The 22 Laws of Category Design

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?

You have to stand in the future to create a different future. Our friend, Mike Maples Jr., calls this “backcasting.” Legendary builders must stand in the future and pull the present from the current reality to the future of their design. So an important additional job of the builder is to persuade early like-minded people to join a new movement.

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

An easy exercise to start thinking is understanding whether you are forecasting or backcasting. Take a moment to think about which direction you are facing: Forecasting: standing in the past, looking forward, thinking about the future Backcasting: standing in a different future and living “as if” that different future already exists today This migh

By rejecting the premise and imagining the future, we can see that yesterday’s solution (ICE cars) is today’s problem (air pollution), which becomes tomorrow’s solution (electric vehicles). Here are a few more examples: Yesterday, processed foods saved lives from contamination and bacteria. Today, processed foods are a major factor in obesity, whic

Law #1 Thinking About Thinking Is the Most Important Kind of Thinking Expertise is the enemy of fresh thinking. Category design is a game of thinking. If you want to find success as a category designer, you have to change the way a reader, customer, consumer, subscriber, or user “thinks.” You are successful when you’ve moved their thinking from the

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

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

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