A Call To Action For Category Designers w/ Play Bigger Co-Authors Christopher Lochhead, Al Ramadan, and Kevin Maney

Welcome to the first episode of the Category Thinkers Podcast, a feature of the Category Thinkers community. And we thought when launching this podcast, what better thing to do than to bring the godfathers of category design together on the birthday of when category design was framed, named and claimed by the publishing of the book Play Bigger. So this is a conversation with Christopher Lockhead, Kevin Maney, and Al Ramadan, live from Casa Cruz, where Play Bigger was written, moderated by the founders of the Category Thinkers community, Mike Damphouse, John Ruschi, and me, Pablo Gonzalez. And you today get to listen along as the fellas talk about how they wrote the book, how far category design has come since the book came out, and what the future may hold before asking a whole bunch of questions from our community. In a live AMA that we hosted. Notable moments are when each of them talk about their process for creating a pov. They talk about failures in category design that they've experienced thanks to some of these great questions that were asked. And for me, my favorite part was when they start talking about the importance of this community. It is clear that these guys are ready to pass on the torch to the next great wave of category designers. And that's what the Category Thinkers community is all about. It is for those of you that are category curious and want to be category capable. It's for those of you that have been working in category design and want to surround yourself with other people that are different. It's for those of you who are leading this effort inside of your company and you just need somebody like you to bounce things off of that are not going to get subdued by the gravity of it all. So we hope that you join us inside the community. Go to categorythinkers.com join the free Slack Channel and start sharpening that category blade. Now, fair warning, these guys cuss in this episode. So if you got some kiddos, you probably want to listen to this another time, but you're in for a wild ride here. Enjoy. Without further ado, I'm going to give it to the three authors of Category Design. They're going to jam for about 20 minutes. You're in a back room bar listening to the godfathers of category design kind of reminisce and tell old timey tales from the sea. We got Christopher Lockhead, we got Al Ramadan, we got Kevin Maney. Gentlemen, I will let you take it away.

Well, thank you everybody and welcome for joining us. And it's thrilled to be here. I wanted to start this actually, you know, sometime before we started writing Play Beggar and Chris we are sitting at a residence we fondly call Casa Cruz. It's Christopher's house. This is his incredible studio, which we love. And back in 2012. So this is quite a long time ago, Christopher and Kerry started thinking about what was this legacy property that they were going to build. And I was fortunate enough to be part of that conversation. One of the things I said to him was, let's build a place where we can have fun and that we can come up with ideas and really engage with each other as humans. And it turns out that five years later or four years later, I guess that's where Play Bigger happened at this place. And the design that he and Carrie put into this home is exactly that. It's a place where you can have fun, you can engage, you can let go of kind of all of the things that are sort of hanging around in your head and actually get at what is the core of this thing called what we now call category design. So I just wanted to. Cheers to Christopher. Thank you so much for organizing.

Kevin.

Thank you so much.

Oh, and we had so much fun writing the book. And Kevin, I mean, how much fun was it writing the book?

Yeah, but you have to, so you have to understand this from my perspective. Please educate me, which I. I'm sure I've told you about this before. So I have this assignment to basically, like, join you guys and write this book. And I have in my head, like, I've written a bunch of books before. I. I, like, I know what has to go into it, how, what kind of pace we stay on, whatever. So these guys invite me to come out to Casa Cruz, and we're gonna, like, we're gonna work on the book. And I come out and I said, ready to go? Let's go. And the first thing was like, ah, let's get on our bikes and ride down to the beach and watch the surfers and have a burrito. It's like, okay, I might have to go surfing. Maybe this is part of the process. All right, we do that. We come back. All right, let's get going now. You know, it's the middle of the afternoon. We need to pour some beers or something. And so this was like the, the, the. The. Let's say the pace of how we worked was nothing like anything that I. But, but in the, like, once I figured it out, what you guys were doing and how this was working, because we, we do all this stuff and, like, we'd be talking along the way, and then suddenly we'd come out and maybe have These, like, two hours of suddenly all come together in this intense, like, two hours, and we pour everything out and. And it was unlike any way that I'd ever worked before. But as I've told you guys before, I mean, I've been in this business for, like, you know, whatever, three decades. I never had more fun than in the two years that we spent.

Yep.

Going from point A to point B and getting this book published.

The worst part of writing Play Bigger was ending right here.

Right. That's true.

I've never heard.

Those last. That when you guys read.

What do you mean? And, you know, I don't. If others have heard this, I'd love to know. But, like, I've never heard other authors say that. That the worst part of writing their book was that they had to stop writing their book.

Yep, yep, yep. By the way, we were talking about this just before we went on the air, wondering whether swearing was allowed on the podcast, which, of course, the fuck it is. Of course. And so this was such a part of our conversations and all of what we were doing that I knew that it had to go in the book. And I don't know if you remember this, but when I wrote what the. I think it was the book proposal, and I figured the first draft of it, this did. That actually ended up going in. But the book proposal, the first word I put in it was. And I just said, like, okay, we got that out of the way.

