Al Ramadan of Play Bigger – Category Design Beyond Tech Startups – Changing the World

The common thinking around category design is that it only applies to a specific set of company types. But here are category thinkers, we disagree. We believe category design concepts can be applied to any effort trying to change the way people think. And that's why we brought one of the Godfathers of category design, co-author of Playbigger, Al Ramadhan, to talk about how he has been applying category thinking to combat the effects of climate change and sea level rise on the California coastline. Welcome to category thinkers podcast, a feature of the category thinkers community. And while other category design content focuses on success cases, we're different. We focus on the messy middle. People and projects in the process of conditioning the market to change the way they see the world from the way it was to the way it should be. And we found it real interesting that even one of the founding fathers of this discipline finds himself in the messy middle himself in a new category. So we hosted an online event with our community to hear from Al about it. In it, he talks to the co-founders of the category thinkers community, Mike Dampass, aka Damp, John Roozy, and me, Pablo Gonzalez. About subjects like how bringing the problem as close to home as possible is the key to gaining traction, why he doesn't even mention the term category design when he's working with nonprofits, and what he's learned about deploying a point of view for nonprofit causes that he's bringing back with him to the business world. Along with about half a dozen questions from the community, because this was one of our monthly live events. And speaking of events, if you also believe that they've come roaring back after COVID, but they're slightly different, you should visit one of our sponsors. My company, be the stage.live, because we keep seeing companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to show up at events for the sole purpose of creating awareness and driving leads. But when your booth is worn out of hundreds, prize wheels and merch just make you blend in with everyone else. At attendees feel this, because they're trying to avoid eye contact with you while trying to figure out if their kid is going to like your giveaway, which makes your presence at the show a misfire, and the follow-up messages as generic as that branded thermos. Be the stage.live turns you into the talk of the trade show. We convert your booth into a live podcast studio where attendees are invited to share their expertise. The lights, cameras and action make the onlookers stop in their tracks and get pulled in. Then we package up the content into something they can reshare while the event is still going, amplifying your on-site presence and creating a digital word of mouth engine. After the event, you're the one follow-up they're actually looking forward to. You want help with that? Check us out at bethestage.live. If you need help radically differentiating or creating a point of view, check out our other sponsors. The category design advisors. You can check them out at categorydesignadvisors.com. They host these free weekly strategy sessions they call office hours or any team that needs some help with category. Whether it's trying to work out your POV with them, get some advice on how to align your team around category. Just get a better understanding of where to get started. You can go to categorydesignadvisors.com, book their office hours and hop on a call with Damp and John themselves. And finally, what we really like for you to do is to stop listening to the conversation and be a part of it. And you can do that by joining our free Slack community at categorythinkers.com. There, you're going to find over 600 other category curious, category capable category designers, just like you working out their POVs, sharing content and helping each other succeed while getting access to events. With some of the names and category design, you really, really want to meet like our past event with Sangram Vajra or our upcoming event with Playbigger co-author Al Ramadan. Stop just listening to these shows and join the conversation by going to categorythinkers.com and joining the free Slack community. Now I'm going to leave you to this epic conversation with a super unique guy Nick Titman. I start us off here. All right, we made it. Welcome everybody to the second live event of the year. Look at this. All right. People are rolling in loving this. We were on another, on another call. Jammin with Al. I'm sure he's going to be jumping in here in a second. So I see some familiar faces. I see some new faces. Jeff. I think this is your first event bud. Welcome. Good to have you man. Glenn. Glenn. I know you're a, you're a past star out here. Emily, a regular contributor. Monica regular contributor. Good to have you here. Fernando. I don't know if you've been to a live event yet. Good to have you though. This is possible. First time. First time. All right. For now. I'm good to have you here, man. Okay. So the way that this goes. I'm going to ask good to have you man. As always. The way that this normally goes is, you know, we're me. John and damp will. And then we'll start with Al for maybe like 20, 30 minutes. After that. Yeah. I'm going to start setting some of these. I'm going to start setting some of these spotlights here. After that. We're going to open the room for just a Q and a. And the way that that rolls is that. I'm going to be moderated or you can DM me in the chat. I'll be very active in the chat throughout just kind of like setting everybody up and making sure that you're who's up next and who isn't. At that points. I will add the spotlight to you. You can come on. Share and first time. Good to have you as well. Thank you for making time here. At that point, I'll add the spotlight to you. You'll kind of like come on stage and ask whatever question you got and you can jam without a little bit. If you have a follow up question. I'll leave you on. If it starts going super, super long. I'll just kind of like make it obvious by. I'll bring it on the next person that is that is in line to ask the next question. But as you all know, we want everybody to participate as much as possible. Feel free to chat and make this an ongoing conversation in the chat as well. And if you really, really got something that you have to say just let me know in the chat and maybe it adds to it. I'll I'll add it in. But I'll try to piece as much as possible. But really keeping the order of. Whoever has the spotlight on speaking and adding the spotlights is just kind of how we how we keep it here. And we try to keep it rolling as much as possible. Let me see. John is here. I'm adding you. John. You're on stage. And then all we are waiting on is out. So maybe Mary, maybe you can send them the invite from this thing or or damp. Are you talking out and on another. I sent it to him. I sent it to him by email and and text. But for everyone's knowledge, we screwed up on our our introductory call and ended up on the wrong URL. So our bad. The other thing is that at the moment, the West Coast just is recovering from lots of power and internet outages. So I just talked to team in California that I work with that is severely impacted. I hope they're doing all right, but that is not. Here we go. I see it out. I was here. Yeah, I was just telling us about the bunch of storms over there. Owl. If you want to unmute. There we go. So I've lost the internet. So I'm actually running off of sell service right now. The whole things going down inside Chris. Sorry about that. And Dres and Jerry was just telling us what you were going through. All right. Welcome everybody. Welcome to the first of the February event of the category thinkers community. As you all