Positioning: UX principle for coding agents

Decide who the product is for and what it replaces before you write a single line of the page. Positioning is the input to the headline, not a result of it. A page whose positioning is undecided produces a headline any competitor could run unchanged, and that headline earns no attention.

This matters more each year. Building and launching a product is close to free now, so the scarce thing is not the product, it is attention. Positioning is the cheapest lever on that problem: it costs a decision, not a feature. Strong, specific positioning stops the right visitor and tells them at once that this is for them.

Answer Four Questions First

Every landing page rests on four answers. Get them before writing copy, and the copy mostly writes itself.

Who is it for? Name a person specific enough to picture: "freelance video editors who bill by the project", not "creative teams".
What do they use today? The competitive alternative is the reference point the visitor will judge you against. It is often a rival product, but just as often a spreadsheet, an agency, an intern, or doing nothing.
What is the sharpest difference? One thing you do that the alternative cannot. Not your longest feature list, the single difference that would make this person switch.
Why now? What changed in their world that makes the old way stop working. Skip this only when nothing changed.

If any answer is missing, the page will hedge, and a hedging page reads as a product for nobody.

Narrow On Purpose

The instinct is to widen the audience so the page turns away fewer people. It does the opposite: a headline written for everyone is recognised by no one.

Compare:

"Project management for modern teams". A visitor reads it, recognises nothing, and leaves.
"Project management for freelance video editors". A video editor stops, and everyone else was never going to convert anyway.

Narrowing does not shrink the market, it wins the part of the market that can hear you. You can widen later from a position of strength; you cannot get attention from a position of vagueness.

Strong positioning excludes people. If nobody reads the headline and thinks "not for me", it is not positioning, it is a description. Check who your page turns away. An empty answer is the finding.

Anchor To What They Already Know

A visitor understands a new product by placing it next to something familiar. Choose that reference point yourself, or they will pick one for you, and it may be the wrong one.

Name the alternative and beat it on one axis: "Invoicing that takes a minute, not an afternoon in a spreadsheet."
Borrow a known category when it is honest: "the X for Y" is a cliché because it works, but only when both halves are true and the reader knows X.
Do not invent a new category unless you can explain it in one sentence. A category nobody has heard of forces the visitor to learn before they can care, and most will not.

Category-inflation words ("platform", "solution", "operating system for", "reimagine") sound like positioning and carry none. They describe the ambition, not the difference.

Test the Headline Before You Style It

Three cheap tests, run in order. Each one kills a common failure.

Competitor swap test. Put a competitor's name on your headline. If it still reads true, the headline says nothing. microcopy.md runs this test at the string level; run it here on the value proposition, where it costs the most.
Recognition test. Would the person from question one recognise their own situation in the first two lines, in their own words? Use the words the customer uses, not the words the team uses internally.
Repeat test. Ask someone to say what the product does after reading only the headline and the supporting line. If they paraphrase into something generic, rewrite. This is the same bar ui/marketing-pages.md sets for the hero.

Positioning Shapes the Whole Page, Not Just the Headline

Once the four answers are set, they decide far more than the top line. Carry them all the way down.

The headline states the difference. The supporting line names the person and the concrete outcome.
Section order follows the objections of that one buyer, not a template. The doubt that stops them most goes highest.
Proof selection matches the buyer: a logo wall of enterprises does nothing for a solo freelancer, and a freelancer's testimonial does nothing for a procurement team.
The CTA label matches where they are: "Start a free invoice" beats "Get started" because it names what happens next for that person.
Screenshots show the workflow that person runs, not the most impressive screen in the app.

A section that does not serve the four answers is filler. ui/marketing-pages.md covers the layout that makes this scannable, and ui/product-pages.md covers the stricter contract when the page sells one product.

Positioning Is a Product Decision Too

Question three is the honest one. If you cannot name a difference the visitor would switch for, better copy will not create one, and stretching for it produces the vague headline you were trying to avoid.

When that happens, say so, and treat it as product feedback rather than a writing problem:

Narrow the product until a difference exists. Serving one person completely beats serving five partly.
Look for the difference in the workflow, the defaults, the speed, or who it is built around, not only in the feature list.
Ship the narrow version, then widen once the narrow one works.

Never Invent the Answers

Positioning is made of facts about a real business, so it is the one part of a page you cannot generate.

Ask the user the four questions when the answers are not in the brief. Two or three sentences back from them beats a page of confident invention.
Never invent a customer, a testimonial, a named user count, a funding note, or an award. Fabricated proof is a Critical issue in review-rules.md, and it is the fastest way to lose the trust the page exists to build.
When the user cannot answer question three yet, write the page around what is true (who it is for, what it replaces) and tell them the difference is still missing. Do not paper over it with adjectives.
Placeholder positioning is allowed only when it is labelled as a placeholder in the handoff.

Positioning