And just for the rest of the viewers and readers here, I was the one that was trying to get the fucks out of the book. And these two guys were the tries. And there was this arm wrestle the whole time of how we were going to swear. So, you know, it was. It was quite the. It was quite the entertaining experience.

I don't know if I ever told you guys this.

So there's somebody.

No, no, no. I learned something early in my career from this wild marketing genius copywriting ad man named Rich Bunnell, whose company was called Get Rich Quick. One man advertising marketing company Rich Bunnell.

As you do.

Yeah, yeah. And so Rich was always about get to the point and get to it now.

Do you know what?

What?

Good. Good advice.

Yeah. Good counsel and so on. The swearing. Here's what he said. Whenever you're going to deliver something to a client, they're not going to accept what you think it really should be because they have to, quote, unquote, add value. And because nobody has any balls, they got to dumb that shit down and make him. Make it more acceptable to more people. So what Rich taught me was you always put extra raisins in the Raisin Bran so that the client can take out a few raisins and add value and get to where you want. And so from my point of view, when we were writing the shits and the fucks in the book, I was trying to jam as many shits and fucks into the book as possible, fully expecting that our publisher would take some of the raisins out of the Raisin Bran, but she didn't.

Okay, so I got a funny story on this. So there was a moment where we had a. A conversation with the Korean publisher. As, you know, play Vegas in multiple. Multiple languages. We had a conversation.

He says we. He means him, because I actually was not having conversation.

Doesn't remember. So he was there, and he asked a question of, like, well, how did you translate fucking Korean of the Korean publisher?

Did I really ask that question? Are you. Are you. Are you sure?

The answer was something like super politically correct, which was like, yes. And we went about making sure it was, you know, sort of appropriate for our cultural norms or something like that, which means they took them all out.

They didn't say fuck in Korea. I didn't know that story. Or if I did, you just forgotten. So this is the great.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about. So this place, Casa Cow. Casa Cruz, is wherever we are. Yeah. Here we're in the kitchen. It's one of these things that Kevin was talking about, which is, like, part of, as a group, at least trying to write something or do something. Like, this is about sort of like, connecting with each other as humans. Yes, yes.

Press pause on this just before you do the rest of that. So the key part of this is.

That we were afraid Kevin might not want to talk.

We almost got thrown out of every publishing house because we were four people. Good point. Right. They didn't know what we were.

Three people with a barnacle. But continue.

So take it from there. But the fact that there were four of us was really unusual, and we almost didn't get a book deal because of that alone.

So let me. Hold on. Let me understand this. So a book that, at its core, one of the core tenets is about being radically different was rejected because it was radically different.

Yes. And required this thing called collaboration. And so you've all had this experience as category designers. When you have a group of people in the room, you have to find a way of sort of connecting as humans beforehand. That was really where I was going in the conversation. And I think what. What happened for us was is that we had this location casa cruise where we could hang out, and it might have taken us three or four hours to kind of get to the point where we were comfortable with each other. Right, Kevin? I mean, you're the. You're the expert here, honestly. But we found a way of doing that, and that then opened up the floodgates, and then all of a sudden, boom, all this stuff came out. And one morning, I don't remember exactly where it was in the process or anything like that, but I do remember that we were sort of circling around the category name question, like, okay, what is this thing we do? And we're all in.

We had the category design. Category design.

Yes, exactly. As. As crazy as that sounds. And so we were in the kitchen. It was relatively early, at least for me. It was like 9am These guys have already had three or four hours of work at that point in time. But I'm a late starter, and. And we were sitting in the kitchen, we just had breakfast, and we're having a coffee, and we're, like, going around. It's like, okay, well, if the problem is, how do you differentiate. Differentiate yourself? And how do you engage with people who have a problem? What is the solution? And we were sort of going around, and I. I don't remember exactly how it all went down, but it was something like, you know, we were throwing words out. It was something design. And I think at some point it sort of came to, hey, it's about positioning was at least the old way. We used to talk about this, right?

And.

And all that sort of stuff and recent trout and everything else, and their work was fantastic, but it was dated for sure. And so we.

At.

At some point, it went from positioning design. And then Kevin Maney, in his genius, was at the counter and sort of said, no, I think it's category design. You have to design a category. And everyone in the room was like, that's it. Touchdown. We're done. So I don't know if you had that experience as a category designer. We've done probably 70 or 80 of them myself. And that experience of sort of, like, connecting on the. On the solution, the category name was just so powerful. And boom. That was category design. And from that end, then on, that was it. It was, like, done. We were over.

There was one step before that, though. Okay, you were talking about Macromedia, and you were talking about experience design. Macromedia created. Had. Created experience design. And so you were kind of like. You were kind of stuck in this Thing of like, it's kind of like that. It's like a discipline of like, experience design was a discipline. And it was that connection from you talking about experience design to us having talked about categories and all of this, that, that, that. Then I pulled those two together and that's where, that's where it connected.

