April Dunford
#Conversation

April Dunford

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April Dunford spent 25 years running marketing, product, and sales teams as a startup executive.

Creating a systematic way of positioning tech products and companies became her life's work, informing her consulting practice where she has advised 100+ companies. Her best-selling book Obviously Awesome offers a methodology that any leader or entrepreneur can follow.

I found great value in April's positioning methodology as I figure out directions for my own projects, including Design Disciplin. Even though her experience comes from leading business-to-business marketing, she offers lessons that we can adapt to a whole range of situations – including but not limited to how our design projects speak to their audience, and how to position ourselves towards potential employers and clients.


The transcript below has been edited for clarity, brevity, and readability.


You have literally written the book on this thing that we call positioning. It's called Obviously Awesome. I actually read this book twice, because your message was extremely relevant to me. But I'll get to that later – let's start with the basics. What even is positioning?

I used to be a VP Marketing at startups and tech companies. I switched to consulting about 5-6 years ago. When I switched, I decided I was going to narrowly focus on positioning.

At the beginning, that was a challenge. People say, "what do you do?" And I say, "well, I'm a positioning consultant!" And they're like, "uh, what's positioning?"

I think that positioning is really misunderstood, even amongst marketing professionals. If I were to get 10 vice presidents of marketing together and say, "define positioning" – you would probably get 10 really different definitions. Most people confuse positioning with things you want to do with positioning: "Positioning is exactly the same as messaging." "It's just like your tag line." Or the one that really bothers me: when people talk about "brand positioning", and they smush them together. I don't think that's right. There's branding, and there's positioning, and those two things are actually entirely separate. In fact, messaging, branding, go-to-market strategy, all these things flow from positioning. But you got to have positioning straight first.

I define positioning this way: it's how your product is the best in the world at delivering some kind of value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about.

So you have been a VP of marketing – a very high level executive in charge of marketing at a company. How did your life, education, and career play out to make you the expert on positioning?

I'm a bit of an accidental marketer. I didn't start out with an idea that I was going to have a marketing career. I actually studied engineering in university.

When I graduated, I got a job at a startup. And the job that I originally got hired for was a product marketing job. It involved doing presentations, going along on sales calls, going to trade shows and doing demos of the products... I got hired mainly because I was a decent public speaker. That was about it. And the product that we were selling was quite technical, so they needed somebody that at least knew a little bit about databases and SQL queries. I was good at all that, because I had studied engineering.

The product that I got assigned to, we ended up repositioning shortly after I joined. So I was involved in that repositioning effort. The product was not doing well, pre-repositioning – in fact, we were toying with the idea of potentially shutting it down. But then we repositioned it, and it took off! The product became wildly successful. The company got acquired by a big company in Silicon Valley. I inherited a team of folks after the acquisition. Then my boss quit, and people thought it would be a good idea to put me in charge! I had no background in marketing at all, and there I was, running this big global marketing team with a great big budget and all the rest.

At that point things were going really well. The product was really hot, and selling a lot, so I decided, well, I'm just going to learn this marketing stuff as I go along. So I took a bunch of courses, I read a bunch of books... And from that point forward I just decided, marketing is my jam. This is what I do. So I'm a bit of an accidental marketer. Interestingly though, that first experience came out of a repositioning that we did on a product. And even after the acquisition, I ended up being in charge of a handful of other products which were repositioned as well, because they were, kind of, weakly positioned. After I left there, I went to another startup; and it turned out, the first thing we did there was reposition the product as well!

So early in my career I got exposed to the power of positioning: how you could have something that didn't seem to be doing very well in the market, reposition it, and have it grow really fast. Right from the beginning I was sold on this idea of positioning. That's what sparked my interest in, exactly how does this work? And how can we do it more effectively and efficiently? I probably spent the next 10 years trying to perfect a way of doing positioning – a methodology that would get us to really good positioning, really quickly.

Where in the world were these experiences?

