Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp)
Barbara Gago, former CMO at Miro and VP of Marketing at Greenhouse, shares insights on creating new software categories, effective brand building and rebranding strategies, and the importance of developing opinionated software to solve systemic problems.
Deep Dive Analysis
14 Topic Outline
Barbra Gago's Career Background and Current Venture
Deciding Between Category Creation and Existing Markets
Defining a Product Category and Key Examples
Greenhouse's Failed Category Creation Attempt
Miro's Successful Visual Collaboration Category Creation
Tactics for Building a New Product Category
Navigating the Middle Ground of Category Strategy
When and How to Rebrand a Product
Key Principles for Building a Lasting Global Brand
Integrating Company Values into Brand Identity
Process for Developing Company Values
Core Elements of a Product Brand
Understanding and Building Opinionated Software
Rationale for Pando's Opinionated Software Approach
5 Key Concepts
Product Category
A product category is a grouping of products, typically found on directory sites like G2 Crowd or Software Advice, based on feature sets that solve a specific pain point or set of pain points. These categories often correspond to an allocated budget that customers have for such solutions.
Category Creation
Category creation is the strategic effort to define and establish a new market segment for a product. This process involves significant thought leadership, content marketing, and collaboration with industry analysts and directory sites to educate buyers and validate the unique value proposition of the new category.
Love Mark
A 'love mark' is a brand that people deeply love, are committed to, and feel invested in. Building a love mark requires authenticity and often involves fostering a strong emotional connection with users, going beyond just functional benefits.
Brand System
A brand system refers to a comprehensive and scalable approach to brand building, where all visual and auditory elements—such as the logo, colors, fonts, photography, illustrations, and brand voice—are designed to work together cohesively. This ensures consistency and adaptability across all customer touchpoints.
Opinionated Software
Opinionated software is a platform that integrates specific best practices or rules into its core design, thereby guiding or enforcing a particular way of behaving or performing work. Instead of offering complete flexibility, it provides a structured approach, often aimed at improving processes or reducing bias, as seen in Atlassian's tools for agile workflows or Greenhouse's structured recruiting.
6 Questions Answered
A product category is how products are grouped on directory sites (like G2 Crowd) based on feature sets that solve specific pain points, for which customers typically have an allocated budget.
Category creation is often suitable when a product's scope is much larger than existing categories, when there's a new disruptive technology, or when an existing category carries too much disdain (though this can also lead to failure). It's less about a raw percentage of companies and more about market inflection points.
It might fail if customers continue to use existing category terms to describe your product despite your efforts, if you're already well-established in an existing category, or if your product isn't truly differentiated from others in your space.
It's often best to rebrand once a company has achieved product-market fit and is entering a scale phase, but before too much investment has been made in the existing brand. The sooner the better, especially if the current name or brand doesn't reflect the product's full potential or future aspirations.
Company values can deeply shape how a brand manifests, influencing the language used, visual elements (colors, objects), and how employees interact with customers and partners, making the brand more authentic and human.
Opinionated software integrates best practices or rules into the system, guiding users towards better ways of working, reducing bias, and solving systemic problems, such as Greenhouse's structured recruiting or Pando's approach to performance reviews.
12 Actionable Insights
1. Prioritize Brand & Product Together
Build product and brand in tandem from early stages, as both are crucial for customer acquisition, loyalty, and engagement. A great product needs a thoughtful brand, and a great brand needs a strong product.
2. Integrate Values into Brand
Weave company values into the brand’s DNA to ensure authenticity and consistent manifestation across all touchpoints and employee interactions, as values are foundational to how people behave and interact.
3. Consider Category Creation
Explore creating a new category if your product’s scope is too small for your ambition, if there’s no existing budget for your solution, or if you truly don’t fit into existing categories. This strategy is most effective during market inflection points or when introducing disruptive technology.
4. Treat Rebranding as Product
Approach rebranding with a structured, agile, and transparent process, similar to product development, involving the entire company and gathering customer feedback. This ensures broad alignment and buy-in across the organization.
5. Customer Insights Drive Strategy
Base all marketing, positioning, and category creation efforts on extensive conversations with customers to deeply understand their pain points, how they solve problems, and the language they use. This direct feedback is the source of effective positioning.
6. Engage Analysts for Validation
Build relationships with industry analysts (e.g., Gartner, Forrester) and directory sites (e.g., G2 Crowd) to explain and differentiate your new category. These entities play a critical role in shaping customer perception and validating new categories.
7. Use Content & PR for Education
Leverage content marketing, thought leadership, and PR to educate buyers about a new category, its unique value propositions, and why they should allocate budget for it. This helps generate appetite and understanding for the new space.
8. Maintain Existing Category Positioning
If building a new category, continue to optimize and sell into relevant existing categories in parallel to capture immediate budget and market share. This allows for a long-tail strategy where you gradually shift mindsets while still operating within established markets.
9. Rebrand Early & Strategically
Rebrand before significant scale, ideally once product-market fit is established, if the current name limits growth or doesn’t reflect the product’s full potential. The sooner you rebrand, the less investment is wasted on an unscalable brand.
10. Retain Brand Essence in Rebrand
When rebranding, subtly nod to the original brand’s essence (e.g., colors, key elements) to maintain connection with early adopters and existing customers. This helps transition the user base without alienating loyal users.
11. Structure Company Value Definition
For company values, use a structured workshop format (brain dump, group, vote) to gather input from the team, then assign a skilled writer to draft concise, non-generic definitions. This ensures broad input while maintaining clarity and memorability.
12. Build Opinionated Software
Develop software that enforces best practices or a ‘better way’ of working, especially to address systemic issues, biases, or lack of technology in existing processes. This approach provides clear guidance and improves outcomes for users.
4 Key Quotes
Ultimately, you're not building a category until there is competition. Like it's not officially actually a category until there's more companies that do that.
Barbra Gago
The product and the brand are the main things that will get customers and keep them and also keep them loyal and engaged. So I think you have to have both. You can't have one or the other.
Barbra Gago
The best way to kind of incorporate your brand and how people are interacting with people that you are selling to customers or whoever, partners, is to have those values incorporated. Because then it's every touch point isn't something that you have to train people.
Barbra Gago
Everybody hates it, but I like asking like what someone's top 10 accomplishments are.
Barbra Gago
1 Protocols
Developing Company Values
Barbra Gago- Conduct a workshop where everybody brain dumps their ideas around values.
- Group the ideas into themes.
- Vote on the most important themes.
- Have someone who knows how to write well come up with the first draft of definitions for the shortlisted values/operating principles.
- Gather feedback on the drafted definitions.