And just to continue on the thread, the other aha. Here was many of the thinkers who we were trying to stand on the shoulders of brought incredible things, and very few of them declared it as a discipline. It was sort of an idea that may have been researched. There might, you know, whatever it was, but very few people have said, okay, wait a minute. No, no, no. I think. And Kevin, you were the first to say it. Kevin Maney said, category design is a new le. And I know myself, I know I can speak for al. We've had category design in our head since we were born. We just didn't know it until we figured it out over time. And we never would have figured it out, you know, if we weren't all together. But once you realize it's a new lens, well, now, now you got something to play with, right? Because product design is a lens, experience design is a lens, Company design in brackets, business model design is a lens, ecosystem design, et cetera, et cetera, right? There's a lot of things that you have to think about and then be able to go build from that design. And the big aha was everybody understands you can design a product or a company. Most people treat the market like they treat the weather. You can design, right? And we saw it this week or, or last week when Apple launched the Vision Pro. It turns out I found this out today. Learning things. Old dude learning things. Apparently, spatial computing has been around for approximately 20 years. And here's the simple aha. Because a bunch of people said, ah, Apple didn't create the category data. And what they conflate is for 20 years, first mover people have been shipping spatial computing technologies and products. Apple became the first company to design the category. And there's a huge difference between shipping product and designing market categories.

Yeah, yeah, so true. And, and, and, and on this topic, something you were touching on and Ken was touching on, which was like, okay, so category design as a discipline. If you think about some of the brilliant works that have happened in our life and some of the inspiration we had for the book, Kevin, you know, positioning by recent Trout, Jeffrey Moore's incredible sets of work and, and, and, and many others, right? The thing that they did order Christensen, all that so the things that they did was so brilliantly was they articulated this problem, they articulated sort of a way of solving or in some cases, examples of solving what. What they didn't do was create a discipline.

Right.

And that's why all of these folks on the, on the call are so special here is, is they now realize that actually category design is a discipline. There is a set of steps that you've got to take. And that's the brilliance, I think, of the whole thing. And what's so exciting, at least to me as an author here, is this like, oh my gosh, in addition to sort of articulating the problem and sort of how you might go about solving it, we also created this idea of a discipline called category design. And that's, I think, at the end of the day, is what distinguishes us and our book, relative to some of these other masterpieces. Right. Is that we actually got that shit down on paper.

Yes.

Yeah. There's nobody calling themselves a chasm crosser.

Right. And for me personally, and I know I speak for both of you on.

This.

We'Re not with tablets coming down from the mountain. That is to say, everybody who's here today is contributing to category design. Pablo is as important as anybody. John Ruge, of course, Mike Damp House, I consider him a godfather. Right. And so many. Now tens of thousands of fucking people on LinkedIn call themselves category designers. Our friend Cartiga, who's a quote, she's category designing a category underneath category designers called impact. Category designer focused on environmental and social impact. And so my point is, and you al, you said it about sort of consultancies and agencies and now some pretty big players in that world. What I love is how much thinking, how much innovation is coming from category designers who are entrepreneurs, CEOs and business leaders themselves, and new thought leaders who've attached to have embraced category design and are bringing their thinking, their research, their frameworks. Fucking A. I'm so inspired by how so how so many others are building and growing on the original set of ideas. Yeah.

And it comes to the, it comes to the sort of the point of. Okay, so if we're category designers, Christopher, and we are doing this work, what are the artifacts that we have to deliver? One of them is a point of view. That's clearly something we embodied in the book.

Yes.

So that's a long winded version of the point of view, but it's a point of view. The, the.

I've never been celebrated for my brevity.

So the, the, the thing I was getting to was there's two other components or two artifact, other artifacts that are really important in category design. One of them is called a blueprint. It's the, the, the, the, the vision for the solution.

Right?

That's what a blueprint is. It's generally in some kind of a diagram, doesn't have to be, and then the other is the ecosystem that surrounds that particular category. And I think what at least I'm most proud of, and in particularly I tip my hat to Kevin on this particular point, the blueprint showed up because it's a service based kind of process or method. The blueprint showed up at the end of each chapter. If you've paid attention to reading play bigger and I mean I'm sure many of you have there's this idea that at each particular point you have to make a decision, what is the problem, what is the solution, who has that problem? And so on and so forth. And so that there is the blueprint. It's not in the diagram that the book play Pigger articulates, but I have seen a number of blueprints from organizations that do category design which incorporate those sort of elements. And then the second thing is the ecosystem. And that's the most exciting part of this conversation is you all are part of that ecosystem. Like we were mentioning before, there's all different kinds of organizations who are contributing and participating and doing categories design, whether it's internal category designers at large companies to external agencies and everything in between. And that is in, in our opinion, and I'm sure it's what we said in the book is when you develop a really powerful category, you actually create this ecosystem of players who all contribute to that. And that's very much what's happening. And that at seven year mark at least that's a really important thing.