I'm based in Canada. The original company that I worked for was here in Canada, but then we got acquired by a company in Silicon Valley; so I was kind of splitting my time between Toronto and Silicon Valley. For a while I lived in Silicon Valley with a different company, for a while I lived in New York... But home base for me has always been more or less Toronto. I was in Paris for a couple years too. But mainly I've been in Toronto.

The reason I was asking is: these words that define a landscape of careers and jobs sometimes change their meaning, based on where you are in the world. You mentioned marketing, engineering, "product"... Can you comment a little bit about "marketing" vs. "design" vs. "product"?

When I started there was a clear line between product management and marketing. Marketing, in a B2B tech company, back when I started, was primarily concerned with lead generation. Like, how do we generate leads for the sales force? We didn't touch product at all. The product just was what it was. We didn't have too much control over that. Our job was to take the product and and try to get leads for it, so we could make as much money as we could!

The product management side of the house... They were seen more as the conduit between the product and the business. So there was the development team, you know, the programmers... And there was the business side of the house, where we're in marketing and sales. Product management was supposed to be making sure that we're building things we can sell; we're building things that the market wants, things that marketing can actually drive leads for, things that the sales team knows how to sell.

My first job was in product marketing, which was an even more niche thing at the time. Product marketers were essentially experts on the market. So they understood, deeply, what was differentiating and what wasn't differentiating. They understood different segments of buyers and what they cared about. So if you think about it, positioning is kind of a fundamental thing that product marketing does. I think my background in product marketing was kind of unique at the time. You certainly didn't meet many product marketers, and that had been a thing that I was doing right from the beginning.

Design, in a lot of ways, straddles the three – at least in the design groups that I've worked for. They're touching marketing and sales, they're definitely involved on the product side of things, and making sure that we're building something that works with the customers we're trying to sell to. And then, obviously, they're touching product.

The "build-measure-learn" feedback loop at the heart of Lean Startup methodology. (Adapted from The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.)

That is actually my home – I teach design at the university. And when I read your book it was it was mind-blowing for me. You basically describe, in this book, this method that we can use to formulate and articulate positioning: How do we decide what the positioning is, and how do we represent it? This is like the missing side of design for me. When we teach design and talk about design in our little world, we talk about methods a lot, which is about how you get the information – how you interview people, how you sort categorize ideas... But your book focused on how to analyze the information that we have – what questions do you ask, how do you filter what you know, and make decisions that get to what really matters?

As an experienced marketing and product leader, what is your opinion on product design methods, design research, market research, and so on? Concretely, have you ever observed that rigorously applying research methods or design methods makes a difference, as opposed to doing things quick and dirty?

It's interesting... When I started in the the first startup that I worked at, it was very typical of the time – which was like 25 years ago... If you roll the clock back 25 years ago, most startups started out as consulting businesses. They started out building custom software for companies that would pay for that custom software. And then what would happen is, they would notice, like, "hey, we keep getting asked to build the same thing, over and over and over again. Why don't we just build it as a product and sell it as a product?" Almost all startups started that way, when I started. The good thing about that is, you had a product out in market, and there were already customers using it, and you had at least a little bit of validation on the idea. Like, you knew people were asking for it! You had, at least, a handful of customers. You knew it was good! So the product would get built with that in mind.

Later on in my career, people really switched to building a building a product startup from scratch, without doing this consulting. And for the most part, the methodology they were using to try and figure out what product they should build and who's it for was lean startup. We have sort of a thesis we're going to try, to test that thesis out we're going to build a minimum viable product, we're going to iterate on that, we're going to try to figure it out... And then, if it works, it works  –great! If it doesn't, we throw it out and we try something else!

