from my own business. Recently, I reached out to a team. I’m not gonna say who they were, to help me build some tools kind of on the back end of my business. Something essentially to help me manage a pipeline of people who are interested in joining my UX job search coaching program, Career Strategy Lab. So I could get the right message to the right person at the right.

And these people I spoke with, they were really into AI. So I sat down with them and I gave them a very thorough demo of everything I had that they could work with, meaning data and tools that I already built myself. And I was really, really clear about my goals and my exact use cases. I basically spoon fed them exactly what.

They needed. And if I was hiring myself, what I would want from a client in terms of context, so that I could go off and come up with the perfect pitch to give that client. And that’s what I thought I did with these people. And a few days went by and they came back quite quickly, to be honest, with a prototype that they had generated proudly with AI. And

It was extremely underwhelming, to be honest. It was actually disappointing because I spent so much of my time preparing for that meeting with them, gathering what I wanted to show them, explaining it to them in the meeting, and essentially, like I said, spoon feeding them what they needed to come back with a really solid proposal back to me. And the problem was they totally ignored what I said I wanted.

And they just ran straight into building with AI. And that example is a very powerful point I want to make in that the speed at which AI lets us build is a real danger because it essentially tempts us to skip the most important part. In this case, they skipped listening to me, the user of this tool that I was.

prepared to pay them to build.

The most valuable people in UX and product moving forward will not be the ones who can build the fastest. It will be the people who know what’s worth building because they do their research, they listen to the research, they know what features matter and which ones can wait, and they don’t get enamored with the act of building, especially with AI.

Because here’s what’s happening when we rush to build, right? We build the wrong thing. And then what happens if your product’s already in the market? When you build the wrong thing, you end up confusing existing users and they stop using the product. And our potential users are so confused about what the product actually does that they never sign up for it in the first place. And so what did I do with this?

This company that I was going to hire who gave me this crappy AI prototype, I walked away and I built it myself. And it works great. And you know why it works great? Because I built it off of the use cases I knew I needed, which I also told them. And I had the context, I knew the positioning for this, that they frankly chose to ignore. And

I was able to build it quite quickly, not because of AI, but because AI let me build faster based on the extreme clarity I had of what I needed to build in the first place, who this tool was for, how they were going to use it, when they were going to use it, why they would use it, the benefit to using it for my team inside my business also.

The impact that it would have on these people in the pipeline of people interested in joining Career Strategy Lab. And that clarity was crucial to me just going and building this myself. Now, had I just sat down with an AI tool and not thought about all those use cases, I probably would have taken me.

A lot longer to build it because I would have needed to do a lot more iterating. Like the thinking that I did before I built it allowed me to build it faster. If I had skipped that thinking, I think the build timeline would have been far, far longer because I would have encountered a lot more roadblocks and kind of gotchas as I was building in real time. And this applies way beyond.

Products in your job search, if you’re looking for one right now, it is the exact same trap. You can use AI to fire off hundreds of applications, right? And it feels productive. But if you have not positioned yourself correctly in the first place, meaning if you’ve not gotten clear on who you are, what you do, what your expertise is, not just in terms of your UX and product skills, but even

Industries you have experience in, types of products such as do you lean more B2B, B2C, SaaS, enterprise, whatever. You need that clarity because if you don’t have that clarity, you’re going to end up getting into the trap of applying to tons of jobs that are probably not a fit for you.

Positioning is the thinking that must come first before you build, before you hit apply, before you present. And if you’re a leader or a manager, it’s the conversation you need to have before anyone starts building. Why are we building this? Is it worth building? Is it worth building now? Because when everyone is racing to ship, knowing what not to build.

or maybe whatnot to build right now is actually a superpower.

Okay, the second point I want to make is that we must frame the work. And there’s a very specific way that you can frame the work or the message that you are trying to communicate to people. So the person who can frame the work will beat the person who only does the work. This is the one a lot of people miss. And it’s the one I could talk about all day long. When everyone is producing more.

Being noticed stops coming from the volume of work you can literally do. And it actually comes from how you frame and talk about the work you did. So I want to give you an exact example here. I learned best with examples. So let’s dive into this. Imagine a product designer, let’s call her Maya, and Maya just spent three weeks on a project.

And she sends her stakeholders this update. She says, over the last three weeks, we ran 12 usability studies, tested three prototypes, iterated the navigation twice, looked at the analytics, and based on all that, we think we should focus on the checkout flow. Okay. Now that’s not terrible. That is a lot of good work, but

To the person reading that, if someone receives that in Slack or email or something, the recommendation is buried at the very end, right? We think we should focus on the checkout flow. Those are the last words of what Maya said. And it sounds like, frankly, one more thing on the recipient’s to-do list. And the real question that’s gonna come from this.

Is okay, well, why should we focus on the checkout flow? And that question never gets answered in Maya’s message. And as a result, Maya will probably not get a yes because this is going to result in a bunch of back and forth so that they can get to the root of Maya’s recommendation of we think we should focus on the checkout flow. The answer, well, why was not in Maya’s

Message. So here’s how Maya could have framed that differently in a way that answers that question why? And as a result, is going to increase the chances someone says yes to this recommendation. So instead, what if Maya said the following? Our usability tests showed that step three of the checkout flow is causing 70% of our drop-off.

