Positioning for tech companies. Author of the best-selling books Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch.

April Dunford is the world's foremost authority on product positioning for B2B technology companies. As a consultant, April helps companies make complex products easy to understand and love. After a 25-year career as a VP of Marketing at various fast-growing technology firms, she has consulted with 300 technology companies, including Google, Epic Games, Postman, and others. April is the acclaimed author of the best-selling book, "Obviously Awesome," which delves into the art of positioning, and the newly released, "Sales Pitch," which unveils the secrets to crafting a winning sales narrative in the market.

April Dunford

Can you use my positioning methodology to get yourself a date? I had a fun conversation with Brent Adamson and Shari Levitin on the Selling Isn't Everything podcast, where we talked about a bunch of things like:
♥️ Can you use my book, Obviously Awesome, to position yourself for romance (spoiler - I don't think it's a great idea, but hey, your mileage may vary!)
♥️ "Fractional CMO" is not great positioning (I mean, it's fine in the short term, but let's be honest, marketers can do better)
♥️ Why it's important to think about value and best-fit customers as a matching set
♥️ Why the "insight" step in a sales pitch is so hard to get right, but also critically important. 
This was a fun one!
Episode link in the comments

Atlassian

Technical PMM and product strategy for Rovo Studio and agent builders

Principal, AI Product Strategy & Technical Marketing

HyreSnap

GTM Advisor

Protopia AI

Protopia AI redefines data security for the LLM era. Our solution, Stained Glass Transform (SGT), allows organizations to transform their data into secure representations that can be fed directly into AI models with no loss of accuracy. It was built by researchers with decades of experience across data security, encryption , model training/fine-tuning, and AI. 

My focus spans establishing thought leadership,  core product marketing, growth, sales enablement and more.

Head of Product Marketing

Labelbox

I lead the PMM function and GTM efforts for Labelbox - launching narratives and programs that help F500 executives succeed with their AI and ML initiatives

Director of Product Marketing

Google

• Define core positioning, messaging and drive product launches for multiple AI & ML technologies. Launched OpenXLA through partnerships across Google Cloud, Intel, Nvidia and more. Coverage across 22 leading tech publications including TechTarget, VentureBeat and >200K organic impressions.

• Lead web marketing team for tensorflow.org. Rebooted the TensorFlow website (>18K pages, >1 Mn monthly visitors) through deep SEO research, customer panels, UX & messaging sprints and cross-organization collaboration. New website led to 19% increase in product adoption (+425K installs a week) and 288% boost in interactions with developer assets and code.

• Manage performance marketing for multiple AI & ML developer products. Managed > $2Mn in ad spend, 3 performance marketers, and 40+ countries. Campaigns (SEM + YouTube) grew signups for ML developer events 6X YoY, 10% increase in active users, millions of YouTube views, 36X more 
interactions with coding artefacts and tutorials.

• Manage email marketing and newsletter editorial.

Product Marketing Lead, TensorFlow

Global Marketing Manager

Databricks

• Managed global programs (NA, EMEA, APAC) targeting business and technical buyers across named accounts, enterprise & mid-market segments. Created >$110 Mn in marketing pipeline.

• Messaging and Positioning: Crafted outbound messaging and assets targeting data engineering practitioners with industry research, sales feedback and content analytics. Supported launch readiness and sales enablement content.

• Partner Marketing: Landed joint marketing programs with Databricks' largest partners (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Tableau, Datarobot, Talend, Informatica and more). Programs were recognized by leadership at AWS, Microsoft Azure and Tableau for impact. 

• Data Science & Analytics: (1) Built rules-based classifier using Python for mapping leads and contacts in CRM to target personas (data engineers, data scientists, leaders, etc). Model used by marketing, customer success and sales teams for analysis. (2) Built email & nurture dashboard using Tableau and managed weekly marketing performance reporting with global marketing team. (3) Built persona dashboard to analyze event and content performance across geos and personas. Insights created campaign best practices, improved conversion rates by 40% and cut CPAs by 50%.