In my case, in most of the companies that I worked at, I would come in later. So I would come in as, like. the first professional marketing hire. Usually they'd have a couple of junior people doing some kind of marketing. But maybe they just raise some money, or they decide that now's the time, we're really going to invest in marketing, drive a lot of leads, really accelerate the growth – let's go hire a VP! That's when I would come in. And for the most part, at the state when I came in, if I look back at what had happened before there; at some point there was really good customer input. It was either because it was built out of the need of a particular customer, or they came from a services background, or they had done this really rigorous lean startup thing – you know, minimum viable product, testing it out, getting lots of feedback... But usually at the point when I came in, this idea of going back to figure out what the customers want and what's going on in the market sort of fell by the wayside. It was like, "okay, we know now! We're just executing on it!"

Typically, I would say, some of this stuff was where the root cause of weak positioning would come from. So you get this thing where the the founding team would say, "hey, we're building a thing, and it's email Because we hate email, we think email sucks, so we want to build better email!" So we got this thing, email, we put it out in the world, we get people using it. We add things, we take things away... Fast forward two years, and all of a sudden, you've got this thing, and you know what – it's actually chat! You think it's email – maybe chat didn't even exist when you built this thing – but if you looked at it now, clean, you would call that chat. You wouldn't call that email. But we've always thought of it as email, and that's our baggage. Where we came from, two years ago, it absolutely was email. But now it's something else! And that gap is confusing the heck out of customers. So they're seeing this thing, it kind of looks like chat, it doesn't do what I expect email would do... And yet you're calling it email! I'm so confused! And then, they don't buy.

So a lot of the weak positioning I see comes from this, what I would call "positioning baggage" – where the company has been started with a really firm idea of "this is the problem we're trying to solve, this is the product, this is the market category it sits in!" But the market itself has evolved. Categories have evolved. Your product itself has changed. And and the market category, the way you're positioning that product today, isn't actually very strong. If you were to reposition it today, for what it does, you would position it in a completely different way.

So I know if it's the methodology that gets us into this problem or what it is. but all I know is, by the time I showed up, there's usually a gap between the way we're thinking about it internally and the way customers think about it when they first see it. And closing that gap is the key to me being able to do good stuff in marketing.

Based on my my reading of your book: you advocate for surveying the market periodically, to determine who the best customer is. And if necessary, reorienting how we describe the product to suit that best customer we have. Conventional wisdom and design is that you should indeed do this periodical review of the market, but then you should tweak the product itself to suit the customer. So you start with the customer. Your customer is a constant – someone you have decided to provide for.

So we have three variables. We have the product itself. We have the market, or who the product is for. And we have how we describe the product, how we speak to the market. How do we stabilize them at the same time?

I'm mainly concerned with two of those three, because I feel like the way we talk about it comes out of the other two. What we have to have is this great fit between them – I have to have a product, and I have to understand who fits really well with that product.

As a marketing person, if I came on board a company that was already selling, already in market... Let's say they've already got a few million revenue... The first thing I would do is, I'd look and see: what exactly are we competing with?

It sounds like a weird way to start, but it's actually super interesting. Because if I go to customers, and I say, "why do you love our stuff?" – you'll hear all kinds of things that don't matter. They'll say, "oh, because your support is so great!" – that's not why you picked us in the first place! So I go and ask customers, "if my product didn't exist, what would you be doing today?"

There's usually two kinds of competition. One is whatever they were doing before they adopted our stuff, so: status quo in the account. A lot of times that isn't software. Or, at least, it's not software that looks like us. A lot of times it's, you know, "I would use a spreadsheet," or "I would hire an intern to do it," you know – just manual processes, whatever. And then, if the customer did decide, "okay, we can't do it that way anymore. We've got to do it a better way. We're going to switch to something else..." If it's B2B, generally what happens is, they make a short list of products to look at. And I got to beat those too, in order to win a deal.

So if you think about it, in order for me to transact business with a customer, I have to beat status quo, and I have to beat whatever else lands on a short list with me. So in my world, if i can understand that deeply, then that gives me a stake in the ground, to say, "look, in the market today, right now, here's who we have to beat in order to get a deal." Not who we'd like to beat, not who we think might be our competitors... No – who's actually our competition? If we didn't exist, this is what customers would be doing.

