Most growth problems are positioning problems wearing a costume

The brief usually arrives already diagnosed. 'We need more traffic.' 'We need to improve conversion.' 'We need to reduce churn.' Each of these is a symptom presented as a cause, and accepting it is the fastest way to spend a budget without changing an outcome.

Symptom, cause, and the cost of skipping the difference

A traffic problem is real when qualified demand exists and you are absent from it. It is not real when the demand you are chasing belongs to a job your product does not do well. In the second case, more traffic makes the numbers worse: more visitors, lower conversion, more support load, faster churn.

A short diagnostic

Three questions usually separate the two. What job were the last twenty customers hiring you for? Would they describe you the way you describe yourself? And when they chose you, what did they stop doing?

The third question is the useful one. If nobody can say what the product replaced, the company is probably competing in a category it has assumed rather than one buyers recognise.

Why this matters more now

When discovery is mediated by models, ambiguity is punished harder. A vague position produced mediocre rankings before; now it produces absence. The remedy is not louder marketing. It is deciding, with evidence, what you are the obvious answer to.