Well, I have a. So I'm going to pose a question to Chris and Al.

Nobody said there was going to be any math.

So you know, the, the, the satisfying thing or really satisfying thing to me, and I'm sure to you guys too is that we didn't just create a thing, we create, you know, we started a movement. That's why there's all these people on, on the call and that's why we're seeing agencies become category design agencies and all this. It's a movement. What's our role as, as a, as a movement gets rolling and all these other people are doing, as Chris said, contributing new ideas and all of that, all of that, you know, do we want to be the ones who just like threw the first rock in the pond and the ripples are, you know, going everywhere, and that's all we do or what are we going forward as, as. As. I don't know, custodians of this movement, if that's what we want to be.

Yeah. You want me to go first on this? Really? Okay, well, the first thing we're not is a bunch of on a mountain. And anybody who knows me knows how much I hate hustle, porn stars and all that thing and influencers and all that. And the reason that stuff angers me is for that thinking, that business model to work, the person doing the. Let's just politely call it educating has to be up here. And the people consuming the educating need to be down here. And the business model for Gary VD and Tai Lopez and all these is, don't you wish you were me? And I'm here and you're there. I'm the leader, you're the follower, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we are real people, right? We're people who come from very, very humble beginnings, all of us. We're people who had parents who struggled tremendously to give us these opportunities that we've had. We stand on the shoulders in our work of. Of heroes, you know, starting with Drucker and many entrepreneurs and honor, I mean. And so I guess my point is we started a conversation, we presented a framework, we presented a set of ideas, we did a set of research to come to much of those ideas. So how we got to where we got to was, yes, based on experience and intuition and creativity and a lot of jamming and a lot of whiskey and a lot of data science research. Al Ramadan was the guy who said, listen, we need to dig into this stuff. We got data published in the Harvard Business Review. In the business world, it's the hardest single publication to get data published in. And so I guess my point is this. And this is important for the story of play bigger and category design. And I think it's important for all category designers or anybody who wants to do anything exponential. We created all of this shit to start a conversation, not to give an answer. We said it in the book, and the way we did it, you guys both said it is a radical collaboration. We said it in the book, he wrote it. This was written by a band.

Right?

And so the. My answer to your question is that in some ways we are, you know, sort of the. In the originators of the idea, but by no means the sort of the end game, right? And I think if you look at some of the great leaders in, in the tech community that's been a big part of their vision is like, we, we have some ideas, but we don't own them all. And so I think the coolest thing about category thinkers and a lot of the folks on this call is that they're the next generation. They're the ones who have actually got to take this forward. Right. And yeah, sure, we have a particular perspective on how the process goes. And I know at play, bigger the company, we have three different methods, but they're three. There's going to be probably 50 others, and they're going to come from all different perspectives and angles and everything else, and they're going to attach to different customers and all that sort of stuff. And so I think the answer is that we, we, we are hopefully the Yodas. We can use the lightsaber if we really have to.

I'll walk you with a lightsaber if you want.

Way better. If we have a whole bunch of Jedis out there swinging them and we're sort of just helping out.

Yes.

All right.

Are we. I feel like I'm done with us. Yeah.

We, we've got some questions. The, the, the crew out here, we're over. We were over 50 attendees for a bit, but we've got some questions we're going to throw your way. And anyone in the audience still use the Q and A button at the bottom of the zoom screen to throw your Q and A in and we'll get it to the OGs, the OGs of category design.

Yeah.

I'm going to pull in Lori's question first. Lori Goldman from Denver. Lori, I'm so thrilled you're here. Lori is one of our ambassadors, and not only that, she's one of the most enthusiastic and passionate about what we're doing. So I was thrilled when I saw her pop up in the Q A. Laura wants to go back to your book writing process and she asks, what was the process of working together like? And how did you divide responsibility and how did you keep each other on task?

Was it a process?

I don't know.

You're the writer.

Before I let the writer answer the question, which is the right answer, but, you know, why stop now? We had this aha. Very early. Who. Who answered the. Who asked the question?

Lori.

Lori. Lori. We had this aha. So we started around and doing some stuff. We didn't know how we were going to do it. And then we had this aha. See this big sexy guy right here? He's a giant sexy man. Al Ramadan. And he said to me, hey, blockhead, what if we let the writer do the writing? So, Kevin, one person. And one other thing about this, while I have the microphone, do you remember George W. Bush? Wasn't he. Wasn't he great? And one of the things he said is, I'm the decider. I'm the decider. And so we also realized very early on, you got a group of guys, a band, writing a book. Somebody has to decide what's in the book and what's not in the book, because most of the book is not in the book, if you know what I mean. And so we decided, thanks to Al Rama Lama Ding Dong, that we would let the guy who's the professional author who's written number one bestsellers decide. Yeah.