know, this is also repurposed into podcasts. And I hope you've been checking out the podcast. It's been growing. We love some reviews. We love some more mentions, but more than anything. If you haven't joined the free Slack channel. Go to category thinkers.com hop into the Slack channel. That's where we're all kind of like jamming throughout the week. Really cool conversations going on around MTM or something like that. The performance TV metrics and people testing out their POVs. Things of that sorts. As you all know, we're going to jam without here for like 20, 25 minutes. Then we're going to open up for Q&A. So raise your hand. If you have a question. Raise it early and often. So I have you kind of in the queue. If you want to get in first, just go ahead and raise your hand right now. And I'll know that you've got the first question for all because you've been dying to ask it. But I'm one of the co founders of the category thinkers community. I'm joined by my fellow co founders. John Roozy. You want to say hi, John? Hey, morning everyone. Glad to have you all here. And Mike Dan Pous. But everybody calls him. Damn, unless here is mom. Damn, if you want to say hi. When I hear the word Michael, I know him in trouble. And of course, sorry, man. Good. Why don't we kick this off? Go for a man. Yeah. You and I were chatting now a few weeks ago about how, you know, category design is being being used in ways that it's not the typical startup, you know, ABC round category building venture funded companies. We've done a couple pro bono projects for nonprofits. I know you've done the same. And we've also just past couple of years done a couple of multi billion dollar post IPO giant. So category design is just spun itself all over the map. And as one of the OGs of category design and co author play bigger, what? What are your thoughts seven and a half years in here we are. Well, yeah, more like 12 or 13 for for us at play bigger. And what I'd say is what happened over the weekend here in Santa Cruz is is likely to be what happened. happens in your neighborhoods too. And Rosanna, she, a great author from the SoCal area wrote a book recently called California Against the Coast. And in the book, she said that where the first generation to feel the effects of climate change and probably the last to be able to do anything about it. And so it spoke to us at Playbigger as an important thing. And so we decided to not just work for money and options, but to work for impact. And that's what we've been doing here for the last couple of years. So we feel that climate change might be the biggest problem faced by the world. I'm sure there's others that are of the same kind of caliber, but it's time to sort of apply some of the learnings that we've had collectively here and point it to changing the way people think about the problem in their world and the problems that face them and the threats that really are showing up. And we were about 12 months into what's called Save West Cleff. It's a community group about 700 people here in Santa Cruz. And the goal of Save West Cleff is to really chart the new and new future, a new and different future than what we've charted over the last 40 or 50 years. So I happy to talk about that. I'm happy to talk about sort of larger companies as well. They're all, I think, the same thing, which is in the case of public companies we're working with today. They're 10,000 people in the company in the community. I'm part of here in Santa Cruz is about 25,000 people in the city of Santa Cruz. So similar kind of size and a lot of what we're learning in the tech world and in the sort of the larger company world is playing out. Happy to talk in any detail on any of those topics, Mike. Well, it's interesting. Kevin and I were having a chat with all the political stuff, you know, firing up with the election year this year. And Kevin and I were talking about how, you know, the principles of category designers so applicable in so many different ways. And it's really about getting people to resonate and interact with your story. And if you can get people to understand the problem they have, the problem they don't know they have, and then address it with category thinking. You're so much more powerful than just trying to tell people how bigger, brighter, and smarter you are. We did a project a couple of years ago for a nonprofit that is designing these little devices. They're like smoke detectors that go in public restrooms, which by the way, public restrooms is the most common place for opioid overdose in the world. That and your own bedroom. And so these devices monitor breathing and motion and with machine learning can determine when an overdose is starting. Really, really smart technology and it'll notify either a network of people nearby that have Narcan or the manager of the store, the Starbucks, or, you know, someone's mother and potentially save a life. And the principles were the same no matter what. I mean, you're identified a problem, tell the story. And since we worked with them, they were able to drum up, I think three more states to regulate and allow the product in. It's pretty powerful stuff. And you see it with politics too. I chuckle every time I hear a politician, you know, start giving their point of view. And it's just good solid technique for telling stories. The one L that really amazes me that I'm curious about, and it's just good to tell the background on this. You remember the live webinar you did about it? I don't know, maybe a year or two ago with the wildfire guy? That was really cool. It was something you'd never, never have thought of category thinking, but you got applied it so well and so brilliantly. And maybe give us a little short story on that one. - Yeah, this, you know, the media has become so dramatized and fact-free for the most part. And, you know, today we're dealing with floods and storm and tempest. And three years ago we were dealing with, you know, wildfires, big ones in California. And this guy sort of created a channel, a YouTube channel. He was a firefighter, super experienced. He worked for the firefighter department. He would, and he would get up each morning basically, get on Google Maps overlay, the sensor data of what happened last night that you can get access to and start telling the story of what happened on the fire. And it was so much more powerful than anything the local news stations or anybody else would have. And so he sort of identified that people actually wanted to know what was really happening. And the problem that they had was that it was just, you know, sort of peanut butter media and without the facts. And so it became incredibly popular and everything. And to Mike's point, one of the things we often do is we sort of go free to wear and do a category design live with some, we just did one in Australia with 45 different companies. So it was quite an experiment. And we find that it's just, you know, exhilarating for everyone to be part of that. So yeah, cool story. He has subsequently gone on to do, is called The Lookout is the name of his thing. And he's gone on to do, you know, great things. What I was going to say on your comment, on your opening comment on sort of the problem and everything. I think there's a couple of things that are important when you're getting to this kind of scale, where there's literally thousands or tens of thousands of people's minds that you have to change. And, you know, one of the things we found with the project here in Santa Cruz was the local city and county had been sort of talking about the threat as being climate change or sea level rise. And whilst in some ways that's accurate, the problem, you're talking about a problem that has so much scope that no one can care about it, right? And so what we did in Santa Cruz is we actually worked with