The 22 Laws of Category Design

Category designers introduce the world to new ways of living, working, and playing. They are people and companies who move the world from the way it is, to the way they think it should be. And they do this by solving a problem people didn’t know they had or by reimagining a known problem, then creating the potential for a radically different soluti

Dominating a new category is not necessarily about being the first to market a product. It is about being the first company to have your definition of a problem and, therefore, the solution, tip at scale. For example, Apple did not create the mobile phone category (that accomplishment goes to Motorola). But Apple did redesign the category with a fr

(Sun Microsystems was an early pioneer in the tech industry that contributed an incredible amount of knowledge and had one of the greatest category designing taglines in history: “The network is the computer.” It forced thinking and caused a conversation.)

If you start with the way the world “is,” then try to make the way it “is” different, you are making an unconscious decision to improve within the context of a game someone else invented. You are competing. But if you start with the way it “could be,” if you assume the possible and stand in the future, you give yourself the opportunity to write new

Category design involves educating the market about a new, often-ignored problem as well as a solution that you can provide.

Strategic thinking, in its purest form, is the process of considering “what could be true.” Strategy is the art of the possible. What new mental model would have to be invented for this to work? What if people moved from the way it is, to a new, different way? What if a new outcome (an outcome we haven’t considered before) was possible?

Reflexive thinkers want Obvious content. Reflective thinkers want Non-Obvious content.

Your first lesson: Everything is the way it is because somebody changed the way it was.

Translation: One company wins big in each category. But most marketers, entrepreneurs, creators, and investors spend their entire careers competing for only 24 percent of the value opportunity of a given category. They’re not the Category King—and they don’t even know it. As a result, they waste time and effort competing over demand instead of crea