And from there it was actually. That was a turning point. And from there it became much more smooth and simple and basically like. So you guys remember this? I would come. I wish, I wish I had the photos to throw up on the. Because I still have some of those pictures. We would meet here every month and that usually coincided with one chapter being finished and we're ready to start the next one. So I would send the previous.

And of course, you live in New York and Al and I are here in California.

So I'd fly out and after a suitable number of whiskeys and beers and.

Not to be disclosed publicly, it's a can. It's a patent pending process.

Yeah, I would come, I would send. I'd send them the chapter. So these guys would read the chapter and they'd have these, like, thoughts about, like, what was it that. That chapter.

And.

But I would have a printout of a page for each chapter and stick them about what was in. What was going in each chapter. And every time we come, we lay that out. Al has. Chris has a giant dining room table. So we lay all of that out on the table so that you could visually see the book and where it was and what was in what chapters, what was others. And so we'd come in and we discussed the chapter that was written and decide on what to change or what among all of us as a. As a group.

And.

And then we would turn to what was in front of us on the table and talk about what's supposed to be in the next chapter. And was the thing we thought was going to be in the next chapter, did it really belong in chapter three, you know, three chapters later? And you know, because we could do that because it was all visual and we could move stickers around so We. We basically just worked it chapter by chapter by. By doing that and meeting here once a. You know, once a month and. And kind of kept it. I mean, we actually. Considering what we've been talking about and how like, sort of loose it was in that way, though, we kept it a pretty disciplined process about keeping it moving along.

The other thing I think that was important is a design point when you're gonna jam as a band. So the sessions here, I thought were jam sessions. And then Kevin would go back and write the first draft of the next chapter or the next chapter based on those jam sessions. And then one interesting thing that we decided. I don't know how we got to this, Al was or Kevin will write the first thing based on the jam session. We'd give our feedback but not share it with each other. So the only person who had all the original and the feedback was Kevin. And then we discussed the content. And ultimately Kevin was the decider. Let the guy that writes the number one bestsellers write the number one bestseller.

Right.

Love it. So, guys, we got a Kevin here. Here's a little bit of a memory for you. See if I can share it. There is Kevin cat, Kevin's cat, laying on chapter three.

Yeah, Pippi the cat was like. It was a. Was a constant through the writing of the book.

Cool. I got a question. So this one came from Josh Webb. And basically after, you know, al, you said 70. 70 categories. Kevin and I probably. On gosh, no. 45 or so. Chris. God knows how many.

250, 000, I'm sure. Yeah.

How many from a million miles?

How many unique or different POVs do you write versions before you know you've got it right?

This is actually a really interesting topic.

So.

And this is where I think the conversation about difference is really valuable. How Christopher does that, how we do it at play bigger and how Kevin does that. They're all different, honestly. And. Right. And so. And that's the beauty of this whole thing is so long as you stick to the idea that you've got to frame the problem and make sure there's a villain or a boogeyman, as we used to call it in the book, the label associated with that problem. Talk about the ramifications, talk about the vision for the future, and then ultimately talk about outcomes and sort of what you want people to do, so long as you do that, it doesn't freaking matter. And I can tell you this. So I am way, as Christopher already knows. I'm way more on the analytical slash.

Really collaborative sort of side never noticed.

And so we may end up at 20 versions. In the case of Christopher, it might be two, and in the case of Kevin, it might be two or three as well. And so the important thing is, is that it depends on you as the person who's leading the category design process, how you go about doing that. But at some point in time, one thing I would say that all three of us would agree, there has to be one. You have to read it. It has to be simple, no diagrams. And it has to be sort of emotional and really connect with people. And that people's reaction in the first five minutes of hearing that draft point of view, or first pancake, as we sometimes call it, is the. Is where the truth is, is if you listen really carefully to how people react to that, that's where ultimately the final edits actually show up.

Yeah, I. You know, it's. It's funny, like. Well, so to the people in the audience, like, you know, ever since the book came out and we all, like, have our different practices, we've actually never, like, been a part of each other's. Like, I don't know specifically how your practice goes or how your practice goes, or you don't know how.

I'm not sure it's a practice.

You're still practicing, right?

I'm practicing.

Yeah, exactly. But I just. I just. To answer your question, Josh, I think was on. From. From the. Where where like, Mike and. And John and I sit is we believe it kind of like, with a book, we believe it's a collaborative process. So we write very much like I did with you guys.

So.

Right. Like, we write a first version of the point of view that we believe is close to. Right. And hopefully. And actually to your point about putting in raisins. Extra raisins. That puts in some extra raisins that pushes the company a little farther than comfortable being.

See, Rich Bennett was right.

Yeah, there you go. And. But then what's important is we. We go through it line by line with the six or eight or 12 people, whatever it is, of the leadership team that are working with us and all edit and revise it together. Because what that does is by the end of that process, it makes everybody in the room buy into it.

Yeah.

So there is a. There is alignment, there is buy in. And everybody says, okay, that's our story that we're going to tell ourselves.

Amen. Hallelujah. Kevin, Manny, great question.

Josh, next question.

