Before you run ads. Before you build funnels. Before you hire a marketing agency or spin up an AI content engine. You need to answer a more basic question:
What category are you actually in?
That was the real subtext of the Category Design panel that opened the Strike Marketing Summit. Not “how do we market better,” but what game are we playing in the first place?
What struck me during that conversation wasn’t that any one idea was revolutionary. It’s that the same ideas kept resurfacing from different angles, different careers, and different use cases.
That’s usually a signal.
So instead of recapping the panel speaker by speaker, I want to do something more useful here: distill the discussion into 10 category design takeaways—the kind that change how you make decisions before you touch marketing.
1. Category design is a business strategy, not a marketing tactic
This is the misconception that causes most of the downstream confusion.
People hear “category design” and think messaging. Or positioning. Or branding.
That’s marketing.
Category design is upstream of all of that. It’s the strategic decision about:
What problem matters
Who it matters to
How the market should think differently because you exist
As Kevin Maney made clear during the panel, marketing operates inside a category. Category design determines whether the category exists at all - and on whose terms.
Get this wrong and marketing becomes cosmetic.
2. If you don’t design the category, you inherit one by default
No company starts from a blank slate.
If you don’t actively decide what category you’re in, the market will decide for you -usually by lumping you into the closest existing box.
And inherited categories come with inherited constraints:
Comparison to incumbents
Feature-level differentiation
Pressure to compete on price or volume
That’s not a marketing problem. That’s a strategic one.
3. Categories live in the mind, not in the product
Founders love to talk about what their product does. Clients care about the problem the product solves. And they want a mental model to remember how to solve their problem.
Categories don’t exist in roadmaps or feature sets. They exist in the way buyers mentally organize the world. If there’s no mental slot for what you do, customers literally don’t know how to choose you.
And if the slot exists, but was defined by someone else, you’ll always be measured by the wrong criteria.
4. Market comes before problem, and problem comes before product
This is one of the hardest inversions for founders to internalize. We’re taught to chase product–market fit. But that framing assumes:
The market already exists
The problem is already defined
Your job is to wedge your product into it
Category designers flip the sequence: market → problem → product
They start by asking: What’s changing in the world? Who is affected by that change? What new problem exists because of it?
Only then does the product make sense.
5. Context matters more than innovation alone
Most founders over-index on innovation. New features. New tech. New capabilities. But innovation without context rarely creates a category.
Context explains why now. Why the market is ready. Why the old way no longer works. Why this problem suddenly matters.
Without context, innovation looks like a nice-to-have. With context, it becomes inevitable.
6. The “missing” is where leverage lives
One of the most useful parts of the panel discussion was the emphasis on what’s missing.
Not what’s broken. Not what’s inefficient. What’s missing because the world changed.
That missing piece is what gives a category its pull. It’s what makes buyers say, “I didn’t have language for this, but yes, that’s it!”
If you can clearly articulate what’s missing, you’ve done most of the hard work already.
7. Language creates traction before traction is visible
Category design doesn’t show up first as revenue or pipeline. It shows up as language.
People start repeating your framing. They use your terms unprompted. You hear your words coming back to you in conversations, on social media, at conferences.
As Pablo Gonzalez pointed out, categories don’t spread because of titles or taglines. They spread because of repeatable lines: phrases that feel obvious once you hear them.
That’s when you know something is working, even if the numbers haven’t caught up yet.
8. Books, summits, and media are category tools, not growth hacks
This came up implicitly throughout the panel. Books don’t create categories because they sell copies. Summits don’t create categories because they generate leads.
They work because they:
Force clarity of point of view
Educate the market at scale
Give language somewhere to live
Used this way, media becomes a key component of category design.
9. Category design feels slow… until it suddenly compounds
This is where most founders give up. Early category work looks like:
Naming problems
Refining language
Educating instead of selling
Explaining ideas that feel “obvious” to you but not yet to the market
Then something shifts. Prospects show up already aligned. Competitors start borrowing your words. The market snaps into focus.
By the time it looks like momentum, the work has already been done.
10. Category design can’t be delegated (only shepherded)
You can hire marketers. You can outsource execution. You can use AI to amplify. But category design itself can’t be handed off.
It requires judgment. Trade-offs. Commitment. And the willingness to say no to easier paths.
That makes it a leadership responsibility, not a marketing task.
Final thought
Everything downstream - marketing, sales, content, even product - gets easier once the category is clear. But nothing downstream can fix a category decision you never made.
That’s why we opened the Strike Marketing Summit with this panel. And that’s why every founder should understand these ideas before they do any marketing.
If you want to hear the full conversation, including the nuance and debate behind these takeaways, I strongly recommend watching the Category Design panel from the summit.
Everything else builds on this foundation. And that was very much intentional.
Super useful! I've seen this play out in practice as well, and very good reminders. Now to define our category before it's defined for us. Thanks!