I know the answer to this if I have salespeople, because I can go ask them! I'll say, "what's the status quo," and they'll tell me what it is, or who else is on the short list – they know! So I put that stake in the ground, I say, "look, I've got to beat this, in order to do a deal." And then you say, well, what have I got to beat them with? And all I've got is my differentiated capabilities – which are mainly features, but sometimes it's other things... And so you know I can make a list of all those features and then I can translate those features into value for the customer. Now what I've got is my differentiated value that we can deliver, that the other alternatives cannot. And that is actually the fundamental basis of everything we need to understand in marketing.

Once I've got that – my differentiated value that I can provide over the other things that customers are looking at – then I can say, "alright, well, not everybody cares about that the same!" You know, a lot of times, I'll talk to startups and they'll say, "we're selling to small and medium-sized businesses." But not all small and medium businesses care about these things that you do really well! So what you're looking for is: what are the characteristics of a target account that make them really, really value these things that you can do? It's that match between the two sides that we really want.

What I get a lot is, companies will come to me and they'll say, "we sell to mid-market today, but we want to sell to large enterprise." But if you're not selling to large enterprise today, you probably don't have a product that serves large enterprise! So you're going to have to go build some product to do that. What we can do today is to figure out exactly what kind of companies are a really good fit for what you already do.

In my world, when we're thinking about positioning, what we're thinking about is how: can I optimize sales and marketing for the product that I've got today? And how I do that is, I say, "what am I really, really good at? What value can I deliver, that no one else can? And who cares about that?" That's where the magic happens.

Now, your strategy might say, "I don't want to sell to these people. I want to sell to these other people." You're going to have to figure out a product roadmap that gets you to that. I can't help you with that, and positioning doesn't solve that problem. Product strategy solves that problem. What positioning is all about is, "how do I make it crystal clear; this is the value that uniquely we can deliver, and here are the people that this is for."

So in my world, once I figure that out, then I can figure out what the messaging needs to be, to communicate that: "I've got this value for these people, how should I talk about that?" I need to talk about that in a way that these people understand, that communicates this value.

5 (+1) components of effective positioning, from April Dunford's Obviously Awesome.

So it seems to imply that the company we're talking about is already doing something – there's some kind of product, infrastructure. That's really interesting because a lot of the approaches we talk about in design – like human-centered design, sprints, or design thinking – are largely geared towards innovation and invention; trying to come up with something where there's nothing. And even within those approaches I was able to find a lot of value in your message and methodology. Bringing in the approach of positioning even at very early stages of the project... I've actually sat down and gone through some of the exercises that you outline in your book, to figure out the positioning of Design Disciplin, and it helped me tremendously.

So it does apply across different scales: larger companies, smaller companies, startups, even like a relatively tiny project like mine... And it's clearly oriented towards business. But I'm wondering if it applies at an even smaller scale – on the scale of an individual. For example, do you also practice intentional positioning in your brand and your career? Can we extend your positioning method to how we navigate our careers?

I often get asked: does my methodology work if your product is a consumer product? My background is all business-to-business. The companies I work with are business-to-business. And my first answer is: "I don't know!" I don't do consumer, it wasn't designed for that. I have had people selling consumer products come to me and say they've used it, and it works. That's great. But your mileage may vary – maybe it works well for you, maybe it doesn't.