Dr. Griggs, who's one of the preeminent scientists here in Santa Cruz and a few others and started really understanding what the threat was to Santa Cruz, in particular to Westcliffe. And it turns out that it's not unlike the estates where you folks are, they're hurricanes, they're called bomb cyclones on this part of the world. And they are, there's no problem with them, except when they come from the angle of 240 to 270 degrees to the shoreline. That's when the problem shows up, right? And so if the beauty of what we do and the approach we take collectively is that when you get that so clear on the problem in this particular case swell coming from 240 to 270 greater than 20 feet with a period of more than 18 seconds, that's the thing we gotta be, that's the thing that's, you know, sort of crashing us right now. And so if you do that, then the solution becomes, well, how do we stop that swell from hitting the coastline? Are there mechanisms? And of course, as you know, in the Gulf States and the estates, many of you put up barrier islands way out at sea, that sort of block, if you like, the waves coming through and hitting the coastline. And so that's part one. And I can tell you this, we've been at this, a West lift thing now for, when I say we, there's eight of us on the executive committee. And like I said, there's about 700 people, members of the movement. And we have spent 90% of our time talking about this threat, right? And it helps so much because people aren't like, oh, climate change, I can't solve that. Or, you know, sea level rise, yeah, I can't solve that. But you can solve the actual threat. So how about we tackle that? And I think that's a lesson for all of us that as we're doing this work, the more precise you can make that, you know, problem statement and the more specific you can be about, sort of the ramifications or the pain points, as a result of that, the more you hit the people in the gut and you can then change their minds on how they think about, well, shit, I didn't even thought about that problem. I didn't really know that it was swells coming from 240. I thought it was just the sea level was rising. It actually turns out it's not. So that's one of the most important things. And then the change management in these size groups is really something that we've learnt over the course of the last three or four years in particular. It just takes a lot more work and figuring out how you're going to get to each of the different subgroups within the community or a large public enterprise, how you move the leaders of each one of those particular, sort of subgroups to the solution that we're trying to get to is something that we're still learning honestly, as we speak, both in the political context, as well as in the scientific context. So that's a lot of what we've been learning here over the last little bit. - Now, I find it really interesting that you're applying this stuff in the nonprofit space and in what you're doing right now, 'cause I didn't come from the startup world or even the marketing world. I was in construction and at a certain point, I got really active in nonprofits and everything that I've learned about getting people to unite around the movement and around the problem and creating communities comes from, from that world. And when I look at it, I see very startup, lean startup driven mentality, right? Like they're always fundraising for the next thing and it's always like action, action, action, action. And I wonder if there's any lessons that you have on what you've learned from talking about category design and this different way, this different lens of viewing things and this different lens on how to, how to make change happen and how quickly people are able to adopt this thing when they're coming from the nonprofit world or what they're, you know, like what success they're having that you're not seeing on the tech side or what similarities you're seeing from that standpoint. - Yeah, yeah, great observation. Well, first of all, we don't really talk to them about category design. It's just what we do and we never really say, "Hey, we're gonna do category design here." That's a sort of a starting point. I don't, they don't know what it is, generally. So it's like saying, you know, we're gonna do space science or something like that, right? So we focus in terms of the work that we do, we encourage everybody to get focused on the problem and get as specific about the problems we possibly can. That's a starting point. One of the other companies that we worked with recently, maybe three or four years ago, is a company called Save the Waves Coalition. It's a worldwide nonprofit, about $2 million in revenue each year. And they're trying to save so if ecosystems around the world, so they're doing surf ecosystem conservation. And the problem is, is of course, that many of the reefs in the ocean are changing as a result of the warming, you'd know this in Florida, especially. The warming temperature of the water is killing the reefs and about 35% of all oxygen and carbon-sick question sort of happens in reefs. And so if they go away, you know, the human kinds are real problems. So, and finding a problem that's specific to a group of people, if you said that as a general statement, people are be like, oh man, I can't stop that. I really can't. That's just gonna happen. It's nature, blah, blah. But if you say, well, that's gonna change your surf break and that's gonna fundamentally change your recreation and the way that you enjoy it. And it's gonna change your village. The fishing in your village is gonna go away. And that's the only source of food that you have. All of a sudden you're at a problem that's so powerful and so gut-wrenching that people are like, I really wanna do something about this, right? And so it went from, you know, carbon sequestration at 35% to your fish are disappearing and you've no longer got anywhere you can surf. And all of a sudden, because you got so specific and so focused on one of the things we say is, what's the problem you're solving? And who are you solving it for, right? So that's the category design discipline side of our brains. And in this particular case, it was, you know, the problem was reach disappearing or fundamentally surf-sprake disappearing and the surfers were the ones who were experiencing that. So motivate them, get them activated and it magic things happen. And then in the case of the, in the case of the, both nonprofits and, you know, sort of the community work that we're doing, take the city of Santa Cruz as I was talking about before, literally tens of thousands of people, there's no boss, there's no CEO, right? So this, you know, if the mayor or, you know, the manager of the city, the CEO of the city sort of came out and said, okay, we're gonna do this, you know, people would say, you know, jump in a lake, you know, I agree to that, that's not. And so part of what you have to figure out is, how do you truly reach all of those different constituents? And how do you motivate them to move to a new future in parallel with sort of where the city and the county and the coastal commission, national marine sanctuary, and all these other regulatory bodies are out. And that's the beauty of our experience with category design is understanding that if we keep talking about the problem and how it relates to them as an individual, might be someone who walks along the coast. It might be someone who serves, might be someone who bikes, might be someone who drives all that sort of stuff, right? So you can get really specific about that, if you like, the use case, true in the, in the large enterprise as well. That's, that's it right there, right? Like I, to, to the idea of like a joining stakeholders getting people united around the problem, what I found was moved to Miami as a green building