TwosWrite things down

Play Bigger by Al Ramadan

Play Bigger by Al Ramadan

by Parker · 122 things on Twos

✓ Positioning by Al Reis
Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney
Christopher Lochhead pushed for the one big moment
How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets
Ogilvy on Advertising
The key is creating, developing, and dominating new categories of products and services
Uber made us all aware that we had a taxi problem—and that the problem had a new solution
Uber stressed all of personal transportation was too expensive and too messy. He said Uber could become more desirable than owning a car. He wanted to make "transportation as reliable as running water."
Uber teed itself up to solve enormous problems so $40 billion or $50 billion seemed cheap in the long run
Uber put it into our minds that it uniquely understood the problem and could craft a solution
Smart companies typically go public about the time their category takes wing—usually six to ten years after the company's founding
The most exciting companies create. They give us new ways of living, thinking, or doing business, many times solving a problem we didn’t know we had—or a problem we didn’t pay attention to because we never thought there was another way.”
They don’t sell us better. The most exciting companies sell us different.
For the smartest pirates, dreamers, and innovators on the planet, disruption is never the goal. Creation is the goal. Elvis Presley didn’t set out to “disrupt” jazz. He set out to create rock and roll—a product that came from his soul.
“Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.” - Peter Thiel
One company wins big and dominates a healthy category, and the rest struggle, get acquired or perish
Apple, Facebook, and Tesla weren't the first products in their markets, but they all made something different from what came before, and built a category that pulled in customers and made them desire the product
The first inventor is an innovator to be thanked. The first to define and develop a category is a category king to be followed
Brands don't make a category kind. Category design does
A problem is a category
Winning companies today market the problem, not just the solution
People look for ways to make fewer choices in the face of more choices
Once you've committed to a product or service in a new category, you're likely to feel certain that it is the best even if something slightly better comes along. Once a king emerges customers believe it's the best, regardless of any evidence to the contrary
Studies show that people will and do change their minds to fit in
Your number one job is to change the way people think. Your product, your company culture, your marketing—everything has to be aligned with transforming the way potential customers think. If you change the way they think, they will change their buying behavior. If you are the company that changes the way people think, people will see your company as the category king, and you will win the majority of the customers
A great team is nothing without a great category
The product just has to be good enough to satisfy the category
Category designers condition the market to see their aha moment the way they do and demand the new thing
Category design is the discipline of creating and developing a new market category, and conditioning the market so it will demand your solution and crown your company as its king
Remember, a great new category is one that solves a problem people didn’t know they had, or solves an obvious problem no one thought could be solved. Either way, you are introducing something new to potential customers’ lives. You have to help them move from the way they used to think, to a new frame of reference. This is what it means to condition the market. You have to first define and market the problem—and only then can you help people understand that you can solve the problem better than anyone else
“We needed to introduce an entirely new market and promote a new way of doing business.” - Mark Benioff
Once people can see the problem, they can't unsee it
When the category demands a product, the problem doesn't have to be perfect right from the get-go
Dave’s Three Questions:
A market insight involves seeing a “missing” in the world at large and believing that technology can be built to solve it
That knowledge/serendipity combination is behind the story of Evan Spiegel and Snapchat. Spiegel grew up as a privileged kid in Southern California, the eldest child of two high-powered lawyers. By the time he attended Stanford, Spiegel was the kind of wealthy, connected, snowboarding, BMW-driving party guy who would’ve been at home in an episode of “Entourage. Such a guy apparently had quite a bit of experience with women sending him potentially embarrassing photos, which got him thinking about a missing: Spiegel believed there would be a market for a way to send images or text that would automatically disappear. He was at Stanford, steeping in the school’s computer science and start-up milieu, providing him with knowledge of the possibilities of new technology. So he pursued his disappearing-picture idea, originally called Picaboo. Picaboo soon became Snapchat, and Spiegel’s market insight evolved into a full-blown media property and turned into a business valued at billions of dollars
It was also not obvious that these entrepreneurs could build the technology, companies, and categories that would make the insights come alive. And that’s the other trick about market insights. When you have a good one, it seems a little crazy. It is nonconsensus. It becomes your job to make it consensus, and to believe in it when no one else does
The 11 facets of a company
The category name will inform the strategy of the company, not the other way around. It should describe the nature of the problem being solved. For companies aimed at the enterprise, the name should speak to the business function where the problem lives. Ideally, the category name will become a line item in every company’s budget. Consumer-facing companies need a category name that’s direct and descriptive, like “social network” or “on-demand transportation.
Once a company discovers its category, it must fully embrace the category internally. The category has to become part of the very fabric of the company.
Sketch out what the category means to every part of the company. What does it mean for the product and its features? What does it mean for marketing and sales, for the types of investors you’ll pitch, for the partners you might approach?
Once you know your category, it becomes your true north. It must guide all of your journeys.