• Launched demand generation in the APAC region - established playbook for campaigns and growth marketing.

• Piloted lifecycle marketing campaigns and ABM initiatives.

Senior Marketing Manager, AI/ML

Microsoft

• Trial to activation: Launched developer onboarding program in 70 markets globally. Program led to 40% growth in activation, 5X growth in per developer revenue as well as thousands of new apps published to the Windows marketplace.

• Content: Translated core positioning/messaging and research into campaign content and external assets tailored to different developer personas. Commissioned first-party research to benchmark & optimize campaigns against top competitors, including Android, Apple developers, Amazon developers and more.

•  Engineering & Analytics: (1) Led the buildout of cloud-hosted customer data platform that combined developer data from 26 upstream sources. The CDP was integrated with Salesforce CRM, AutoPilot HQ (Marketing Automation) and PowerBI (Analytics) to power campaigns and analytics. (2) Built new email delivery pipeline in SalesForce Marketing Cloud to improve delivery rates from 36% to 93%. (3) Managed engineering vendors for ongoing spirits and marketing activations.

• Stakeholder Management: Managed complex alignment and execution across PM, PMM, legal, creative, engineering, agencies, vendors and technology partners.

•  Marketing Tools - Marketo certified expert, well versed in salesforce marketing cloud, autopilot hq, Power BI, Heap analytics and more.

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Developer Marketing

KPIT

• Managed marketing programs for North America, across multiple SAP product lines, sales tiers (enterprise, mid-market, small business) and customer verticals (energy, healthcare, manufacturing, distribution, retail). Efforts spanned events, webinars, digital campaigns, partner marketing and more.
• Worked closely with SMEs to craft positioning and messaging (microsites, blogs, infographics, landing pages, solution briefs, decks, marketing emails, one-pagers, event collateral, press releases and creative) for ERP, analytics, CRM, HR, ecommerce and vertical-specific solutions.  Hands-on with HTML, Adobe (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Acrobat Pro) and Microsoft tools.
• Collaborated with engineers and tech vendors to build technologies for marketing intelligence and lead enrichment. Toolset automated and accelerated market research and segmentation efforts from 4 weeks to 2 days while cutting resource requirements from 4 reps to 0.5 reps, at 20% of commercial costs. The resulting quality improvement and expanded segmentation unlocked new insights for personalization and doubled lead generation from campaigns. 
• Grew event registrations 300% for webinars. Partnered with multiple stakeholders within organization and at strategic go to market partners.
• Marketing Automation: Experienced in Salesforce, HubSpot and Pardot.

Marketing Manager

RJT Compuquest

• Recognized by SAP NA marketing leadership for growth and impact. Built marketing practice from the ground-up, leading teams of marketing reps and SDRs. Reporting to the VP of NA sales, I established marketing programs (across events, inbound, webinars, digital) and established processes for sales handoffs, lead quality assessment, KPIs/SLAs and performance incentives for SDRs.  Initiatives led to MQL pipeline growth from $xx,000 to $x M in one year at 50% of industry-standard cost per opportunity. 
• Established positioning and authored content spanning multiple formats - Press Releases, customer case studies, marketing briefs, web pages, one-pagers, print ads, videos, event collateral and marketing emails. 
• Drove marketing programs for mid-market and enterprise customers in North America across SAP products spanning ERP solutions, CRM, BI and other product lines.
• Partnered with engineers to innovate new market research tools that accelerated list research from weeks to hours while improving data quality. Freed up capacity for marketing reps to focus on client-facing actions.