consultant and people don't care that much about green building, but they do care about Miami becoming the sacrificial land for sea level rise in first world cities, right? So it's the whole, or, or, or, or one of it came to Habitat for Humanity, people are just like, oh, this is a nice to have. I love to go out and build homes, but this idea of empowering generations to move up the economic spectrum with a hand up, not a hand out, and how that affects other neighborhoods around it 'cause now they're owning and making the city better. This idea of bringing the problem closer to home, closer to how it affects the person versus the, hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could all have this thing happen? It's kind of like what I see as, as the through line of why it becomes effective in nonprofits and why it can become effective as a business leader of just like, hey, wouldn't it be great if we have this software that does XYZ as opposed to, you know, look how this will change your life today and look how much of an existential threat it is if you just keep doing things the old way, is the thing that I hear that really resonates across all of it. You know what I love about everything we're saying here is we're all very fortunate people, right? We're blessed to have been in an industry where we've learned a ton of things from really smart people. We've done some things at the tip of the spear, you know, I remember playing around with AI in the 90s when it didn't even do anything. And, but, you know, the experiences I got through being in startups, you know, I just saw a post recently that, you know, take action in things, right? And I don't know, I know you know Brian Halligan, CEO of our founder of HubSpot. He's just started a VC fund and funded 117 million in his first fund and it's focused solely on ocean applications. And he's investing in carbon removal companies. He's investing in fishing optimization of the supply chain. It's really amazing, but he was fortunate enough to be able to take his experiences and his facilities to actually apply something to a big picture problem. And I love seeing that in the world. Yeah, me too. Let me ask you a follow up on that. Now, so when I read Play Bigger and like a lot of other folks, the examples in the book are very narrow, right? And I think there's power in that because you can start to see some patterns emerge and how different companies have done a lot of the same things. Since you've been doing this work with nonprofits and kind of different realms, let's try to be really tactical with this. What specific things have worked really well or that you've had to change that might be different from kind of that commercial playbook. And specifically, I'm thinking about when you go about evangelizing these ideas and getting people to think differently. Like it takes time and it takes energy to make a mind share. And most nonprofits don't have huge war chests to blow on Super Bowl ads or big impacts like that. So what are you seeing companies or nonprofits or movements do to kind of get that word out without the same type of resources and things that are available to them if they were in a more commercial situation? - Yeah, that's a great question. I do think it centers on sort of getting specific about the problem and what we've seen with a number of them is that they, especially in this world, if you think about sort of a large community like Santa Cruz and how the communication comes from the city, the county or whatever, it's generally John in the form of a 400 paid scientific report that sort of outlines kind of like, you know, just a whole bunch of stuff that's language like resilience and adaptation plans and all of this stuff that doesn't really mean anything or resonate to people. So what we've encouraged everybody to do is put right a book. It's you and I would call it the manifesto. That's what you do. It's of course derivative of the point of view, but it's the book. And so in the case of St. Westlift, we wrote the book but it was a picture book. It wasn't like, you know, to come out or yeah. - Right, right. It was a, and it showed, you know, in this particular case in conjunction with UCSC here in Santa Cruz, we went back for the first time through the digital archives and found photographs of this particular area all the way from 1928 to, you know, obviously the current day. And we laid them all out for people on an 11 by 17 sort of book and you could see how this area had changed over the course of the last 100 years, right? And so then, then, so you knew the ramifications, I, what had changed, right? Or the bad thing that happened has resolved the problem. And then we were able to introduce the problem. It's like, well, shit, I care about that. I remember that parking lot used to be there. It's not there anymore. Oh my God, what is that? What's happened here? Then you tell the story of, well, actually, it's these particular, these particular bombsite lines and atmospheric rivers that create these wave events that blow those parking lots out. Oh, shit, well, we should do something about that. It's like, yes. So books or these manifestos that people, in the case of the communities, having them available in their households is a really important thing because their kids, their uncles, aunts, grandmas, neighbors, they all come around. And so that's why we created this big book. And we've been selling them as part of sort of the, if you like, the fundraising side of this thing. So instead of asking people for a quote, dumb donation. for a hundred bucks, we say, "Hey, buy the book." Right? So that's the kind of work we did the same kind of thing with Save the Waves as well, where we started to talk about the idea of a certain ecosystem. It's not just about the way, but it's about the pathometry, the stuff that's under the water, it's about the swell and how it approaches the reef, and it's about, you know, all of the living organisms, plants, and animals there as well, including humans. And when you start getting that sort of holistic picture, all of a sudden people sort of got it. So there's some of the techniques that we've applied here. We're still learning honestly. Like I said, this is the first time we've really forated into something of this scale. Yeah, I really like that, because you're not providing a brochure or a book about how great the nonprofit is, all the amazing work we do, which is kind of the standard way of going about things. You're flipping it and you're really making the problem very visceral. You're getting people to have an emotional and an immediate reaction to the problem. And then by extension, you kind of earn the right to ask for their support or their involvement in the cause itself. So true, so true. We should create a new title, new job title, cognitive bias engineers, because we're using all the same skills in different ways. You know, and it's a just called influencer. Yeah, exactly. Amazing how powerful it could be. We had a project that Kevin and I did years ago with plastic bank. It's a company that in third world countries, which is where 90% of the plastic waste comes into the ocean from. They use plastic and then convert it to cryptocurrency. And so people are picking plastic up and walking away from these depot centers with coupons that are good for milk and soap, etc. And the POV, I mean, we only put a couple of plane visits to Vancouver into the project. But one day I'm sitting there watching the baseball playoffs and there's an ad for an IBM and they're telling the plastic bank POV story. It's the words we wrote. And that's how powerful it can be. It can move national television if we're lucky. Anyway, I think Pablo, you're switching over to Q&A, Andreas. What do you got? I have a really simple question. First of all, I really, I'm also