Oh, hold on. I'm not even close to Donna. Yeah.

All right.

Well, while you're pouring yourself one there?

No, I'm pouring how one? I'm not pouring me one.

Oh, my apologies. My apologies.

So, Chris, so a couple of quickies. So A, we're attacking the status quo. We're attacking the old category. Not a competitor, not a competitive product or brand. This one's going to sound like I've lived on the west coast too long, but I don't give a why stop now? At least in my process, when I'm writing these things, there's an element of creating, discovering, and this is the woo woo part. You ready? Channeling. I know this sounds crazy, but I ask myself the question, particularly when I get stuck. But it's always in the background, and sometimes it's in the foreground. The question is, what does this POV want? There's a way of languaging this that will open people up. The truth is, one of the biggest fucks misunderstandings in business is that nobody likes change. Nobody likes change. They fucking love change. If they understand the value of it. If they understand the pro. The problem that it solves. Think of what we've all been through in our lifetimes. Think of what we've all been through in the last three years. People love change if they get it. So when creating a pov, it's like, does POV one? And the meaning of that question for me is like, it's. I'm trying to channel it right, and there's a problem and there's a vision for the future that represents the solution. And as nuts as it sounds, I just try to let that thing show up. Let it write you, not you write it.

Are there substances involved in this process?

There might be. So here's the incredible thing. The short answer is yes and edit sober.

Okay, Mike, next question. Pablo?

Yes and edit sober. I'm going to write that one down.

All right.

Ed Cravo and Kenneth Rutsky have similar questions.

Right.

Kenneth is asking, after seven years, what would you change in the book Augment de emphasize, emphasize more, add or delete, or make it even more awesome. Ed is asking, have there been any additions to the fundamentals of the book, pov, Boogeyman, etc, since publishing? So anything. Anything that y' all look back at and think, man, this would. This would go in it if we were. If we were publishing tomorrow.

The short answer, in my opinion, is no. The skeleton was right. What has happened over the course of the last seven years is we're able to practice this discipline and we're able to figure out some things along the way. And so hopefully, if we ever get around to it, there'll be a second edition which will talk about sort of like exactly what the question was, which is like, okay, so how did Qualtrics go about building the experience management category, for example, or how did Save the Waves Coalition create the surf ecosystem conservation category and what were the steps? So I think the quick answer is I don't think the structure has changed that much. The detail and some of the sort of the finesse, for sure, is my short answer.

No, yeah, no, I mean, I would totally agree. I think there's probably 100 things that we've learned since that that could go into another version or whatever. But. But I would. I think what's. What's there is pretty solid.

I, of course, agree. And what I'm most excited about is that collectively, us, and more importantly, you continue to build on the thinking and as more companies, whether it's, you know, Qualtrics or nonprofits like Save the Or Al's done an incredible job with this organization here locally called Save Westcliffe after a horrible storm destroyed an incredible part of Santa Cruz and many other things we could mention. But the reality is I wouldn't change anything. And the most exciting thing is everything that's been innovated on top of it by all of us collectively.

Yeah.

One thing I would say is, is that our understanding, we, we did this work for a company called Mural. And this is not an advertisement for either them or us. It's merely to say, come on now.

You guys are awesome.

The, the thing, the category that we created for them was this idea of collaborative intelligence. And so.

The idea, the President of the United States is college.

Sorry about that. And so the idea of how you collaborate around these steps, to Kevin's point and to Christopher's point and how you get the answer that's already in the room, you just need to bring it out from those people who are involved. Is probably one of the areas that we would, if we were to write another book, it would be an exploration around that. Like, okay, what are the techniques? How do you do this? How do you do it in a world that's sort of like virtual world, or how do you do it in person? How do you do it? So that all of the techniques essentially around how you get at either the problem or the solution or the blueprint or the lightning strike plan and all that sort of stuff, they were the things I think that would probably benefit from more, more detail.

The other part of it is, I think we understand today now more than Ever all of the criticisms and misunderstandings. And so I think maybe we would have got in front of some of those things in a way that we couldn't understand at the time. And I know I speak for Kevin, Al and Damp and John and Pablo, and many of us in the category design world, we stand in front of those things today. The other thing that I think is important, too, young category. Here we go. Al, you ready? Is your beer? Is your beer where you want it to be? So a couple of young category designers asked me a little bit ago, what could we do to make, you know, it easier for people to kind of understand and get it? Because the aha, of course, is, yes, category design is something you learn, but the truth is, you said it. Category design is something you get. So how do we get more people to get category design? And I think that's a very important question. And what I said to these young Jedis was, the people who are meant to get it are going to get it, and the people who aren't meant to get it don't get it. And I'm somebody who likes to fight. And for the most part, particularly in the native digital world or in the irl, I've stopped fighting with anybody who disagrees with us. And I actually take the radical opposite, which is, oh, you want to talk about why branding and building the best product is the answer. Excellent. You do a podcast about that and send it to me and I'll retweet it telling everybody how fucking awesome that is. Right? You think product led growth is really smart, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, and my point is this. The vast majority of people in the business world, and frankly in the world, get paid to maintain the way it is, manage it, improve it, and grow it in an incremental way. And I don't mean that pejoratively. No. Right. I don't want. I don't want the guy maintaining the bridge to be throwing 40 yard passes.

