For Product Managers who are have not been through the product positioning exercise a few times, the greatest difficulty about it may not be the effort itself but what you need to do in order to be ready for it. That’s because in order to position your product well against the competition, you need to get past the all-too-natural pride and denial about your own product to a point where you can be accurate and objective about it and its rivals.

Crafting the positioning of a product is an art unto itself. But what holds so many people back is that they can’t even get to a mental clean slate from which to start their positioning effort. It’s human nature to develop a very subjective loyalty to your own product, and you tend to become blind to your product’s faults and fiercely defensive against competitors.

Read on below for some tips to help you wipe that slate clean so that you’re in the right place to do a good job at evaluating your product, your competition, and figuring out where to place your product so that it stands in the best light possible.