CONCEPT
How professional markets read you, and how to shape that reading.
Positioning is the category a professional market files you into, plus the evidence it can retrieve to justify the filing. It is not what you say you do. It is the compressed version of you that survives in somebody else's head after forty seconds on your profile and one conversation about you that you were not present for. Ries and Trout made the point about products: positioning happens in the mind of the prospect, not in the marketing department. Labor markets work the same way, with worse information.
Nobody can observe your actual capability before hiring you. Michael Spence's work on market signaling describes the resulting behavior: under uncertainty, buyers substitute observable proxies that correlate with the thing they cannot see. Credentials, company names, tenure shape, title trajectory, the adjacency between the last problem you solved and the problem in front of them, and whatever artifacts of your work are publicly legible.
Proxies are lossy, and the loss is the mechanism. Two people with identical skill get read differently because one of them has been standing next to a legible problem for three years and the other has been standing next to five problems for eight months each. This is not fairness. It is the market spending as little as possible on evaluation.
The cost of a position is the set of rooms you stop getting called into, and if you are not paying that cost you do not have one. Someone positioned as a generalist who can pick anything up is retrievable for nothing in particular, which means their name does not surface when a specific problem appears.
The relevant competition is not to be the best. It is to be the one recalled at the moment a named problem shows up. Retrievability is a property of the label attached to you, and labels have to be narrow enough to index.
The practical form of this is a problem class rather than a job function. "Revenue operations" is a function; every large company has one and they all blur together. "The person who untangles a broken lead-routing and attribution stack after a merger" is a problem class, and it either matches what somebody is currently bleeding over or it does not.
People confuse positioning with branding. Branding is voice, look, and consistency. Positioning is a claim about where you sit relative to alternatives, and it can be tested: name three people you would lose to, and say what you would lose on.
People also believe positioning can be changed by announcement. Rewriting a headline changes nothing, because the market reads the shape of the last two years, not the summary above it. Repositioning is done with evidence, and evidence takes about as long to accumulate as the work does.
And titles get overweighted. A title is the cheapest signal available and mostly outside your control. What is inside your control is which problem is attached to your name, in whose memory, and how recently.
You do not write your own position. You supply the evidence somebody else uses to write it.