Oh, same with the, the sewer system. Like, can we not do that?

And the planes and like, there's a lot of places where that's with that. That's the answer. And hallelujah. God bless you. I love you. I appreciate the roads and the planes and all that working. And there's a minuscule percentage of us who get paid to create different futures, exponential difference, who get paid to move the world from one way to a different way. And what I've learned. I used to think getting fired all the time was a bug. And I now know It's a feature. Right. Because if you're somebody who breaks the current thing and creates the new thing, that's awesome. Unless you're the dude maintaining the current thing.

There's a. There's a. There's a weird question that I get sometimes when we talk about category design, which is, well, if every company did category design, you can't create, like, Infinite. Like, every company would have its own category. That doesn't make any sense. Whatever.

They're never going to do that.

Well, exactly.

So less than 10% are ever going to do it.

It's funny that you say that, that exact number, because I was just going to say that 90% of people who are in business or even thinking about any of this don't have the courage.

To do category design, even think category.

Design, because it takes a lot of courage because you're actually doing something that.

Nobody has seen before and there's no evidence for.

Right, right. Exactly. There's no.

You have. The leap of faith required. Is not available in a spreadsheet.

Exactly. Actually, one of the things we'll say is, like, if you. If you could put a TAM slide on your pitch deck, you're not a category designer.

Yeah. There is no TAM. It says, we only invest in $0 billion markets.

That's actually a really good segue to a question from Anna. Anna from anov. Good to see you, Anna.

Hi, Anna. Yeah.

You and Christopher know each other? Been on each other's podcasts? I think Anna wants to know. She says you always talk about successful companies, but can you talk about one to two companies that tried category design and failed, or X or Y reason? And what were those reasons?

Yes, I definitely can.

We all can. And it's still.

It still hurts.

And we have the documents of the useless stock options and stock that we own in those companies.

So I would. I would. I would. I would say. I'm going to go out on a limb here. And I would say that probably in the early days of our work together, and I'm thinking collectively, Christopher and I, at least, we were probably at a 50, 50 batting average. 50% of the companies would actually do something spectacular, and some 50% would fail. And I would say that in the very best scenario, it's probably more like 60 or 70%. The reality is that many of the companies that we work with on creating categories simply can't get there. And one of them is Origami Logic. It's a company that we talked about in our book.

Honestly, so embarrassed. Still. Still.

Still.

Well, I did Great work.

Didn't do it.

I was going to say, well, let's get to that. So I'm still angry. Brilliant work. Honestly, marketing signals at that time in point were something that was so important in the market. To read the signals from the market and the creation.

There was no. We invented the term marketing signal.

Correct. And that measuring marketing signals was something really fucking important. Like every CMO in the world cared about a marketing signal or the marketing signals they were receiving. And so we went about with Ofer and his team creating what I think is still one of the greatest point of views of all time, which is, do you know what happened today? Literally that's the starting of the point of view. And the answer of course is for most marketing professionals, no, I don't fucking know.

No idea.

And in fact the Famous one is 50. 50, right. I know half of what my marketing is. And so that's one example. And honestly, I think we had quite an arm wrestle at the time we were writing the book. Kevin, tell me if I'm wrong here about how much, to the extent, how much do we include in the book, sort of those case studies, because you just never know how these things are going to play out over time. That one played out badly. Now let me just say one thing. It wasn't the category design that was the problem. And if you've read our book, you'll see that we have this thing called the magic triangle. It's this idea that you have to have. And the great companies do this. Not only the design of the category, but a design of the product and design of the company. Those three things have to come in alignment. And honestly, I swear to God this is true. These other two pieces are really fucking important. And in the case of Origami, they hired a salesforce that came from one of their competitors, I think it was, and they tried the enterprise sale, go to Market Motion and they failed.

And they were skating to where the puck was. This is the aha. Salespeople respond to inbound demand.

And so creating demand is a whole new concept.

Correct. And.

And the AHA for something that doesn't exist.

Correct. And so what happens? And this was true in Origami and we've had it in many other cases. The salesforce says, oh, in this case the category was marketing signal management. Nobody's asking for marketing figure management. There aren't any RFPs. You know what RSPs for? There are RSPs for nose picking and carbo dingulating. So we need to tell people we need new methods.

Right.

And what they don't understand is or.

Don'T have the courage to, or ability.

To, or in fairness, aren't trained to. Category design at the high level is setting the agenda in the market, right. And category design sale is taking the pov, the framing of the problem and going into the customer saying, oh, you thought you wanted nose picking, carbo dingulation, have you thought about. And then you lay down the POV and then you set the agenda in the account, said Simply, in the B2B space, there's two companies, there's the company that helps the customer write the RFP based on a category design, and there's the companies that respond to the POV and don't win the business.

