The Positioning Doc That Wasn't Mine

I was reviewing the positioning document for my own product when I noticed something off about a paragraph. Then the paragraph after it. Then the section.

The content had been copied from a client's platform. Not paraphrased — inherited wholesale. I had been consulting on that client's go-to-market and building my own product in the same weeks, in the same tools, in the same headspace, and somewhere in the shuffle their story had walked into my document and made itself at home.

What's unnerving is that it read fine. It was well-written, coherent, confident positioning. It just wasn't about my product.

Why this happens specifically to consultant-builders

If you only build, you don't have someone else's positioning lying around. If you only consult, you don't have your own to contaminate. The failure mode is specific to doing both at once, which is exactly the position a lot of bootstrapped founders are in — funding the product with the services.

And the contamination runs in the direction you'd least expect. It isn't lazy copying. It's that the client's story is more finished than yours. They've had more time, more reviewers, more customer conversations. Their positioning is polished; yours is half-formed. So when you sit down to write yours and your brain reaches for a sentence, the well-worn one arrives first. You're not stealing. You're autocompleting from the wrong corpus.

There's a second-order risk here too, and it's the one that actually matters: if their story is genuinely a good fit for your product, that's a signal you may be building an undifferentiated version of what they already have. If it isn't a good fit, you've been carrying a positioning document that would have actively misled every buyer who read it.

The check

I now treat my own strategy documents as needing provenance, the way a codebase needs a licence audit.

Before any positioning doc is treated as real, one pass asking: could this paragraph appear, unchanged, in a client's deck? If yes, it isn't mine. Either it's inherited, or it's so generic to the category that it does no positioning work at all. Both are failures, and the fix is the same — rewrite it from something only I know.

The broader principle: when you work on multiple entities simultaneously, your strategy artefacts need explicit ownership boundaries, not just separate folders. Folders keep files apart. They don't keep sentences apart.