Category Design

Notes from the book Play Bigger.

You need to create your own category. Usually you hear about "company design" or "product design", but there's a third apex missing - "category design". To create one, you need to find your own PoV of the world. Ideally, you'd even have someone externally helping define this. Define: "D-day" a few months after your PoV is defined. On D-Day, you'll present 4 seminal documents:

1) Category Blueprint: category architecture

What do we expect the cat leader to deliver? It's not a promise of what the company will do, buy a vision of the category.

2) Product Taxonomy: Product description

Reverse your features and pricing to fit the blueprint. Category leaders lead with language - rename generically.

3) Use Cases

Build very specific collateral to the team -> it'll give them weapon to win.

4) Category Ecosystem

Who are the outside players who will be involved in the development of the category?