I will say that there are really different forces at play if what you've got is a consumer product, and it's largely around this concept of alternatives. When we're talking about alternatives, like, what would you do if my product didn't exist... If it's B2B – and particularly a B2B sale that's complex enough that we have a salesperson – we can kind of count on the idea that there's somebody making a deliberate purchase. So they're going to shop around a little bit. They're going to make a shortlist of competitors. They're going to do their research. If I'm buying bubblegum, I don't do that! I walk into the convenience store, and whatever's there, I make a choice. It might be because I like the color, or it might be because I have an affinity for that brand, or it might be because it was the only one available in this shop... There are all these other things that come into play if i'm going to buy shoes, maybe it's more emotional, about how I make my decisions... So I think the first step of this, when it's consumer stuff, is a lot more complex; and would necessarily mean that you need to go do some deeper customer research, and have customer interviews to kind of unearth; exactly how is a customer making a choice? If it's B2B, if I have salesperson involved, we know the answer to these questions!

Now coming back to, like, individuals, or positioning a podcast... I have positioned myself as a consultant, exactly this way. I could tell you exactly what the competitive comparables are: if people didn't use me, what would they do? Well, I know what I did when I was a vice president of marketing: I kind of mumbled around on it, took a stab at it, and we iterated on it as we went along. Why is it better to work with me? Well, it's faster. It's more efficient. Now that I have a book out, I think one of the biggest competitive comparables to working with me is to just pay 10 bucks and buy my book and do it yourself. You don't necessarily need me. And I'm fine with that, having that as a competitive comparable. I do it all the time, when people call me, and they ask about working with me as a consultant... I'll usually just put it out there: "look, you can do this yourself – there's no reason why you can't do this yourself. And you can do it your way. Or if you want to do it my way, you can buy my book and do it my way!"  The book is there to tell you exactly how to do that. There's advantages to working with me, and I can outline what those are: I've done this 200 times, so I kind of know it. I built the methodology, so I know where you might get stuck. There's advantages to having an outside facilitator break through some internal politics, or make sure that everybody gets a chance to talk about what their concerns are. If you do it with me, I'm going to guarantee that we get to end the job in a week, so it's pretty fast, it's pretty efficient. You're likely to get a very good outcome, because I've done it 200 times... But it costs a lot more money than 10 bucks to buy the book!

So I think that you could position an individual – I've certainly positioned myself that way. But the methodology was not built for that. It was built with B2B tech companies in mind. Can you use it for other things? I think you can.

The other thing I want to address briefly is this idea of, well, what do you do if your product hasn't launched yet? I get a lot of companies come to me, and they're still in the early stages of building the product. So they don't have it out market. And this first step is, you know, if you didn't exist what would customers buy? How do I know that if I haven't sold anything yet? For that, you can use my methodology to develop what I would call a "positioning thesis" – which is you say: we're building a product, and in that product there are a bunch of baked-in assumptions. So we assume that this is what status quo is in the account, these are the other competitors that are going to be involved, therefore this is how we're different, therefore this is our differentiated value, we think these kinds of customers are going to really love that, and here's why this is the market we're going to position ourselves in... So what I've got is a thesis. It is untested. Now we launch the product... And what generally happens is, our thesis is not entirely correct. It's kind of correct, but it's not totally correct. So we mess it up. Some of those assumptions were not true. But after we get our first wave of customers, then we can really tighten it up. Because now we've got some feedback, and some data. We know more about how customers behave. That's a really good time to tighten it up.

So my advice to folks when they're first launching something new is: it's good to have a positioning thesis. But in terms of my messaging and how I present that positioning to the world... I would actually keep that positioning fairly loose until I've gotten my first wave of customers, and I know for sure what's going on. Then I know how to tighten it up. If I launch with really tight positioning, I might tighten it in the wrong places, and actually miss an opportunity where the customer is potentially a really good fit.

So my analogy to this is, you know, you're designing something... It's a tuna net! You're a fisherman. You designed a tuna net. It's been designed to catch tuna, and that's your thesis – but I don't know if it's true or not! I don't know if it works that good for tuna. So when I start selling the thing, I think I'd be better off to just say, you know what, it's a fishing net! It's good for all kinds of fish – big fish, like any kind of big fish. Let's get some people out there, fishing it with it. Throw it out in the ocean and then see what we pull up. Maybe we find out, like, oh my gosh  –grouper! It catches some tuna, but it's really good for grouper, like it's amazing for grouper! Then I could really tighten it up and say, it's a grouper fishing net. It's amazing. It's the best one the world has ever known. And we sell to grouper fishermen. Now I know, I've validated it.