Head Of Marketing

Head of AI Product Marketing | x-Google, Meta, Microsoft | Advisor

15 years of experience spanning product marketing, demand generation and developer marketing. 7 years of experience leading marketing for AI and analytics technologies - I led product marketing for TensorFlow, rolled out AI models at Meta and marketed the big data and AI revolution at Databricks. I am an educator and advocate for product marketing and for embedding AI and LLMs in marketing workflows

Abhishek Ratna

100+ customer conversations, demos on the state of the possible and awesome teamwork with an epic crew - it was a blast representing Atlassian at #msignite 

You rock Reni, Karen, Kai, Shivani, Annie, Tishya, Alex, Ali, Jeremy, Sanjay, Tishya Khanna and Steve  

So many of our users are finding use cases, transforming workflows and putting AI at the heart of their teams and we’re proud to be a part of the journey

Huge thanks Nick for the dinner and AI talks afterwards

Principal, AI Product Strategy & Product Marketing at Atlassian | ex-Google, Meta, Microsoft

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A picture is worth a 1000 words, but with Nano Banana pro, it may be worth a dozen videos. You can use it to turn long, complex videos into infographics!

I needed to quickly explain the Atlassian Forge architecture to new developers. The source video was dense, but Nano Banana Pro and Gemini 3 Pro made light work of it. They even connected all the technologies to a developers user journey!

Steps 

1️⃣ I fed it the video URL to extract essential concepts in plain English.

⚙️ Prompt: “Analyze this video and understand it’s essential content. (Link to video)”

2️⃣ I asked to visualize those steps as a "developer journey" flowchart.

⚙️ Prompt: “Create a modern, powerful infographic that helps new developers understand Atlassian Forge. Keep the descriptions concise and simple. Tie in the components with the user journey.”

3️⃣ We did a quick back-and-forth on the modern design. Not the greatest visuals out of the box but can be refined pretty quickly. 

In just minutes, I went from a technical deep-dive video to the powerful visual guide below. 

#NanoBananaPro #AtlassianForge

Finished teaching a session with 30+ product marketers on how to build AI agents in ChatGPT for real workflows.

One attendee told me it was the best session they'd attended in 2025.

Here's what we actually covered (and the questions that surprised me):

⚙️  The Workshop:

We built a Custom GPT from scratch — a "Nova Messaging Assistant" that knows a company's brand guidelines, personas, competitive landscape, and messaging frameworks.

The goal wasn't to show off AI. It was to solve a real PMM problem: the time sink of translating product specs into persona-specific messaging.

❓  The Questions That Made It Real:

The build was great but the discussion that followed was even better.

→ "How do we handle security concerns in enterprise?"
We talked through data handling, what gets stored vs. processed, and how to have that conversation with your security team.

→ "How do I measure if this is actually making me more productive?"
Not vanity metrics. Real before/after tracking — time per deliverable, revision cycles, output quality.

→ "What about Gemini? Claude? N8N?"
The tools change. The patterns don't. We discussed when different platforms make sense and why the underlying architecture matters more than the logo.

→ "When do I need a workflow vs. just a Custom GPT?"
GPTs for conversation, workflows for automation. If a human needs to start it every time, you're not automating — you're assisting.

💡  What I Learned:

PMMs aren't skeptical of AI. They're skeptical of AI hype that doesn't address their actual workflow.

When you show them a tool that saves 2 hours on messaging work they do every week, they lean in.

When you let them ask the hard questions — security, measurement, trade-offs — they trust it.

Thank you to everyone who attended and made it a real conversation, not just a presentation. And specially to Sophie Bass and the Product Marketing Alliance

If I had to pick one word as the hallmark of the AI era, it would be "Velocity". 

Across the board, large organizations and small are shipping product updates and launches in days - in the case of Perplexity, one new feature every 93 hours!

Since January 1 2025:

- Perplexity has shipped a new product or feature approximately every 93 hrs.  
- Perplexity has made a new top model available approximately every 17 days.

OpenAI just dropped their 2025 State of Enterprise AI report. Three findings jumped out:

1. The growth numbers are staggering

ChatGPT Enterprise seats up 9x YoY. Weekly enterprise messages up 8x. API reasoning token consumption per org? Up 320x.

