Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp)
October 27, 2022
AI Summary
5 min readBarbra Gago shares lessons from her marketing leadership at Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, and Culture Amp, focusing on creating new categories and building brands that drive growth without heavy ad spend.
Defining and Creating Categories
Gago explains category creation as establishing a new market space where your product becomes the default solution, rather than competing in crowded ones. She outlines steps: identify unmet needs through customer pain points, craft a simple narrative that reframes the problem (e.g., shifting from "HR software" to "people enablement"), and use content like blogs and talks to educate the market. At Culture Amp, they created the "employee experience" category by publishing research that highlighted feedback loops over traditional surveys, gaining first-mover advantage.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: No Guest**
- 2 (01:15) **Recent Market Volatility**
- 3 (07:42) **Federal Reserve Rate Decision**
- 4 (14:28) **Tech Sector Earnings Preview**
- 5 (22:10) **Geopolitical Risks**
- 6 (29:55) **Crypto Market Update**
- 7 (36:18) **Listener Q&A**
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Barbra Gago is the founder and CEO of Pando, where she’s democratizing career progression. Previously she worked as the Chief Marketing Officer and Global Head of Marketing at Miro, where she helped create an entirely new software category for the space, and also served as VP of Marketing at Greenhouse, where she led go-to-market strategy. In today’s episode, we cover three main topics: category creation, branding and rebranding, and building opinionated software. Barbra discusses how she was able to rebrand Miro and launch a whole new category—and why her attempt to do that at Greenhouse failed. We cover the benefits of building your own category, and when it makes sense to do so and when it doesn’t. She also shares the importance of getting to know your users, why a great brand is informed by its values, and why Pando is built in an opinionated way.
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Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/category-creation-and-brand-building-barbra-gago-pando-miro-greenhouse-culture-amp/#transcript
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Where to find Barbra Gago:
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/barbragago
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbragago
• Pando: https://www.pando.com/
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
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Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:
• AssemblyAI: https://www.assemblyai.com/?utm_source=lennyspodcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=oct27
• Stytch: https://stytch.com/lenny
• Vanta: https://vanta.com/lenny
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Referenced:
• G2: https://g2.com/
• Software Advice: https://www.softwareadvice.com/
• Marketo: https://www.marketo.com/
• HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/
• Gainsight: More from this podcast