Maybe not every single detail, but I think the philosophy of what you describe and teach does apply to the level of the individual. It kind of comes from having studied a bit of economics as an undergrad... It's interesting that in economics they talk about the labor market as just another market. The basic concepts of economics – supply, demand, scarcity – these apply to all kinds of markets. The situation where you are the provider of some kind of value or service, and there are various employers who might be interested in purchasing that from you... The same principles and dynamics largely apply to that situation as well.

But on the topic of education... So I teach at the university, as I as said. I work with younger people. I try to give them skills and ideas that will be useful in employment situations. What are some skills and ideas that you wish younger people could be armed with? I know that you're not doing management anymore, but if you think back at the years when you were practicing as a leader... What can I teach my students, for example, to prepare them for the leadership of someone like April Dunford?

There are a handful of things. I feel like, on the marketing side of things, I could teach you almost anything. But what I couldn't teach you... I couldn't teach you to be excited about the work. A lot of times, in the interview, that's what I'd be looking for. Like, are you excited about the work? Are you gonna show up every day and be sort of jazzed to be here?

And then the other thing I couldn't teach you is, how to write. Writing skills are a thing. I don't have time to teach you how to write. And yet, you can teach yourself how to write. That is a very learnable skill. I think anybody that had something on their resume that proved that they could write, got you ahead of the pack in my book. Because I can't teach you how to do that. It's one of the few things I can't teach you how to do. I can teach you a lot of other tactical marketing things, but I can't teach you how to write. It got so bad that I used to give people a writing test in interviews, because it's so fundamental to so much stuff we were doing in marketing. Sometimes I'd be hiring people with a technical background, and some of them are just terrible writers... Like, I think the whole reason they went into tech is because they hated everything on the English side of the house... So I would give people a test. And being able to write a coherent couple of paragraphs can go a long way when you're interviewing with me.

Yeah, what we call human history basically begins with the invention of writing... It's one of the most amazing technologies ever invented. And it's one of the most powerful skills that anyone can use, anywhere – even with your friends. Like, I got this hand-written note from a friend last week. I was massively impressed... It's so easy to impress people with writing, if you have that power.

I have some quick-fire questions I like to ask a lot of my guests.

What is a question that you wish you get asked in all these podcasts, but no one asks you?

You know, I've done a lot of podcasts in the last year so. I feel like I've been asked almost everything... I don't get asked that much about, how do you know if your sales people are just terrible? Like, how do you know if it's a positioning problem or it's actually like a marketing and sales execution problem? I'm surprised I don't get asked that more. When people come, to me looking for help, I'm trying to filter for that. Because all I can do is to help you with your positioning. If you have a marketing execution problem, then I can't help you with that. If you have a sales execution problem, I can't help you with that.

What's a symptom of that?

The first thing you have to understand is: you have to have some happy customers. If you don't have happy customers, maybe you've got a terrible product. That is just settled. That's the first thing.

The next thing is, sometimes companies come to me and they'll say, "we're just not generating as many leads as as we should. The leads that do go over to sales, sales manages to sell them. But I feel like we could be generating more leads." And then I'm like, "okay, well, explain the positioning right now." And sometimes people explain the positioning to me, and I'm like, "that actually sounds really good!" So if the story sounds good, it resonates with customers, those customers are signing on and going through; but you're just not getting enough of them... Then I'd say you've got one of two problems. Either you're not doing enough marketing – or the right kind of marketing – to get that message in front of prospects. Or, the addressable market of people that are a good fit for your stuff is just not big enough – which means you got a product problem. So I need to figure out how to have a product that fits with a bigger range of customers than the one i'm fitting with now.

