For mid-stage startups and established companies

Strategic category design creates and helps orchestrate a business strategy that vaults your company to the level of elite, high-growth home runs. It is a transformational process that leads your team to key decisions and epiphanies. It launches your company on a shared mission to develop and win a new market category. The result is an inspiring, strategic North Star – a beacon that attracts talent, investment and customers. And it gets you there quickly and efficiently. We understand that you don’t have time to waste.

The work can be highly valuable at many different critical moments for a company – for instance, when seeking investment or going public; when stuck in a crowded category with a need to differentiate; when building on recent successes to create a future vision and more expansive category. Category design can align and strengthen a leadership team, reinvigorate an established company’s strategy, win analysts’ attention and give a company a powerful sales and marketing narrative.

When engaged in a full project, CDA works hands-on with your leadership team to discover the right category, capture it in a Point of View (POV) narrative, sell the story internally and come up with a plan to take the category to market.

The most intensive part of the process requires CDA and the leadership team to meet live for two full-day workshops within a week.

How It Works

Pre-Workshop:

Prior to the modules, your team should have read the book Play Bigger and supporting materials. On our end, we absorb background material about your company, industry and category. We will also review a questionnaire that the attendees will complete and then interview the team further helping us understand your company and current category thinking.

Module 1: Category Design Discovery and POV Writing

Attendees: 6 to 12 members of the company leadership team and 2 to 3 CDA partners.

Workshop: We lead a discussion about the problem you solve, what a solution to that problem should look like, what category that might create, and why you are the company that should create that category.

We then sketch out how we can capture that conversation in a POV – a narrative of 800 to 1,000 words. The POV is intended to become your internal manifesto about the category and how you want to shape it, which in turn will inform strategy, product direction, investor decks, marketing messages, sales pitches and other aspects of the company.

CDA then takes a day between the workshops to write the POV.

Days 2 and 3: CDA Work Sessions

Participants: The same members of the company leadership team and CDA partners.

Workshop: CDA presents the POV we developed to your team in order to provoke deeper thinking and discussion about the strategic direction and how to frame it. Over the course of the day, all of us together drive toward a version of the POV that your team unanimously gets behind and believes in.

Your team will leave the workshop with a POV that captures the category strategy and a renewed sense of purpose.

Post-Workshop: POV Refinement and Category-Defining Essay

At this point, we work primarily with the CEO to tighten the screws on the last bits of the POV, making it ready for roll-out to the rest of the company.

We then work with the CEO to develop an essay, based on the POV, that can become a first blog post or public-facing article announcing and explaining the category.

Virtual Workshop: Mobilization

Participants: Key leaders who will be involved in taking the category to market, usually including the CEO, CMO, head of sales and others in similar roles.

Virtual Workshop: We lead a brainstorming session and act as guides to help your team start making plans to roll out the category internally and externally.

Ongoing Advisory Services

When a company pays us partly in equity, helping the company get to a good category outcome over the long term is in our best interests. Your team can tap us for category design discussions and advice at any time.