Most companies that reach out to Mike Damphousse, the Co-Founder of Category Design Advisors, believe they have a messaging problem. Standing out has gotten harder as tech companies, and even non-tech ones, describe themselves as AI companies. When everyone leads with the same claim, differentiation takes more than better wording. In this episode of #shifthappens, he explains why that diagnosis is almost always wrong, and why the companies people remember are the ones that defined a category rather than competed inside one.
The conversation traces how category design moved from a marketing idea to a company-wide discipline, what goes into building a category point of view, and why the answer to a crowded market isn't a sharper description of what you do but a clearer definition of what you are.
Why "Better" Is the Wrong Word
Mike puts it bluntly: if it ends in "-er," you're using the wrong words. Better, faster, brighter — every one of them is a comparison, and everyone drops a company into a frame someone else already built.
He describes a recent office hours call with the founder of Fling Golf, a sport where players launch a golf ball down the course lacrosse-style. The founder explained the entire concept by comparing it to golf. Mike told him to stop comparing and start explaining what problem the sport solves and why it's different.
This matters because comparison changes what people do with the information. Play Bigger, the book that introduced category design, makes the point through a Mike Tyson analogy: Describe who you are before someone tattoos it on your face. Once the market labels you, every conversation turns into a side-by-side evaluation.
The Story That Defines the Category
Mike and his business partner, Kevin Maney, spent a decade turning category design from theory into a repeatable method, which is the work Category Design Advisors does today. Category Design Advisors runs companies through workshops that Mike calls sequencing the DNA. The output is a category point of view, a strategic narrative that establishes the foundation of a category, introduces its language, and sets its rules.
Most companies are surprised by what the narrative leaves out. The brand and the product don't appear until the very end, and even then they read more like closing credits than a pitch.
Mike walks through the structure, which he traces back to the storyline the Greeks were using thousands of years ago. Name the villain first, he says. For Uber, that villain was the taxi experience. Naming it gives people a concrete reason to remember why they're considering an alternative at all. From there, he introduces the solution, then the benefits of that solution, which is the category itself.
He points to Apple as a company that ran this playbook before the vocabulary existed, calling Steve Jobs a natural category designer. The 1984 ad never argued that its computers were faster. It cast conformity as the villain and positioned creative individuals as the people the product was built for.
The sequence works, Mike explains, because of a cognitive bias called the anchoring effect. The first version of a story someone hears is the one that sticks, so the company that introduces the narrative first holds that anchor going forward.
What It Takes to Lead a Category
Mike outlines where companies need to focus if they want to move from competing on features to owning a category.
Replace Comparison with Clear Positioning
Comparison is the default because it's the fastest way to get someone from confused to oriented. It also hands the frame to a competitor. Instead of positioning against alternatives, explain the problem you solve and why your approach differs, so people reach a choice rather than a ranking.
Mike illustrates it with a hypothetical boat-share service in a canal community. The weak version compares itself to Uber. The strong version explains that residents can sit in traffic or step onto a water taxi. Same service, but people understand it differently.
Turn Category Design into Company Strategy
The first call almost always comes from a CMO. Mike listens, then asks for the CEO, because the work doesn't stop at messaging. Completed category design shapes product direction, hiring criteria, and the ethics underneath how a business operates. He doesn't hedge on this: if the CEO isn't driving it, the initiative won't hold.
Establish a Category Point of View
The category point of view is what makes the rest of the work possible. It defines the problem, introduces the language, sets the rules of the category, and frames the solution before the product is named. Done well, it gives an entire organization one narrative to operate from rather than talking points that drift by department.
Use AI as Support
Mike puts it this way: announcing that you're an AI company today is like announcing you were an electricity company a century ago. It's infrastructure, and it's a tool. As a limited partner at a VC firm, he sees pitch decks where the only compelling thing is the word AI on every page. Crypto occupied that slot a few years ago. Sustainability claims occupied it before that. AI belongs inside the story as a capability, not as the reason a company matters.
His own team ran into this while building an AI version of their methodology for the companies they can't take on. The model defaulted to jargon and comparative language immediately, and they had to train it toward clearer phrasing.
Simplify the Story to Drive Decisions
A category point of view should land with someone who has no idea what a company does. That rules out jargon and most metaphors, because leaning on a metaphor forces the listener into a comparison by design.
He and Maney aim for what they call a universal truth. Telling someone it's a nice day is an opinion. Pointing at a clear sky and an 82-degree afternoon is something they can't argue with. Guide people to form the conclusion themselves, and it holds far better than being told.
When Someone Else Already Owns the Category
Mike shares that of the roughly 200 companies Category Design Advisors speaks with each year, the firm takes on five. He adds that the most common thing he has to tell someone on a call is that they're chasing a category another company already leads.
That isn't a dead end, and Zoom is the example he returns to. It launched into a market that already had GoToMeeting and a field of desktop-sharing tools, where video was a small piece that rarely worked well. Mike credits Founder and CEO of Zoom, Eric Yuan, with making video the starting point, then adds two moves he calls brilliant: naming it after a verb and offering a 40-minute free tier that fits neatly against the default 30-minute calendar invite. By his account, Zoom still doesn't hold the largest share of desktop conferencing, and it's still the name people reach for.
He points to Uber's original business plan as the other side of it, a screenshot of small cars moving across a map with a pickup pin. In his telling, the ride-share apps that followed still look like that screenshot, which is what he means when he talks about setting the rules of a category.
The conversation ends closer to where it started. The companies calling Mike think the problem is how they're describing themselves. His answer is that the harder question is what they are, and that's not something a rewrite can solve.
Soundtrack of Shift
Mike picked "Loser" by Beck, and he ties it directly to category design. The thing you don't want, he says, is your company being constantly compared to others. His read on the song is that if you can't beat the old way, you refuse it and create your own.
Explore more soundtracks shaping how leaders approach change and transformation today.
Episode Resources
#shifthappens Research: 2026 State of AI
#shifthappens Insights:
- Securing Cloud Collaboration in the Age of AI
- AI and Brand Identity: What Happens When No One Owns the Voice
- Pause Before You Pivot: Why Strategic Slowing Builds Stronger Leadership
#shifthappens Podcasts:
- AI is a Copilot, Not an Autopilot
- Information Management Foundation for Human-AI Collaboration
- How to Lead in the Age of AI
Dux Raymond Sy on LinkedIn
Mike Damphousse on LinkedIn
Category Design Advisors website
Play Bigger book
