The blank page is rarely the actual problem. The actual problem is that a positioning brief asks for fifteen decisions at once — category, ICP, alternative set, primary value, proof, the three things you're explicitly not — and most PMMs have firm opinions on six of them and gut feelings on the rest. An analyst is useful when it forces those gut feelings into draft sentences you can argue with.
What follows is a working method, not a prompt template. The prompts at the end are the easy part.
Why analysts produce mediocre briefs by default
Hand a generic chat model your homepage and ask for a positioning brief. You'll get something plausible, generically structured, and useless. Three reasons:
- No alternative set. The model defaults to "your competitors are X, Y, Z" pulled from search rankings. Your buyer's actual alternatives include "build it internally," "use the spreadsheet they already have," and "wait six months." The model won't know that unless you tell it.
- No truth filter. It will happily generate value claims you can't defend with evidence. Confident prose, zero proof.
- No tradeoff awareness. A good brief names what you're not — the buyers you don't serve, the use cases you decline, the comparisons you refuse. Default model output is additive and flattering.
A positioning analyst earns its keep by closing those three gaps before the first paragraph of brief gets drafted.
The analyst's job is to interrogate the inputs. The PMM's job is to choose what the brief commits to.
The working method
What goes in the input pack
The single biggest determinant of brief quality is the input pack. Models that receive thin context produce thin output, regardless of prompt sophistication.
Minimum viable input pack
If you can only assemble four of these seven, do the alternative-set interview first and treat the brief as a v0.5 instead of v1.
What the analyst is good at, and what it isn't
A note on the iteration loop
The first brief draft is not the deliverable. The second draft, after a sales call review, is closer. The third draft, after the founder reads it and reacts, is what you ship.
The analyst got me to a draft in an afternoon. Then I spent two weeks getting the founder to disagree with the right parts of it. That's the actual work.
The analyst compresses the drafting time from three weeks to three days. It does not compress the alignment time, and pretending otherwise sets up the brief to be ignored.
What to do Monday
Pull the input pack together first. If the win/loss notes don't exist in any reviewable form, that's the higher-priority problem — no analyst will rescue a brief built on guessed buyer reasons. Spend Monday on the pack, Tuesday on the alternative-set interview, and reserve Wednesday afternoon for the first section-by-section draft pass.
The prompt pack below is the prompts themselves: alternative-set interview, category-noun generator, section-by-section brief draft, and the truth-filter pass. They are starting points, not finished tools — edit them against your own input pack before running.
Keep reading
How to Use an Analyst for Positioning Brainstorms
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Analyst for Launch Narrative Drafting
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Analyst for Market Landscape Mapping
Market-landscape maps are the visual artifacts strategy teams produce to show where a company sits in its category. Most are built manually over weeks. The AI-assisted workflow produces 70% as complete a map in 10% of the time — here's the six-step process.
Positioning Brief
One page that keeps your whole team telling the same story.
The Positioning Brief is a living, one-page document the Analyst re-writes as your pillars, signals, and decisions change. Short enough for the board to read in four minutes, specific enough for a new hire to use on day one.
- ✓One page — readable by the board in four minutes
- ✓Re-writes itself as your market and strategy evolve
- ✓Bridges the gap between strategy and execution