Barbra Gago on Category Creation, Rebranding, and Opinionated Software

Barbra Gago on Category Creation, Rebranding, and Opinionated Software

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Barbra Gago on Category Creation, Rebranding, and Opinionated Software

Source: Lenny’s Podcast Speaker: Barbra Gago Date: ~2022 Link: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/category-creation-and-branding-barbra

Key ideas

  • Three tests for category creation. When deciding whether to create a new category rather than join or elevate an existing one: (1) Does a buyer budget line exist for it, or will you have to create one? (2) Do customers already use words associated with it? (3) Is competition emerging to validate the space? Category creation is expensive and slow — Greenhouse tried “recruiting optimisation platform,” found buyers still called it an ATS, and abandoned it in favour of elevating the ATS category’s value instead. Miro’s “visual collaboration” succeeded partly because no competing category language existed.
  • Category creation mechanics. Four levers: constant customer conversation to hear how they describe the pain; PR to test whether the framing resonates; sustained content and thought leadership to educate buyers that a budget-worthy category exists; analyst relationships (Gartner, Forrester, G2) to get officially categorised. Category creation is a long-tail, multi-year programme, not a one-time positioning pivot.
  • Competition validates, not threatens, a new category. Counter-intuitively, a category does not officially exist until multiple companies claim it. When new competitors self-identify as “visual collaboration,” that confirms the category is real and worth budgeting for — it is not a threat to Miro’s position.
  • Rebrand as a product process. RealtimeBoard → Miro was compressed into five months (October kickoff → South by Southwest launch). Key lessons: rebrand before heavy brand equity accumulates, but after PMF; run it like a product sprint with cross-functional teams and clear ownership; involve the whole company (sales decks, legal contracts, URL); preserve something from the original brand to hold early advocates (yellow Post-it → yellow M).
  • Opinionated software. Platforms that encode best practices and constrain behaviour rather than maximising flexibility. Two approaches: build around an emerging process that lacks technology (Atlassian + agile); or assert a better way and train the market to it (Greenhouse + structured recruiting). Opinionated products create accountability for both sides — but require the conviction that your opinion is correct.

Overview

Barbra Gago — former CMO at Miro, VP Marketing at Greenhouse, Head of Marketing at CultureAmp, and co-founder/CEO of Pando — covers three deeply practical go-to-market topics: how to decide whether to create a new product category (vs. join or elevate an existing one), how to execute a rebrand at speed, and why opinionated software is both harder to build and more defensible than flexible platforms. The episode is grounded in specific decisions made at each company and is particularly strong on the mechanics of B2B category creation.