The 22 Laws of Category Design

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.

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?

For example, fast fashion has become a problem in recent years. So companies have begun creating “tomorrow’s solution” with responsible manufacturing practices, sustainable materials use, and business models that promote a circular economy.

With the rise of the Internet, the mobile phone, the cloud, and now AI, every market category and every company is a tech company. This means non-tech industries and market categories will increasingly behave like native-tech ones.

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

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

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

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