04 Your category creation
Category Creation & Positioning
Can you name and own the new category AI is creating, before the market crystallises around someone else's definition?
Every deep architectural shift in the AI era moves value toward a new control layer - and whoever names that layer first owns the category around it. Most companies fail despite creating a defensible and counterpositioned architecture by remaining stuck in a non-differentiated narrative - getting filed under a crowded existing category despite having the ability to define your own.
Define the new game - or compete in someone else's.
▍ A quick check
Early signs.
- Commodity language - a distinctive architecture keeps getting reduced to “unified platform” or “AI + data + workflows.”
- Wrong category - you're positioned in a crowded existing bucket rather than one you define.
- Benefit-led messaging - structural commitments stay invisible behind universal benefits.
- No negative frame - you can't say “we are this, therefore we are not that.”
If two or more land, this is likely your question.
▍ The argument underneath
Why this matters.
If you read one section, read this. The argument the engagement is built on, from the ground up.
- 01
Every architectural shift moves value to a new layer
When the underlying architecture of an industry shifts, value moves toward a new control layer - and the market needs language for that layer before it can recognise or reward it. The window to supply that language is short. It closes when the narrative crystallises around someone else's definition.
- 02
Category creation = new value unit + new coordination
Map any move on two axes: the unit of value (existing or new) and the coordination mechanism (existing or new). Familiar unit, familiar coordination is incremental optimisation. Change one and you get system rewiring or economic reframing. Change both and you reach economic invention - the only quadrant where a genuinely new category is created.
- 03
Structural uniqueness, narrative genericness
The common failure is a firm that is structurally unique but narratively generic - an uncopyable architecture described in copyable language. Category creation is the work of making structural advantage recognisable and defensible in the market, so the architecture and the narrative finally match.
▍ The work itself
Our work together.
4 phases. Each builds on the last - from analysis to a blueprint you can act on.
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Define the new game
Run a first-principles analysis of how AI reshapes the system of work, identify the category the market needs but lacks language for, and classify the structural elements that make it function and defendable.
Deliverable A category discovery analysis, an ecosystem map, and a category logic defining where to lead, enable, shape, and enforce.
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Articulate the category logic
Architect the category before it is marketed: develop end-state scenarios, create category-native operating logics buyers can adopt, and validate the enabling stack against initial boundaries.
Deliverable A category operating system - end-states, operating logics, and a category boundary map.
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Lock in the category
Make the category economically and strategically unavoidable: stress-test it against adjacent frames, design the boundary posture, and align pricing and incentives so boundary violations become economically unattractive.
Deliverable A control-point and defensibility report, a boundary posture map, and a category economic architecture.
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Shape the market
A category exists only when the market agrees it exists. Translate one invariant category architecture into stakeholder-specific narratives - and map what counts as proof for each audience.
Deliverable Category narratives by stakeholder and an alignment guide so analysts, investors, customers, and partners converge on one definition.
▍ A recent engagement
Project management software
Category creation + competitive counterpositioning
Worked with a large project management software company in a market dominated by phase-specific, discipline-specific execution tools. Each major SaaS player owned a walled garden inside one slice of the project lifecycle - estimating, scheduling, procurement, field execution, closeout - but the things that determined whether a complex project succeeded, was financeable, and was invoiceable lived across those silos, not inside any one of them. AI made it possible to translate and coordinate across the gardens. We helped the client architect a category that played across the walled gardens rather than inside one: a coordination layer that validated, verified, and governed complex projects end-to-end, while leaving phase execution to the existing tool players. On the Category Creation 2×2, this moved the client out of the system-rewiring quadrant (familiar value unit, new coordination) and into the economic-invention quadrant - a new value unit (the governed, financeable project as a whole) coordinated through a new mechanism (AI translation across every execution tool).
▸ The shift
Outcome. Defined a category that incumbent execution-tool players cannot match without abandoning the walled-garden architecture that earned them their position. The client now sits as the validation, verification, and governance layer that makes a complex project financeable, invoiceable, and accountable end-to-end - a category competitors must route through, not imitate.
Let's discuss further.
If this question is in front of your team, the next step is a short call to scope it. Tell us what you're working through and we'll figure out together whether this is the right place to start.
Let's set up a call▍ Or read first
Further reading.
Short essays from the Reshuffle series that build the argument behind this work.