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
Kevin Maney is one of the most interesting minds to listen to when it comes to category design. Not only is Kevin a co-author of Play Bigger, but he’s also a partner at Category Design Advisors, a bestselling author, and an award-winning columnist who’s been writing about technology for 30 years. Oh, and he moonlights
Aristotle is credited with saying, “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” Category design is a lot like that. Once you understand the basic concepts, a whole new set of questions open up for you. And so on. That’s why I always like to learn from other category design practitioners –
A good lightning strike is a core part of any good category design strategy. Its main job is to create a mental shift in the minds of your prospects. You want them to think differently about the problem you address and the solution you’ve created to solve it. Since we just executed our second lightning
Sometimes you’ll hear people describe category design as an “all or nothing” strategy. In this view, there are only two possibilities. One, your business has created an entirely new and separate category – one with clean lines of demarcation from existing categories. Or two, you’re simply competing for market share in an established space –
Every week or so I come across someone who loves the idea of category design but feels stuck because their current employer isn’t pursuing that strategy. It’s a bummer because as exciting and challenging as the work of category design can be, this way of thinking about business isn’t on the radar of most execs. And it’s
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
If you’re a growth-oriented leader who wants to help your business break free of crowded markets and avoid commoditization, then I want to share this presentation with you. A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Empower B2B conference about a business strategy called category design. What is category design exactly? It’s an
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
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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