working with a couple of nonprofits here and there. And I love that you're so invested in the Westcliffe thing. But I'm really curious about is how much time are you spending on that? Do you have a rough idea? Over the last year, I think I dedicated about half of my professional life to this project. That's kind of what I figured, something like that. Would that? If you imagined you were working on a big project with a similar sized corporation, does that roughly level? I think this is bigger for a large public company. Cloud Flare was one that we completed a little bit ago. In our particular case, the duration was probably seven months or something like that. And probably took about half of my time during that. Save Westcliffe Sofah has been 12 months. And partly because I'm learning how to apply what I know to a completely different realm, I've never met with people from the Coast of Commission before. I've never met with National Marine Sanctuary. I've never met with city leaders. I've never met with county leaders. Honestly, I've been not in front of communities before at this scale. And so, part of it's me coming up to speed on how to approach this stuff. But yeah, it's a giant, for me, at least at this point, it's a giant part of my life. That's fantastic. What you guys talked about earlier with politics, by the way, is interesting. We're working with a European party at the moment. And they are facing similar issues. Of course, on an even bigger scale. Yeah. I'd love to dig deeper into that at some point. But Glenn, thanks. Thanks, Andreas. All right, Glenn, you were up, my friend. No, thank you. Over the last four years, here in Tucson, Arizona, I've been a part of a citizens committee with the aim to design build and launch a velodrome, a Olympic style 250 meter, 40 degrees plus banked cycling track. You've probably, if you've seen, you know, watch the Olympics on TV and you see the cyclist go around on a track, that's a velodrome. We are design phases complete. We are in the permitting phase. And we we're looking to start construction within the next couple of months with a launch. We hope at the end of this year. We're a nonprofit. We have both of C4, NSC3, you know, design for capital campaigns stuff, and then more business stuff on the C4 side. So my question is, when, you know, looking at, you were talking about multiple constituencies with the Santa Cruz project. We're looking at the same thing for the velodrome because we have, we're looking at youth and school programs, you know, health and wellness, as well as the cycling community, which ranges from kind of like your casual recreational rider all the way up to the elite racers, you know, Catwons, CatTunes, and then even Olympic class. So my question is, when, as we're developing our point of view about this, can you tell us about your process of how, how that point of view extends into creating, languaging, and then further into messaging that really connects and engages with multiple constituencies and how that works out. Yeah. I love the Colorado bike behind you, by the way. I think I used to ride one of those pretty much the same as that. So thank you. And thank you for all the work you're doing for your community. What I'd say is, you have to know what problem you're solving for which constituent. You gave us a couple of use cases, right? So kids learning how to ride bikes or the equivalent of that in both, sort of like middle school and high school. What is unique about the problem that requires this kind of solution, right? You have to get to that point. Road cycling is one thing, and you certainly were able to learn certain skills and everything else from that. But what is the problem you're solving for them? What is the problem you're solving for professional athletes? What is the problem you're solving for the community more broadly in terms of a place that people can come and enjoy and meet each other? They're all of the problems that you've got to get at. And so if you can start to get that, you can truly understand, you know, sort of, you know, what the motivation or what's the need for a human need to do this? And then if you can speak to that, you can get people leaning forward on that particular topic. I was using the surfing as just an example of that. If you took the surf break here in Santa Cruz away, people would be bummed and pissed and probably, you know, like it's a real problem, right? So the same kind of thing, that's the that's the tension that you have to create. And in the front part of the point of view, of course, you're going to spend all of your time talking about that problem and talking about the ramifications of that problem because of this problem, these bad things or these consequences are happening, right? That's this construct at the front end of what we call the point of view. The back end is then the solution side of that, which I think is usually for most of us is the much more straightforward thing, which is what you need one of these things that does this to solve that problem, right? So that's that's that's where I would encourage you get those use cases clear, figure out who who is related to each one of those use cases, and that will then form, obviously, ultimately, your message has to go out when I'm going to go to speak to the community. This is what I'm going to say when I'm going to speak to professional cyclists, this is what I'm going to say when I speak to kids and schools, this might be the third thing I say. That would be my counsel. Right, right. And my follow up question there, thank you. This is something new. Certainly for our community and I mean, as we're talking with people out there, there are a lot of people that are savvy and in the know about what a velodrome is and how it's used and that kind of thing. But then we get other people who say, what is that a jelly, a jelly drone? No idea. And so what can you what advice can you give us on the solution side? You know, I mean, because obviously, okay, so like with the Santa Cruz project, maybe you can use that as sort of an analogy. Where we're we're bringing something like really new to this community that a lot of people just aren't familiar with. So starting with the problem, I mean, we do have to follow up with the solution and talking about that. But because it's so new and different for a lot of people, how do we address that? Yeah, that's the benefit side of the solution. So there's the technical thing that you're going to do the thing you're going to build or solution, you're going to approach. Then there's the benefits of that. Just like the problem has ramifications, the solution has benefits. So let's just take I'm going to make this completely up. Okay. So let's do it live together. The let's say that, you know, Austin, is it Austin? Is that where you are? Did you say that Tucson Arizona? Tucson, excuse me. Let's say Tucson's, you know, sort of the percentage of people who represent, you know, the United States and the Olympics is 0% from Tucson, but for normal communities, it might be 5%. I'm just making this up completely, right? Then what you have to speak to is that's part of the problem. We think that the kids in our particular part of the world ought to have the same opportunity as somebody in New York or somewhere. in LA or wherever these Colorado will most certainly. And so once you've made that sort of connection, that that's the problem, then when you talk about the solution, and to be able to do that, you need a specialized kind of equipment, if you like, or you need a specialized kind of plug-ups that you go do this. And so then you can speak to that. And the benefit of course is that people get, you know, sort of skilled in that. So we can talk for hours on this stuff, but I think that's the approach that you've got to sort of take. - Yeah, awesome, Al. Thank