10 Comments

“I want to know more about category design!” Loving you, Philippa Gillström

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I’d love to read/learn more about this :)

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J, the free copies have been claimed, but I highly recommend reading the book! And once you have, I'd love to know your thoughts. My next few posts here on my Substack will be diving further into this topic.

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Great stuff Jenny!

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We just launched at category at MURAL! Check out the announcement on MURAL Community here- https://community.mural.co/discussion/1135/introducing-collaborative-intelligence

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YES! I love it! Rare to find community professionals who also "get" category design. Congrats on the launch of your category, and I will be following the progress.

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This is a great book and a great summary! I read this book a few years ago last time I was at a startup. There are really interesting ideas, but I don't think they have it 100% correct. Harvard Business Review does a better job of summarizing what's needed to create a category here. Although I do love the Lightning Strike.

On how it's related to communities, the key challenge most companies face these days is not changing which technologies people use (unless you are just directly replacing another piece product), but more of changing behavior. This takes a community because you need network effects. The book Change by Damon Sentola really blew my mind on this idea.

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Jacob, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts! I value them more than you know. I'm going to look for that HBR review. AND I added "Change" to my to-read list! haha maybe that will be my next book giveaway. Appreciate you!

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Whoops forgot the link. Check it out https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-difference-between-a-first-mover-and-a-category-creator. It details the 3 things needed to create a category:

1) a radical product/service innovation, combined with

2) a breakthrough business model innovation, and finally greased by

3) a breakthrough big data about future category demand.

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This is super insightful, Jenny, and really resonates with some recent experiences I've had working with one of my clients.

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