Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp)

When you're building a category, you need to make sure that there is a category that's validated by analysts and directory sites and things like that. But also, you want to have a lot of traction in terms of thought leadership, like why is this the category, what are the unique kind of value propositions of this particular thing, what are the pain points it solves? And then, of course, getting a lot of content around, because when you're generating a new category, you're also needing to educate buyers that there is a category that they can now budget for and why they should allocate budget for that. (instrumental music)

Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny, and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today my guest is Barbara Gago. Barbara was chief marketing officer and global head of marketing at Miro, where she helped build their global brand and create a whole new software category for the space. Before that, she was VP of marketing at Greenhouse, where she brought the product to market and led their go-to-market strategy. And she was also head of marketing at Culture Amp, where she helped build their go-to-market plan and close their first 50 customers. In our conversation, we focus on three topics: creating your own category, when it makes sense to explore that, when to avoid it, and how to go about it; building your brand and rebranding when it makes sense to; and building opinionated software. I've never seen a post or podcast get as deep into category creation or rebranding, and I'm confident that you will learn something valuable from this podcast. With that, I bring you Barbara Gago. This episode is brought to you by AssemblyAI. If you're looking to build powerful AI-powered features in your audio or video products, then you need to know about AssemblyAI. AssemblyAI is the API platform for state-of-the-art AI models that thousands of product-led growth companies like Spotify, Loom, and CallRail are using to infuse AI into their products. With simple APIs, developers and PMs can get access to powerful AI models for transcription, summarization, and dozens of other tasks that are fast, secure, and production-ready. All their models are researched and trained in-house and continuously updated by their team of AI experts, which, for a PM, makes it easy to build and shift new AI-powered features. Product teams at startups and enterprises are using AssemblyAI to automatically transcribe and summarize phone calls and virtual meetings, detect topics in podcasts, pinpoint when sensitive content is spoken, redact PII from audio videos, and way more. Visit assemblyai.com to try AssemblyAI's API for free and start testing their models in their no-code playground. That's assemblyai.com. Do you want to reduce friction in your onboarding flow? Then let me tell you about Stytch, and that's Stytch with a Y. Stytch is on a mission to eliminate friction from the internet. They're starting by making user authentication and onboarding more seamless and more secure. They offer super flexible, out-of-the-box authentication solutions for companies of all sizes. From email magic links to SMS passcodes, one-tap social logins to even biometrics, Stytch is your all-in-one platform for authentication. Stytch customers have been able to increase conversion by over 60% after spending just one day integrating, and with their API and SDKs, you can improve user conversion and retention and security, all while saving valuable engineering time. Your engineers will come and thank you for using Stytch, because Stytch keeps you from having to build authentication in-house and the integration process is super fast and super smooth. To get $1,000 in free credits, just go to stytch.com/lenny to sign up, and that's Stytch with a Y. (instrumental music) Barbara, welcome to the podcast.