you, thank you so much. And thank you, and I just personally, from, from me to you, thank you for all the great work that you and the team did in Playbigger and continue to do. And the ripples that are making a difference in the world. I just wanted to say thank you. - Thank you, guys. - Thank you, Maria, so to get contributed to Glenn Fernando, what do you got, man? - Well, I wanted to get into questions to get to the problems. I've been working with near-shore outsourcing providers for about 15 years. These are companies from all the way from Mexico, all the way down to Argentina, who provide software development services, custom software development services to American companies as an alternative companies out of, you know, South Asia, et cetera. And there's just, you know, and there was one category innovation that happened, and I think it was kind of almost by happenstance, a company from Mexico called Softech created the near-shore outsourcing category by saying, "Oh, look, there's a problem with outsourcing to India. It's a 12-hour time difference. You have to stay up till midnight or the outsourcing team has to stay up till midnight. And it's not great for when you want to do agile software development where you have to have daily stand-up meetings. And so this problem would have a solution near-shore outsourcing. But since then, there's been no other innovations when it comes to category. Everyone is trying to sell pretty much the same service. We are specialized in Angular and Java. We can help you build your products, et cetera. So I'm actually now working with a customer out of, a customer software development company out of Mexico, helping him to try and figure out what a new category is that they can design around their target market, which is retail outlets. And I've been trying to figure out what is the, what is that compendium or group of questions? I think I'll listen to a podcast that Christopher Lockhead did with, I think, a colleague of yours, Al. What's his name? Lou, I forget what his name was. But anyway, let's keep a roll about Mike Bruno. But anyway, it was all about that sort of list of the 16 questions to really get at the root problem of the company resolves, because they have a lot of service problems. But I really try to figure out how do you get to those root problems, those core problems underneath the surface problems in your questions. Yeah, the question I'd ask you is, is what problem do the retail outlets have? And what problem and what are the ramifications? What are the consequences of the problems? Can you touch it? Let's do it. It just brings down a little bit of here. We tell outlets, they're trying to avoid another situation like they had during COVID where they had toilet paper and diapers missing from the supermarket, supermarket shelves. And they can resolve this with AI applied to inventory management supply chain, or the retail outlets have an oversupply of goods, because the purchasing manager got over-enthusiastic about the popularity of it. But item, and they're gathering dust. And there's the carrying costs involved. So there's a series of problems around that that I think we could start to narrow in on. But what is that one that really moves the retail outlets to try and look for alternative solutions and see software outsourcers as the solution? Yeah, no, you're on it. You're on the right track. You've got to find those use cases. You've got to get real clear about it. Sharon's talking about retail and inventory management, as an example of a category that sort of shows up in the idea of sort of time to market an inventory. You've just got to be better at evangelizing those problems than anybody else. And I want to say you, I mean, you and your client has to be. And so you have to be so crisp and so clear about both the problem as well as the ramification, the consequences of that problem, what it's costing the company both time, money, you might be emotional. There's all different types of consequences. You just got to go do that work. And that's the job of the category designer is to lead that. Just sort of in terms of how you might approach this, when we do our category design, especially on something this size, we send out essentially a survey to all of the exact team, many of the customers, investors, and analysts, and things like that. There's a bunch of questions that we ask. They're probably the ones that Mike Bruno was talking about. And we will come into the first session with maybe 150 responses and clusters of problems. And then we start a conversation about, OK, well, here's all the things that we found. These are the problem areas. Which ones are these? These are the really important ones. That's just the work that you, as a category designer, have to do. In the case of, say, Westcliffe, when everybody signs up, we ask them a series of questions. They're not just by happenstance. They're specifically questions about the problem and what this place means to you so that we can get at what it is that people are kind of missed, right? So that's your work. Go do that. Send out those surveys, get the information back, represent it in a way that people can understand visually, and then have a conversation with the exact team and say, OK, well, which one of these are the problem? And what we generally find is this the problem, the overarching one, then there's a whole series of use cases that show up on the NICTIT, which is exactly what it should happen. Fantastic. Thank you so much for your reply. Thanks for jumping in for Nando. Emily, I don't recognize you without your trademark hats. What's going on? Welcome to the deck. I have to watch my hair on occasion. So-- and this is actually like-- nobody ever sees my natural hair. So this is a really special event. So hey, thanks so much, guys. This is awesome to be here. Thanks for all you guys are doing. My question is actually very broad, and not so specific about my business, which is specialty headwear. But as you're talking about nonprofit and government and community, it really kind of sparked something that I'm working on with mission statements. So in those uprights is nonprofit, government, community, tech, CPG, which is what I'm in. If the goal is quick emotional connection, very personal connection, I've noticed a real lack of use of mission statements, not specifically in business, but specifically in a lot of category design businesses, have you also noticed that this is a really big miss of well-written, emotionally connected. And when I say well-written, we're in business to help people. We are missionary, not mercenary. Do you feel like this is a huge miss where they're really not connecting with people? Nobody's going to just immediately buy your book. Nobody is immediately, even though I have bought all your books. Thanks so much. How are we missing this boat here where we can write a short impactful statement, catch their attention and then buy into our business, or at least get educated about our businesses? If people don't feel the problem that you're evangelizing, what you write in a mission statements are relevant. What I'm kind of asking is how do we grab that attention through that mission statement? If we're not evangelizing, that is that short attention grabber. Not to catch your attention. What I'm saying to you is evangelize the problem, don't evangelize the mission. Right? So if you can get people, if you can speak to people and connect with them at a personal level about a problem that they feel, either they don't believe it can be solved, or maybe they've even thought about it as a problem, then people are sort of leaning forward. And in the point of view that we construct generally at what we call the back end, so the part where we transition into the solution, we will start out with a few