Category Design: A Voyage Toward Belief

In 2016, four authors published a book that changed how many founders thought about markets.

The book was called Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets.

Its premise was simple and provocative:

• The most valuable companies don’t compete in markets.
• They create them.

For decades, business strategy had focused on competition—how to position against rivals, how to capture share, how to optimize execution. Play Bigger flipped the conversation.

The real question wasn’t how to compete better.

• It was how to design a new category you can lead.

The book introduced the idea of Category Design, a discipline that aligns product, company, and Point of View to define a new market and become its leader.

For founders and investors, it explained something many had observed but never fully articulated: the companies that create categories capture the majority of the economic value.

But like any good idea, Category Design didn’t stop evolving when the book was published.

In fact, that was just the beginning.

The Band Splits Up

When Play Bigger was written, the authors often joked that writing it felt like being in a band.

Each person brought a different perspective—strategy, storytelling, research, and experience from years of category design work.

And like many bands, after the first album, the members began exploring different directions.

Not because the original idea was wrong but because it opened the door to deeper questions.

Over the last decade, three new books emerged from the original authors, each pushing the thinking forward in a different way.

Route One: Operationalizing Category Creation

The Category Design Formula by Kevin Maney, et al explores a question founders ask constantly:

How do you actually find and build a category?

Their work focuses on making category creation more systematic.

They frames category discovery as a pattern:

• Context + Missing + Innovation

When technology, regulation, or behavior changes (context), something important becomes absent in the market (missing). A company that fills that gap through innovation can define a new category.

This work moves Category Design from theory toward repeatable practice, giving founders and investors a framework for recognizing when a new market opportunity is emerging.

Route Two: Category Design for Individuals

Creator Capitalist by Christopher Lochhead, et al takes the idea in another direction entirely.

Christopher applies Category Design to individuals.

In the digital economy, creators (founders, thinkers, builders) can design categories around themselves.

Instead of competing for attention in crowded markets, a Creator Capitalist defines a new niche and becomes its leading voice.

This perspective expands Category Design from companies to people, recognizing that individuals can now shape markets in ways that once required large organizations.

Route Three: The Physics of Markets

A third direction explores something deeper.

The Existing Market Trap by Al Ramadan, et al examines why so many companies fail to create new markets in the first place.

The insight is simple but profound:

• Markets are not defined by products or technologies.
• They are defined by belief.

Companies become trapped when they accept the existing market’s assumptions. Escaping that trap requires changing what people believe about the problem and the future.

This work reframes Category Design as part of a broader system, the process by which belief forms inside companies and then spreads through markets.

The Deeper Pattern

Viewed together, these three books reveal something important.

They are not competing interpretations of Category Design., they are different lenses on the same phenomenon.

• One focuses on how categories are discovered.
• One focuses on how individuals create them.
• One focuses on the belief systems that allow them to exist.

Together they expand the original idea into something larger.

From Categories to Belief Systems

The emerging insight is that markets are not simply collections of products or buyers.

Markets are powered by belief systems.

Before a new market (and product category) exists, a new belief must take hold.

• Inside the company first.
• Then in the market.

Only after that does the category appear.

This realization reframes Category Design as a stage in a broader journey: the formation and propagation of belief.

The Next Horizon

When Polynesian wayfinders crossed the Pacific, they navigated by stars and ocean swells long before land appeared on the horizon.

They knew the island was there because the signals told them so.

The evolution of Category Design feels like a similar journey to me.

Play Bigger revealed that companies could design markets.

The next wave of thinking is revealing how belief shapes those markets in the first place.

The island is not fully visible yet but the signals are there.

And the voyage continues and our hope is the next generation carries this even further.