My recommendation is that we focus on step three, and the team thinks we can ship it in three weeks. That is night and day, right? It has a similar gist in that it’s telling someone what Maya and the team did and making a recommendation. But that second one I just gave you has a lot more specifics. There is a why up front and

There’s a lot more context and a lot less ambiguity. And that is exactly how you get people to say yes faster, right? Let’s break it down. So I said the why is up front. Okay. Our usability tests showed that step three of the checkout flow is causing 70% of our drop-off. Okay, that’s the why. It’s identifying where the problem is and being specific with numbers.

Checkout flow, 70% drop off. Step three. Okay. And the ask or the recommendation is also a lot clearer. Instead of just saying we think we should focus on the checkout flow, in this version, Maya says, My recommendation is that we focus on step three and the team thinks we can ship it in three weeks. Now we’re talking. If I am

the decision maker for whether I say yes to this, I have a lot for more information. I know we’re gonna focus on step three. It’s gonna take three weeks, and it could help fix this 70% drop-off rate in my checkout flow. That is a lot more likely to number one, get someone’s attention, maybe spark a conversation, but it could potentially also lead to an immediate yes.

And that is the power of positioning. Most people lead with the what. And version number one of what Maya said was exactly that. It only focused on what. It sounded like a checklist of stuff she did. And to get to yes, you need to lead with the so what. And that

Is what Maya did in that second version. I’m gonna read it again just so you can see the difference. That second version said our usability tests showed that step three of the checkout flow is causing 70% of our drop off. My recommendation is we focus on step three, and the team thinks we can ship it in three weeks. Positioning and that works.

everywhere it’s not just telling your boss an idea or recommendation you could use this in an email right you could just put the ask and the outcome in the first sentence not the fourth paragraph buried in pleasantries and a bunch of unimportant information in a presentation you could make your first slide the recommendation and not some boring executive summary and even in a slack message if you open with something like

I found a way to cut churn by 20%. That’s going to be a lot more powerful than something like, so we’ve been doing a lot of research lately, right? I found a way to cut churn by 20%. Now you’ve got people’s attention. It’s kind of like the idea of identifying a hook. If you are familiar with marketing or social media, a lot of short form content and long form content is centered around hooks.

And you could apply this also to meetings, emails, Slack messages, presentations, et cetera. Because positioning is how you get people’s attention and get them to say yes because it answers the question, so what? Not just what you did. And if you want your ideas to be taken seriously, you need to develop this skill of positioning.

It’s how your name will start coming up in rooms even when you’re not in them because people will start to remember the things you are telling them, the things you are recommending to them, and maybe even problems you’re spotting to try and prevent situations from getting to like a five alarm fire, right?

So if you do one thing this week, here is my challenge. Take the next email you send, request you make, update, Slack message, whatever, and look at the first sentence. And if it’s all about what you did, that is a yellow flag. I want you to rewrite that sentence so it leads with.

The so what, the meaning, the recommendation. Because if your message only focuses on the what, you are going to delay the time it takes to resolve that situation, get an answer, because decision makers want to understand the so what before they make a decision. And again, I want you to notice that everything we’ve talked about today also applies to the positioning of you.

In your career, whether you’re trying to get a promotion, you are trying to get interviews or convert interviews to offers, or you’re trying to get a freelance client to say yes. Because the person who frames their work well is the person who gets the promotion, who gets the raise, who gets the new role, who gets the freelance client to say yes. Because you’ve made the value of your work.

And potential impact or impact you already had, impossible to ignore. So, quick recap: one, when anyone can build anything, the only edge left is knowing what’s worth building. And number two, the person who can frame the work will beat out the person who only does the work. And that is why I am betting on positioning.

As one of the most important skills you can develop in your career, regardless of if you work or UX in product, because AI can help us build fast, but positioning and the thinking that goes along with positioning will help us build the right thing and it helps us get people to say yes to our ideas. I will be sharing a lot more about positioning in the future.

And I’m actually going to be giving a talk and workshop at future product days in Copenhagen from September 22nd to the 24th. It is Europe’s largest product conference. So if you are over in Europe or want to take a trip to Copenhagen, I would love for you to join me. My talk is on how to position your ideas so they land. And my workshop is all about how to position the most important product you will work on.

Which is you. So head over to futureproductdays.com to learn more and grab your ticket. And I’ll make sure to drop the link in the show notes as well. I would really, really love to see you in Copenhagen this fall. And before I go, I would love to hear from you, given how easily AI lets us produce anything at lightning speed.

I am curious, what do you think are the skills that will help UX and product people stand out in the future? So let me know. The best way to do that is to write a post about this episode on LinkedIn, mention me, and then I will reply. And maybe I’ll even repost your post.

To my, I think, 87,000 followers on LinkedIn. All right. I would love to keep this conversation going. So I will look out for you mentioning me in your post about this episode. And that’s all for today. I will see you in the next episode of the Career Strategy Podcast.