Camila Silva

Positioning statement drawn from real customer interview quotes

Turns raw customer interview notes into patterns, a positioning statement and two alternatives, marking anything the interviews don't support.

At a glance

Best for: Founders and product marketers who've done a round of customer calls and need positioning grounded in evidence, not a brainstorm.
Tested on: Claude · Opus 5.5
You fill in: number_of_interviewsproductinterview_notes
You get: Patterns Handover information gets lost between shifts (4 of 5: Maria, Dev, Andre, Kim). "Night crew never knows what the morning crew already… (full result below)

Prompt

Below are notes from {{number_of_interviews}} customer interviews for {{product}}. Use them to draft our positioning.

Work only from what customers actually said. If something a positioning statement needs isn't supported by the notes, write [NOT IN INTERVIEWS] instead of filling it in.

Interview notes:
{{interview_notes}}

Give me:

1. Patterns: the 3-4 things that came up in more than one interview, each with supporting quotes and how many interviews mentioned it. Note any interview that doesn't fit and why.

1. Competitive alternative: what these customers would do if we didn't exist, in their words.

1. Positioning statement in this form: For [target customer] who [situation or trigger], [product] is a [market category] that [key benefit]. Unlike [alternative], we [differentiator].

1. Two alternative statements aimed at a different segment or category the notes also support, and what we'd give up with each.

1. Weakest claim: the part of statement 3 with the thinnest evidence, and one interview question that would test it.

Fill in

{{number_of_interviews}}: How many interviews the notes covere.g. 5
{{product}}: Product name and a one-line descriptione.g. Shiftnote, a shift-handover app for small restaurant kitchens
{{interview_notes}}: Your notes or transcripts, with quotes where you have theme.g. #1 Maria, kitchen manager: 'Night crew never knows what the morning crew already prepped.'

Example input

number_of_interviews: 5
product: Shiftnote, a shift-handover app for small restaurant kitchens
interview_notes:
#1 Maria, kitchen manager, 40-seat taqueria: "Night crew never knows what the morning crew already prepped." Used a whiteboard, it gets wiped. Tried Slack, cooks ignored it. Likes that Shiftnote runs on the tablet by the pass.
#2 Dev, owner, 2 pizza locations: biggest pain is waste. "We threw out 3 tubs of dough last month because nobody logged it." Uses a paper binder. "Anything over $30 a month I have to think about."
#3 Jo, sous chef, hotel restaurant: already has an enterprise scheduling tool, wants handover notes inside it. Lukewarm.
#4 Andre, owner, food truck + commissary: "Texts get lost. I want one place where the closer says what's low." Moved from a group chat to Shiftnote. Posts photos of the prep list.
#5 Kim, chef-owner, 30-seat bistro: "The whiteboard is our system and it's fine until someone's sick." Would pay if it replaced her paper prep list too. Worried cooks won't type; likes the idea of voice notes.

5490

Generated Outputs (1)

2 hours ago

Claude

Opus 5.5

2 hours ago

Generated Output

1. Patterns

• Handover information gets lost between shifts (4 of 5: Maria, Dev, Andre, Kim). "Night crew never knows what the morning crew already prepped." "We threw out 3 tubs of dough last month because nobody logged it." "Texts get lost." "It's fine until someone's sick."

• The current system is physical and fragile (3 of 5: Maria and Kim use whiteboards, Dev a paper binder). Maria's "gets wiped" is the clearest failure.

• Cooks won't use general chat tools or typing (3 of 5): Maria's cooks ignored Slack, Andre's texts got lost in a group chat, Kim worries cooks won't type.

• The prep list is the neighboring job (2 of 5): Andre posts prep-list photos; Kim would pay if it replaced her paper list.

Doesn't fit: Jo works in a hotel with an enterprise tool and wants notes inside it. That's an integration buyer, not your core customer. Price came up once (Dev, under $30 a month); worth noting, not a pattern.

2. Competitive alternative
A whiteboard, a paper binder or a group chat. In Kim's words: "The whiteboard is our system."

3. Positioning statement
For owners and managers of small independent kitchens who lose track of what's prepped and what's low between shifts, Shiftnote is a shift handover log [NOT IN INTERVIEWS: nobody named a category; "handover log" is my suggestion] that gives the next crew one place to see it. Unlike a whiteboard, binder or group chat, we keep every handover in one place on the kitchen tablet, so nothing gets wiped, buried in texts or skipped.

4. Alternatives

• Prep-list angle: "For chef-owners who run the kitchen off a paper prep list, Shiftnote is a digital prep list that also tells the next shift what's done." Supported by Andre and Kim. You give up: the handover pain, your strongest evidence, becomes secondary, and you enter a more crowded category.

• Waste angle for multi-site owners: "For owners of two or three locations who throw out food nobody logged, Shiftnote is the log that stops it." Supported by Dev only. You give up: breadth, and you'd be resting on a single interview.

5. Weakest claim
"On the kitchen tablet" and the implied promise that cooks will use it. Only Maria mentions the tablet, and Kim doubts cooks will type at all. Test it with: "Walk me through the last handover note someone on your crew left. Who wrote it, on what, and how long did it take?"

Why it works

The [NOT IN INTERVIEWS] marker is the key line: positioning drafts usually fail by filling gaps with confident guesses, and this makes the gaps visible. Requiring quotes and counts per pattern separates what one loud customer said from what several said. Using the classic "For... who... Unlike..." template forces a named alternative, which is where differentiation comes from. The two alternatives with trade-offs stop you locking onto the first framing, and the weakest-claim question turns the output into your next interview script.

When not to use it

Five interviews are enough to spot patterns, not to prove them. Don't use this to settle positioning on notes you've already paraphrased heavily, because the model can only be as faithful as your notes. For a market you haven't interviewed yet, write a hypothesis and go talk to people first.

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