The Play Bigger Guide to Category Discovery and Expression
It is imperative in the current era to become a category king
When pitching a venture capitalist, entrepreneurs get funding when they craft a great story
Raw information reaches us on an intellectual level, but stories reach into our hearts and our pants
Decades of brain research have demonstrated that stories have a more lasting impact than facts
A POV tells the worlds you're a company on a mission, not a missionary company looking to make money any way it can. It frames the new problem that your category identifies, and sets you up as the answer
When someone can articulate your problem, you believe that person must have the solution
The story leads potential customers on their from/to journey, so they understand both what is missing and why your company can fix that problem
No one remembers what you say, but they remember how you made them feel. That feeling can be excitement about something that's coming, or fear of missing out
To reach people's emotions, a POV has to sound the way people talk. It has to be simple, direct, visceral
The story about your business is more important than the facts about your business
The POV tells the world why this category and the company creating it are different. Different forces a choice between what was and what can be
Once you establish your initial category, you will need to continue to expand into new markets
Back in 2008, when Twitter first exploded onto the scene, Kevin interviewed cofounder Ev Williams onstage at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley, and asked Williams how he’d describe the vision and strategy of Twitter. “I have a sense for what will take off and why and it’s mostly gut so I’m not good at articulating it necessarily,” Williams responded. “Jack [Dorsey] and Biz [Stone], my other cofounders, have always had grand visions for Twitter. There’s a shared sense in the company that we’re connecting people and we hear daily how we’re changing how people communicate. It’s sort of something we feel through osmosis.” Translation: We have no POV. We have no strategy. We’re watching what our users do and just winging it. (And, by the way, that’s been the perception of Twitter ever since.) Twitter got lucky. It created the right thing at the right moment and won the lottery. You, too, can hope you get lucky. We’re saying that developing a POV is another important step toward improving your odds of success. It’s a way to improve the chances that your initial insight will turn into a company, product, and category that matter.
Tableau's POV: "It's business analytics software for people who are merely curious or bright and want to see and understand data
A great POV is not just the right story—it's the right story for its time
If the POV sits too much in the present, then at best it’s not very exciting, and at worst it makes you seem like a me-too copycat. Cast the POV too far forward ahead of the technology and your team can struggle to make a product that lives up to the promise, while your external audience either isn’t ready for your vision or flat-out doesn’t believe it
It is very important for founders and CEO to write their POV down
In as few words as possible, it should lay out the problem and its ramifications, describe a vision for the category, sketch a blueprint for how to build the category, and paint a picture of potential outcomes
The story simply and clearly defines the problem and creates a “thing” that people will feel they must have. That thing is not your company per se—it’s the category offering! Your company first needs its potential market to say, “We gotta get that thing!” Once people decide they need it, your company stands a good chance of winning those customers as long as it builds a product that solves the problem well enough. If analysts, journalists, and bloggers understand the category story, they too will describe this new thing, and describe it in the way your company describes it—which is tied back to the way your company can solve the problem.
“You’ll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it’s important in general, but why you’re doing something important that no one else is going to get done.” - Peter Thiel
The integrity of your software is the integrity of your business
The Play Bigger Guide to Point of View Discovery and Expression
The things the customers ask for rarely line up with the true north originally set by the CEO. Instead of working on true north, engineers increasingly find themselves working on customer requests, and customers generally ask for something better, not different
It can happen very publicly for consumer companies, as the gravity-inducing requests and criticisms pour out into social media. These forces are the beginning of gravity dragging the product and company away from true north. Pull the product a little off course now and it will continue to veer wildly away from true north over time
A lightning strike is an event meant to explode onto the market, grab the attention of customers, investors, analysts, and media, and make any potential competitors crap their drawers
Other tasks that have to get done in the run-up to the strike include creating new sales decks; writing and producing the lightning strike press materials; updating the brand so it lines up with the POV; preparing analysts so they understand the use cases, company, and category strategy; nailing the growth hacking approaches required to drive digital metrics; and readying the company website so it reflects the POV and takes full advantage of the strike
4 documents for category creation
The Play Bigger Guide to Mobilization
Sensity, the Light Sensory Network or LSN category king planned to launch their lightning strike at the annual Lightfair International convention in Philadelphia but ended up launching after the Bostom Marathon bombing
A great lightning strike is a category-defining event that evangelizes a new problem or an old problem, that can be solved in a new way. It tells the world that this company knows how to define the problem and knows how to solve it
"The beginning of a new generation, not only of computers, but of their applications in business, science, and government." - Thomas Watson Jr., IBM CEO
Get the target audience to think: "That company understands my problem better than any other, and must have the solution."
