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The 4-Step Category POV Process – Part I: Problem Thesis

When a business has a novel idea, there’s one challenge that almost inevitably follows: communicating the importance of that idea to potential customers, investors, and employees seems to require a herculean level of effort. Founders suffer especially from this challenge. They’re so close to the product that they lose sight of the big picture, and

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How to Turn a Category POV into a WSJ Bestseller

What’s worse than a weak point-of-view (POV) for your category? A great POV that no one hears about. For category design to work, your category POV has to be out in the world, evangelizing a position on behalf of your brand. It needs to elicit a response from customers – not collect dust in some

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Category Design Thinking Is for Everyone. Just Ask the Bicycle Industry

Category design thinking isn’t just something that VC-backed companies with unicorn aspirations can use. When applied correctly, the category design lens can expand your addressable market and open up new revenue opportunities with existing customers. Really, we are talking about the development of what Christopher Lochhead calls a “breakthrough product or service.” And there’s no

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Does Category Design Require a Rebrand?

Since category design is such a foundational business strategy, it will impact most areas of your company (if not every nook and cranny). So it’s natural to wonder if category design means you need to go through a rebrand. The answer is… it depends. In this post, I’ll share my approach to figuring out the

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