statements like, we believe that we can solve this problem by XYZ, right? And that's the sort of the, if you like, your mission statement right there, we truly believe we can solve this problem with this kind of a solution. And so in that sense, it's part of the point of view, your mission statement is part of the point of view, that we believe are the, if you like, the mission statements. But I'm just counseling you to not use the mission statement as the starting point for the conversation. I'm just counseling to say, use the problem statement, the consequences that people feel as the starting point. Perfect. Thank you. I would segue on that too and say, you know, it's like your brand, right? Mission statement and brand are for you, right? The category point of view is for the market. And that's what's going to sway people's thinking. Yeah, I, I just have to come from it from two different angles because I'm talking Chrissy White mustache men in headwear who have never built my, the problem is that they've never built my headwear and that's why it doesn't exist. So I have no trouble connecting with the, you know, direct to consumer. They immediately recognize themselves. I have to get through to the white men who have never built hats for hair. So it's, I have to come at it to angles, but no, that's incredibly helpful. Thank you. Thank you, Emily. Michael, I think this is your first time on a call, man. Thanks for jumping in. It is. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Al, huge man and, and played bigger was instrumental in the acquisition of the company. I was recently a part of. So thank you. In many ways. My, my, my question for you, you alluded to earlier when you're working with nonprofits or with maybe less sophisticated or smaller organizations that don't have a large leadership team, the way that you simplify some of the terminology in the book. You mentioned earlier when you worked with a nonprofit, you didn't call it category design. You just spoke more literally to the problem you're solving. What are some ways you've engaged with different types of groups where that nomenclature wouldn't maybe fly and they'd say, I'm, I'm not getting it. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone, so when we first started play bigger, I'm talking 12 years ago now, the company, I think we all collectively thought that we would walk into the room and we would write the point of view for the organization, right? That's I think where our mindset was and that was the operator's mindset, right? That's what we used to do as CMOs and CEOs. We would have to write that for our company. What we have learned over the course of the last, particularly in the last five years is the powerful point of view is get built from the organizational, the community, okay? And so what you have to figure out is how do you approach, I gave you an example of the surveys that we used, literally hundreds of them before we start any kind of negateagement. How do you empower those individuals to be part of writing that point of view? And that work, that change management work, you feel like is really important because one of the things that we noticed in the sort of the first five or six years about business was maybe 30% of the category design work actually came to fruition. That is to say people actually did something with it. You're an example of one of those 30%. Thank you and congratulations. But 70% didn't somewhere along the line, it broke down, right? And so what we now understand, of course, is that that's about ownership, that's about engagement, that's about the individual's feeling part of the writing of this thing, or the creation of this category, right? And what I'd say to you is, is that focus on that, as a category designer, focus on how you do that, whether it's a small series that a sort of company, make sure that all of the people are engaged in the conversation and have no ownership on what's right. Like that's the thing that we've learned, is like, look, there's some great horses out there. They anyone can write one of these point of views. That's really not the skill. The skill is how does the organization own it? How do they be part of the creation? And so a lot of our work over the course of the last five years that are saying is about learning to do what we call collaborative intelligence, getting people engaged in and working on the process of creating this point of view from the ground up, from within the organization. That would be how I would approach it in your case. - Awesome, thank you. - Yeah, just a second, that Michael, to what you said, I'll have done this internally, you know, as a CMO and have learned externally. And you're absolutely right, that it's the process of allowing people to disagree and debate and get that behind them that's so valuable, 'cause even if the outcome doesn't reflect their unique, their specific criticism, they at least have that voice. And now it doesn't come up six months later and that work gets undermined and then second-guess and we're redoing it again and now you've wasted all this time. So I'm really glad that you asked that question, Michael, and thanks for that response Alex. It just hits on so many reasons why that process is so key. - Yeah, and I was gonna say in response to that, one of the lessons that we, one of the things that we, one of the tools that we've used successfully to sort of get people part of this is, we're working with a company called CloudFlip, a phenomenal company, public company, large company. So all of the classic sort of like, you can't do category design for that sort of thing. And what we understood going into this, having done it a few times before with public companies is that unless the entire exec team and the layer underneath them are fully engaged in this thing, it ain't gonna go, it's gonna be a branding exercise or a new website or whatever else. All those things are important, but they're not part of this whole thing. And we do this thing where we say, a successful session for us is, we get if the range of response is absolutely terrible, hate it as a negative one, and this is fantastic as a positive one, we only want the negative one, a positive one, we don't want the zeros, right? So you have to, this is a little bit of us learning our craft and us learning and being comfortable in our own skins is like, I don't care if it's a minus one or a plus one, right? I just want it to be either of those, because if it's a minus one, in the case of Cloudflare, when we first put what we call the null hypothesis in front of them, which was the point of view based off of everybody's input, the CEO said, "This might be the worst POV I've ever seen." And we said, fantastic, what's wrong with it? And out of his mouth came exactly what was wrong with it, right? So that's the beauty of this is if, and of course he was right, the way he expressed it was so powerful, then we were like, okay, we just answered your own question. And the whole room was like, at one point in time, it was like terrified that you had this conversation, like this is the worst piece of work I've ever seen. And then within 10 minutes, everyone's like, oh my God, that is it, right? And we didn't write it. And that was the beautiful thing. - Yeah, nice. - It's tough. All right, we got two more questions. Monica wrote hers in for the sake of brevity, but a habit here in case she wants to add any kind of context. She asks, how do I get innovative idealists that are looking to save the world thinking in these terms? I'm assuming she means thinking in this like adjacent possible problem kind of like terminology, right, Monica? - If I interpret that correctly, then those innovative idealists, we need to connect them with a problem that they truly are passionate about and that they can do something