Sometimes what you've got is, the story sounds really good, marketing is doing really well, everything's going great... Until it hits sales. And then it falls off the cliff. Sometimes that's a sales problem. Then I get into, well, what do the sales people do? Is marketing giving them a script? Is marketing giving them a demo? Is sales telling the same story as marketing? If I get a lot of "I don't know, I don't know..." Well, then maybe this is a sales execution problem.

What are some books that you recommend very frequently to be people that you work with? Other than your own, obviously...

There's a handful of books that I keep coming back to. Lately I'm really interested in how you take positioning and build a really compelling narrative for sales out of that. So the book that I'm recommending a lot recently is this book called The Challenger Sale. It's quite old, I think it came out in 2012 maybe, so it's about 10 years old. But the data, the research that they did to develop that book was really, really important. I don't always agree with the conclusion they come to, and it's a book that's really about a sales methodology. But if you put that aside, the data underneath it... The parts of that book when they're talking about the data are really, really valuable; particularly if you're trying to figure out how to do B2B sales well. So I come back to that book a lot.

Ever since I've started in doing marketing and startups, I always recommend this even older book called The Four Steps to the Epiphany by this guy Steve Blank. It was the book that Lean Startup was based on. If you're interested in Lean Startup, you owe it to yourself to read the original book.

So what is next for April Dunford?

I'm looking forward to getting out of lockdown. I'm looking forward to going to conferences. I'm looking forward to drinking beer on the patio... My future is simple, and it involves being with other people.

I'm working on some stuff for the fall. I've got a couple of things... I have an idea for another book that is kind of a follow-on book to the one that I've got out now. Again, it's all about how to build a compelling sales narrative out of good positioning. So I'm really interested in that right now, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about that, doing talks about that, working with customers on that. That's taken up a bit of my time. But the rest of it, I really, really hope that we're back to doing face-to-face things in the fall.

You sound like you enjoy your work a lot, so I imagine that you spend a lot of time on your work. What is the second thing that you spend most of your time on?

I feel like my world's gotten very small during lockdown. I think, if you had asked me that question in 2019, I would have said I do a lot of traveling! But since March 2020, my world has gotten small.

So I live in Canada, and I have a cabin in the woods. We kayak, and you know, it's on the water, and it's gorgeous. That's kind of my fun thing I'm doing when I'm not working. I'm out in the woods, looking at beavers, and things that Canadians do!

Sounds like a lot of fun. Sounds like the Swedes, actually – the Swedes also enjoy the outdoors.

Yeah, I think we are equally outdoorsy in that way.

The thing that's different is, I guess, maple trees versus oak or something...

That's right, we probably have different kinds of animals and and trees and things... We have maple trees, we've got beavers!

Where can we find you on the internet?

My website is aprildunford.com. Every once in a while I get motivated and I write a blog post, but I'm not a very regular blogger.

The only social media where I'm really active is Twitter, and I'm @aprildunford on Twitter. So you can follow me – every once in awhile I'm ranting about some positioning thing over there...

Yeah, that is where we met, actually... I don't really meet a lot of people on Twitter, I think you were the first one to exchange messages and and then meet...

Yeah, Twitter is my favorite social media. I made an investment in other social media – for a while I was on Instagram, and that I couldn't keep it up. Same thing with LinkedIn – I wish I was more interested in being active on LinkedIn but the content there sometimes bothers me... But Twitter is fast, it's easy, the messages are short, it fits in my time...

True, it's really fun. Well... This has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining me. I'm looking forward to your next book, and maybe we can have another chat after that one is out.

That would be awesome. Thanks so much for having me.



Connect with April Dunford

aprildunford.com | @aprildunford on Twitter

Mehmet Aydın Baytaş

Mehmet Aydın Baytaş

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Mehmet is the founder of Design Disciplin. He has been designing and building since 2005, and spent 10 years as academic computer scientist and design researcher.