Positioning And Story Agent Skill

Positioning & story

> Your story is boring without a villain. And you are not the hero of it. The developer is. You're the wise advisor who hands them a better weapon.

Use this when: your homepage explains what your product *does* before it names the problem, your positioning is interchangeable with three competitors, or nobody feels any urgency to act now.

The core idea

Developers don't buy features; they hire a tool to defeat something that's making their life worse. Get the roles right:

• Hero = the developer (never the vendor, never the product)
• Villain = the undeniable *trend* making the pain worse every day
• Wise Advisor = you, arriving with a gift (the product)
• Inciting event = the change in the world that forces the hero to act *now*

No villain → no urgency → no story → no conversion.

Framework: the 3-part story (Frankl)

• Inciting event: introduce the hero and the villain; the world changed and the hero can't stay put.
• Obstacles: a series of specific challenges, each solved with your help, best told as mini before/afters: *"Before X, we had [problem]. Now [measured result]."*
• Resolution: villain defeated (for now), specific results, hero shares the wisdom → that's your testimonial.

The benchmark (EngFlow):

> *"Slow builds waste your time. Standard build tools can't handle today's codebases. Speed up builds now to keep engineers in flow."*

• Pain: slow builds waste your time
• Villain: standard tools can't handle modern complexity
• Hero: engineers, kept in flow
• Wise Advisor: the build experts

Good villains: cloud-cost sprawl · tool fragmentation · compounding tech debt · flaky pipelines · observability gaps · manual deploys · YAML sprawl · agents you can't trust in prod.

Framework: the 4 levels of differentiation (Frankl)

Compete as high up this ladder as you can. Feature wars are a race to the bottom.

| Level | Type | Sounds like | Grade |

|---|---|---|---|

| 1 | Feature | "we have X, they don't" | D |

| 2 | Benefit | "we save you time" | C |

| 3 | Customer segment | "for CTOs under release pressure with compliance" | B |

| 4 | Problem | "the only fix for [problem no one else has named]" | A |

Reaching Level 4 / category creation: talk to enough TAB members (see talk-to-users) to surface a problem competitors haven't named, then name it so precisely your product is the obvious answer. When rivals adopt your vocabulary, they've already lost the position. (JFrog: "artifact repository" → "Universal Artifact Repository" and leapfrogged Sonatype.)

Decision tree

Can you state a problem only you solve, in the user's words?
├─ YES → Level 4. Lead with the problem; name the category.
└─ NO  → Can you name a specific segment with a compelling reason?
         ├─ YES → Level 3. Lead with the ICP + their trigger.
         └─ NO  → you're stuck at feature/benefit → go run `talk-to-users`.

Mistakes that look reasonable

• Product as hero: "ShipFast helps you…" Make the developer the subject of the sentence.
• No villain: all solution, no antagonist → zero urgency.
• "Platform": developers hear *months of integration and risk.* Name the specific thing it does.
• "Pleased to announce": nobody cares about your emotional state; a feature is not a story, a customer win is.
• Feature-matrix positioning: a checklist vs competitors keeps you at Level 1 forever.

Your next 30 minutes

• [ ] Write one sentence: hero + villain + inciting event (steal the EngFlow shape).
• [ ] Grade your current differentiation 1-4. If it's D/C, list what would move it to B/A.
• [ ] Find the villain in your talk-to-users "environmental changes" bucket, it's already there.
• [ ] Rewrite your headline so the *developer* is the subject and the *problem* comes before the product.

Built from real dev-tool GTM experience, with frameworks from Adam Frankl (*The Developer-Facing Startup*) and Jakub Czakon (*markepear.dev*).

When a framework can't make the call, that's what a human is for: The DevTool GTM Company.