And one more thing. Sorry, Kevin. The one more thing I was going to say that quietly.

Exactly.

And so one more thing I was going to say was that the leader, the king or the champion of the category, as we know, takes 76%. That's what you're fighting for. And so when you do that move where you go back to either a smaller category, which is teeny relative to the bigger one, or whether you say, hey, screwed, I'm going to fight for the other 20, 20, 24%, that's the problem that you have and that's the decision that you make as a CEO. Sorry, Kevin.

No, that's okay. And it just, you know, it does.

How handsome is Kevin? Manny? I mean, really, Kevin Maney is the best looking fucking category designer in the world, I think, bar none. Male. Male category designer.

How many, how many drinks have you had, Chris?

I don't know. This is, I think this whiskey starting to kick in. So you're getting, you're getting better.

Beer goggles.

You're getting better and smarter as you go. Keep going, buddy. I'm sorry to interrupt.

No, I was just going to go back to that concept of courage which it really, where it all falls. And we've seen, we've seen some of our clients who have done this brilliant category design. This, you know, the minute they get some pressure on revenue or something like that, they buckle, right? And they say like, well, we're going to go back to something that actually works in the short term, but it's a short term. And Chris, you've been actually very vocal about saying this, is that you would think that going back to sort of the regressing to the mean is the safe place to be, but it's actually the riskiest place to be because what that means is you can easily be displaced. And if you end up Having the courage to create something new and stand out, you have a better chance of an enduring level of success. I actually just want to. Because I watched this recently. You want to watch a documentary about brilliant category designers? There's a documentary about Kiss.

Oh, yeah, let's talk about Kiss.

And the thing about them was they put out four albums that sold nothing. And, and they played live shows over and over and over again with their makeup and they, in the, in, you know, their, their brand. And, and, and everybody was telling them, you're idiots. Like, get rid of the makeup. This is a joke. You know, play music that everybody wants to hear. You know, this kind of thing. And they were like, no, this is what we are. This is what we're going to do. And, and then four albums in, they put out Kiss alive. The whole thing takes off and for what it's been 30 plus years now. They're the best selling life act of like all, all time. Right? And so that's what it's. That's what it.

I hear you.

I would have.

And then that might be the greatest rock song of all time. I can remember being a very young person running around the house singing that.

But, but, but they. That, that their story to be epitomes.

Kiss army take. I bought the Kiss Army. I was in the Kiss army in the 70s, I kid you not.

All right, Mike, let's go. What else you got?

We are rapping, man. It's like it's birthday time. I want to sing the song, but I think that would be a little, little cliche. But we're getting to the bottom of the hour. We got a bunch of questions we couldn't get to. Sorry, guys. Sorry about that, but this has been amazing. I mean, listening to you guys, it's like I, yeah, I, I want to be in the room, but I feel like I've been in the room. Everything, everything was.

Thank you, John.

Yeah, thanks, John. Thanks, Pablo.

Hey, Clifford, thank you for being here, buddy.

Yeah.

And hey, if you got a bunch of questions, post them all and we'll try and answer them for you.

Post them all in the Slack community.

Talking too much.

And for all of you, that you know the category thinkers community launches I think next week. I want to say next week or the week after with Chris's first episode, the Slack Open. Slack Community. You can chat with any of us at any time. Along with another 300. There's 300 people registered, so.

Awesome.

Incredible.

Way to go, guys.

We're gonna have a podcast a week coming out.

Thanks, David.

Ama's a month, a couple times a month and per face to face meetups and virtual meetups. So category thinkers. It's, you know, it's a community that we've been looking for. I think it's, it's finally time. There's so many category designers out there that care. Let's all be part of it.

Thank you, John. Hey, ho. Let's go.

Hey ho.

All right, guys. Cheers.

Hi, Ron.

Raise your glass.

Love you, Matt. Hey, Matt. Thanks for coming.

Matt. Hey, by the way, happy birthday. Hey, happy birthday, Kevin.

Happy birthday, Lisa.

Thank you. We love you. Thank you. Michelle. Michelle. Wait, you're here. Am I still your crazy whatever neighbor or horrible brother in law or something? Excellent. Thank you, Michelle. God bless you. Eric. Eric, dude, you're incredible. Thanks, Josh.

Is that an epic send off or is that an epic send off by Lockhead himself? Stick around in this channel. Hit subscribe, leave us a rating. But more than anything, anything. Go to categorythinkers.com join the free Slack community where this conversation continues 24. 7. On this podcast, we're going to talk to CEOs, we're going to talk to marketers, we're going to talk to VCs, we're going to talk to small e entrepreneurs about category design. But the value is inside the community where you get to bounce around these ideas and learn from each other. Go to categorythinkers.com right now. Sign up and you'll stop listening to this show and become a part of it.