about, or want to do something about. That's sort of the connection point. So survey a hundred of those innovative idealists, understand what problem in this day think is the biggest issue in the world or to their domain or in an area or a department or something like that, and get at it. Like literally get at it, get it in front of them and have them connect with that problem and refine it. And then once you've done that, they've been engaged in the definition of the problem either front of the point of view and the consequences, then you can move into the solution. But don't go to the solution before you got a new agreement on the problem. - Thank you, Monica. All right, thank you for your question. Rob, close this out, buddy. - All right, first thank you all for taking time. Question is around having one category versus multiple. So since we've been discussing surface level problems versus maybe a root problem, how would you say I should view creating a category? Is it for the one specific problem that people are the most passionate about and then maybe when there's another one, create another category for that or can you have one category and then tie all of the superficial surface level ones to the root problem category? - That's a great question. That is a really great question. And I'm glad we're sort of talking about this. So Microsoft has many categories that it's in. Amazon has many categories that are in. And if you think about it, there's solving different problems for different people. So the Amazon online store is solving a problem for more generally the people, whereas AWS is solving a very specific problem for IT and technology guys. And there's other problems that they solve, right? So just be okay with the fact that when you become large and when you become sort of like a multi-faceted organization, you are going to be in a number of different categories. Your job of course is to try and as a CEO of someone like Amazon is to try and bring all of those things together to make sense of the Uber problem. What I'd say for companies that are smaller is the same thing happens. In the case of one of the companies that working with today, there's an Uber problem. And then there's a series of departmental problems which are expressions of that problem as it relates to that domain. So there's a sales problem, there's a procurement problem, there's a line up, there's a human resources problem, there's a legal problem, there's various problems at that level, but they all connect into this bigger problem in this particular case. And so again, you understanding which level you're talking at or where the problems at is really important, right? Because it does give you that sort of perspective. And what I would say is I haven't seen a really successful point of view that doesn't have a second tier of problems expressed in the form of use case kind of problems. That's where it really really goes. And if you think about it, there's three really important levels within an enterprise and I'm learning about that in the community as well. There's the sea level problem, there's the manager level problem, and then there's the individual level problem the people who are using or doing stuff, right? Those things have to be derivative of the sort of the higher level thing, but each one of them is going to be slightly different. So getting alignment between all of those things and making sure that's crafted into the point of view is part of your job as a category design. - Okay, it helps. I have more of a fault. I have another follow up question. I'm not sure how much time we have. So if we have time. - Oh, you got time? - Yeah, I got time. Sure. - One more. - Okay, so I guess I just, I'll just use our cases as an example, so it's more clear. So I've categorized the overarching category as digital rights network, so it enables people to, well, individuals and businesses to guarantee or enforce their right to privacy, data security, spam free, or spam free communication, et cetera, and there's over 20 different rights. So that's the overarching one, but when you apply that to maybe the advertising industry, then it causes a disruption there. So this is where I'm trying to figure out, do I say we have a category, a new creating, we're creating a new category of a different type of digital rights advertising, and we solve a privacy problem, data privacy, or do I just say we have a digital rights network that is solving digital rights and then here's how you can use it in advertising and email on social media, et cetera. Yeah, great, great, great question. So what I'd start with is I get the sort of taxonomy around rights bill. You said that there's 20 different forms of rights, right? So you have to be the, you have to be the expert on the scope of what rights actually mean, right? And you talked about sort of privacy. You talked about, you know, content, whatever it might be, right? So start with that. That's where you're going to start. The next piece is cool, cool. And I'd love to see it too centered to me. And I'll happily give you feedback. On the vertical piece of this, the industry kind of verticals advertising industry, large enterprises, IT, financial, whatever it might be, each one of those is going to have a slightly different version of the point of view or the go-to market at that point, because it's going to be speaking in language to them. That was the example I was using for the sales department, procurement department, human resources department, right? And then the ramifications, the consequences of that problem in that world and the solutions-lash benefits are all going to be tailored to each one of those, particularly use cases or verticals. So do all that work. And it should sit underneath this idea that rights are out of hand, the digital world is completely and all that sort of thing. And that, you know, we have to solve that because if we don't for, you know, each one of these verticals, there are these different sort of consequences. Hook that helps and I'd be, like I said, I'd be happy to sort of look at the work and send you any feedback. Awesome. I'll add to that, Al. Kevin and I coined a term that we now use on almost every project and that's directed POVs. And so we do the main POV. We don't let the individual pieces get in the way. We try to nail the big one. And then if they say, oh, we're a B2B2C company. We got four different personas we deal with. Then after we're done the main piece, you work on the directed POVs. And they're just so much more powerful. Anyway, guys, this is awesome. I am so psyched that we got together for this one. It was so moving to hear so many people talk about helping community nonprofits, the environment. And Al, you're a leader in the field. And you're a mentor to so many people, including myself. I so appreciate you giving us the time today. We really appreciate it. Been great to meet everybody. And our job is to share our collective knowledge and experiences that I'm learning every day. Happening for the last 20 years. And be happy to reach out and talk to anyone at any time. So think of me as being there and happy to help. Yeah, thanks for being here, Al. This was great. Thanks, guys. Thank you, Al. Here you go. Another conversation designed to help you think like a category designer. Please support our sponsors, categorydesignadvisors.com, and be the stage.live. Because they're the ones foot in the bill for this thing. So you can enjoy it. But more than anything, we'd love to hear from you, whether it's in our community. Or if you could leave us a review for this podcast if you're enjoying this thing, subscribe to it. Hit five stars. Let us know what you think. We can really, really use that. And don't forget, stop just listening to this thing. 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