This isn’t experimentation anymore. It’s infrastructure.

2. There’s a massive gap between power users and everyone else

Frontier workers (95th percentile) send 6x more messages than the median. But the real story is in the task-specific gaps:

→ Coding: 17x more messages
→ Writing: 11x more messages  
→ Analysis: 10x more messages

Same tools. Same availability. Wildly different adoption.

And here’s the kicker: users who engage across ~7 task types report 5x more time saved than those using ~4. Depth compounds.

3. Industry growth is uneven — and revealing

The median sector grew 6x YoY. But look at the outliers:

→ Technology: 11x
→ Healthcare: 8x
→ Manufacturing: 7x

Finance and professional services lead in scale. But healthcare and manufacturing are closing the gap fast — moving from pilots to production.

Even among daily active ChatGPT Enterprise users, 3% have never used data analysis. For monthly active users? 19%.

The tools are there. Usage patterns just haven’t caught up.

Lovable’s meteoric rise to $200M ARR proves that customers buy into the community and not just the product.

Some marketing pointers:
👉 Share your roadmap, thinking and team transparently. 
👉 Spotlight your users and what they’re building

We launched Lovable one year ago, and today we hit $200M ARR.

Here's our story:

We started with a small team in Europe in a co-working space. Almost no one knew who we were, and we didn’t know what was coming.

But that changed quickly...

We transparently shared everything that happened on social media, including product updates, metrics, and new team members. 

Then, thousands of people started sharing what they built with Lovable.

Now, we have one of the most active communities in tech, with over 70 community-run events happening this week alone. People all over the world build 100,000+ new projects on Lovable every day.

It’s not just Lovable that’s grown fast: our users have too...

Lumoo, Quicktables, and Plinq are all products built entirely on Lovable with $10k-$100k in MRR just months after starting.

Designers, PMs, and even developers inside large companies have grown into an important customer group: HCA Healthcare now focuses less on mockups and more on patient care, and Klarna ships weekly instead of quarterly using Lovable.

Today, we’re releasing multiple product updates (read more on our blog):

1. MCP servers: Linear, Jira, Notion, Confluence, n8n
2. Themes: set brand standards across projects
3. Improved visual edits: multi-select components & image generation

MCPs are live today. Themes & visual edits rolling out this week.

We're also opening offices in Boston and San Francisco and building a world-class leadership team. Year one proved it works. Year two is about scale.

To thank you all for this year: For the next 7 days, if you refer someone to Lovable and they publish a project you'll both get 50 credits (that’s 5x more than usual!).

We're looking forward to many more Lovable years ❤️

OpenAI just declared an internal “code red” to fix ChatGPT’s user experience and quality, reportedly because of Gemini.

The irony is almost poetic.

It was barely three years ago that Google declared its own code red when ChatGPT launched and sent shockwaves through Mountain View.

Now the tables have turned.

This whiplash tells us something important about where AI actually is:

🔵 The market is still wide open. 

Despite the breathless commentary about winners and losers, customer preferences remain remarkably fluid. 

🔵 The moats everyone assumes exist… don’t. Not yet.

Speed is the only constant. Three years. That’s all it took for the disruptor to become the disrupted. In most industries, that’s a planning cycle. In AI, it’s an entire competitive era.

🔵  We’re crossing the chasm, not past it. 

The dust hasn’t settled. The “dominant design” hasn’t emerged. We’re still in the messy middle where everything is up for grabs.

🔗 Read full article -

Open article: OpenAI Declares ‘Code Red’ as Google Threatens AI Lead by wsj.com

OpenAI Declares ‘Code Red’ as Google Threatens AI Lead

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The Battle

April Dunford

Abhishek Ratna

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The Battle

April Dunford

Abhishek Ratna

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}April Dunford's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreApril Dunford's LinkedIn Performance