Play Bigger: How Rebels and Innovators Create New Categories and Dominate Markets

by Al Ramadan

A company that best frames a problem is the company that often comes to define and take the category.

In grocery stores, you can sense that Whole Foods has a clear POV, built around healthy gourmet products, while Safeway seems to have no POV at all other than selling groceries. Southwest Airlines has a palpable POV; United Airlines does not. Apple has a POV; Microsoft does not.

Tableau saw a from/to in the making. It could take enterprise customers from expensive and complex products to much more visual, simple, elegant software.

What's our from / to

We can’t emphasize enough how important it is to write down this story. A lot of founders and CEOs have a POV in their heads—and then it stays there, expressed only when they speak, leaving others on the team to try to interpret the POV for themselves.

Everyone in the organization has to work from the same exact POV. And the only way that will happen is if the POV is written down, massaged, reworked, and fought over until a rock-solid version gets agreed upon by the leadership team.

Witness SAP’s “Run simple,” or Microsoft’s “Where do you want to go today?” Both are POV-free and mean nothing.

You have to know how to clearly state the problem you’re solving before you can describe your solution. Macromedia stated that a bad Internet experience equaled bad business, so bad experiences need to be addressed (by Macromedia’s products, of course). Sensity is showing cities that old streetlights are dumb, wasteful, and a problem to be fixed. Origami is saying that marketers don’t know what happened today.

Remember what we said earlier: whoever frames the problem best has the best chance of winning the category.

The initial purpose of the POV is to condition the market to understand the problem and demand a solution.

A POV does no good sitting static on a Web page or orphaned on someone’s hard drive. Salesforce made laminated cards to give to every employee. Some companies present a POV at an all-hands event, or smaller team meetings. Don’t just send it out in a cc:all email. A POV has to be actively evangelized by the CEO and her leadership team.

Early on in the life of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg would talk about a grand ambition of connecting everyone in the world on his platform, but that suit would’ve been way too large for the young company. The early POV was built around connecting college students, while Zuckerberg kept the grand vision in his pocket until the time was right to make it the institutional POV.

As Christensen pointed out in Innovator’s Dilemma, listening to customers leads you to constantly build better, but never to build different. And different is what creates new categories.

If you articulate the problem well, people will assume you know how to solve it.

After all, you’re trying to rearrange synapses in people’s brains so they can’t help but see the problem you define, and think of you as its solution.