The simple argument for a lightning strike is to cut through the noise and get into people's brains
For the lightning strike, you have to start by precisely identifying the target and the desired outcome, and work back from there
Sensity didn't aim to sell lights to technologists—it wanted to sell technology to lighting people
They wanted to make lighting people start thinking that dumb lights were a problem—or at least a waste of resources—and that LSN was the most powerful, thought-through solution
A strike can't be expected to hit every possible audience all at once. Better to hit the right audience—including the right accounts, analysts, influencers, and press—at the right time to produce an outcome that sets the Experience Curve in motion
Pull out a calendar and see where your audience might be in three to six months for planning
Too big of a convention like the Consumer Electronics Show runs the risk of getting lost in the noise
Your target audience won't turn out for a glorified commercial, but they will turn out for good content, high-level networking—and an open bar
"Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one." It was pitching different, not better. It would focus on the long term and take crazy chances
The content of the strike has two requirements:
The content has to be big, bold, and different enough to cut through the noise and reach the brains to the target audience
It can be an engaging superstar speaker, saying something no one has heard before (like a company saying it won't be evil), demonstrating a product that takes people's breath away (an iPhone)
If there's any debate, lean toward playing bigger and bolder
The content must evangelize the category problem first and your product or service second
Identify the problem that can be solved, and then help your audience come to the same aha you had about how to solve it
Take them on a journey from what they know now, to how things can be if they adopt your solution
If you lead with your solution and the audience doesn't yet understand the problem, whatever you say will bounce off their brains and land with a clunk on the floor
The problem is the key that unlocks your target audience's mind
The event has to match the content and audience, or else the message will be lost
"The event is the message. Ensure that every decision you make—from venue to food to speakers—reflects well on your business and conveys your message" - Mark Benioff, Salesforce CEO
Think of teasing events, thunderclaps, to prime the audience and make the lightning strike effective
Smart companies don't waste time and money on pointless vanilla, overly polite public relations. They go for PR that is opportunistic and edgy
After the lightning strike, hijack other stories every 3-6 months to remind customers and competitors about the category, the problem you've defined, and the solution you're offering
The Play Bigger Guide to Strikes, Hijacks, and Attention Grabbing
When category potential, position in the category, and execution all come together in investors' minds, they see the future and want a piece of it
The only way Google will be weakened is if a new category of search emerges that makes the old category seem outmoded
The POV has to be tailored so that the ambitions of the company fit with its capabilities; otherwise the company won't be able to execute and its disappointing performance will scare off investors
Outside developers are a critical element of most technology ecosystems, and they have a huge impact on the flywheel. They build add-ons and plug-ins and tangential products that extend far beyond any one company’s reach
The best people want to work for a king. They know when a company is going to change thee way we do things, create new career opportunities, and compensate them well
A flywheel can be the most powerful force in business. Get it started by employing category design. Guide it with a POV. Power it with lightning strikes and mobilizations. Grow it by expanding the category potential. Do all of that, and a company will increase its odds of becoming not just a category king, but a legendary category king that alters everyday life and work
“When you get started as a college student you limit your scope. It’s like, ‘I’m going to build this thing for the community around me.’ Then it’s ‘I’m going to build this service for people on the Internet.’ But at some point you get to a scale where you decide we can actually solve these bigger problems that will shape the world over the next decade.” - Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO
Over and over, Facebook has played bigger, redesigning its category, product, and company in synch with one another to expand its category potential
A company's value is based on its category potential
Google started as a simple search engine. It soon redefined the company’s POV to say it was “organizing the world’s information.” That in turn expanded Google’s category potential—the more kinds of information Google could organize beyond just what was on Web pages, the more users it could address. So Google digitized books, built out Google Maps, introduced Gmail, bought Picassa for photos, and bought YouTube for video, each time bringing into the mix a new kind of information the company could organize
A category is a problem to be solved in a new way, and once the public sees that problem, they can’t unsee it. There is no way to unring a bell. The market will demand a solution. If you define that category and disappoint the market for any reason—you don’t have the resources or wherewithal or whatever to become its king—then the market will look for a different king
This is why the old saw about “first-mover advantage” is mostly bullshit. The first mover has an advantage only if the first mover has the wherewithal to become king and deliver on its promises
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan
Listening to customers leads you to constantly build better, but never to build different. And different is what creates new categories
Listen to customers so that you understand what the root problem is rather than just doing the solution, because if we just do what we’re told, they wouldn’t need us, and if they didn’t need us, we wouldn’t be able to generate the kind of profitability and competitive advantage that it takes to define a category
The larger lesson from Amazon is the way CEO Jeff Bezos built a culture that encourages category creation. He conditioned investors from early on to expect Amazon to fund category creation at the expense of profits
In the 1997 shareholder letter Jeff Bezos wrote they were going to be bold their their experiments and some of them weren't going to work
If you’re the CEO and want to become a daring category designer, you’re going to need your shareholders’ support—or a new set of shareholders
Invest in knowledge and skills over time, whether that’s through R&D (Corning) or hiring new kinds of employees (Amazon), then use such knowledge to pounce on category creation opportunities when they arise
Putting yourself through a POV exercise can be incredibly clarifying. How do you define who you are and what you want to mean to the world? How do you want people to see you? What’s the problem you can solve, and your way of solving it? Write it down and hone it until it sounds like a presentation—so that if you had ten minutes to sell yourself, you could go through your POV and anyone would grok you. Your POV defines what type of person you are, what makes you different, and why people should care. And if you live your POV, it will attract the right people into your life, and repel the wrong people from your life
Deadlines make things happen
Play Bigger key takeaways
Play Bigger meeting