Called "the biggie" among the four new positioning problems (see Four New Ways AI-Era Markets Break Positioning Execution): in a fast-moving market, how far into the future should a company position itself — against the competitors it faces today, or the ones it expects to face once the market matures?
Dunford's rule of thumb: compete against who you actually compete with right now, while building the product for the competitors coming later. Naming a competitive alternative the customer wasn't already considering is risky — it can send them off to research an option they hadn't thought of and stall the deal, rather than winning it.
Illustrated by a February 2025 client anecdote at an IT-management company: the CPO believed vibe-coding tools (Replit/Lovable, then only about two months old) were already a competitive threat ("not yet," in Dunford's assessment), while the head of sales had never once seen them appear on a real prospect's short list — the same market, two different time horizons, both defensible from where each person sits. Related to Position the Current Product, Not the Vision.
A compact rule for resolving how far ahead to position: compete against your actual current alternatives in customer-facing messaging, while product/R&D builds toward anticipated future competitors internally. Concretely — don't mention a category of competitor (e.g., vibe-coding tools) in positioning or sales conversations if your customers aren't yet putting it on their real shortlist (see Competitive-Alternatives Mapping (Status Quo vs. Shortlist)), even if your product team is already building defenses against it. Positioning tracks today's shortlist; product strategy tracks tomorrow's.