In a separate article, I listed some popular strategy development tools. Many of them leave the user to wrap their own process around them. (I wrote about how I’ve built a process around McKinsey’s Three Horizons model). So, let me talk about an existing process that I think is the most useful in strategy development: Category Design. I use it with clients that are either a start-up firm or an established firm looking for their next growth business. The objective is to design a new product category that the firm can dominate and grow.

Here are three (of many) reasons for my choice. First, the process starts strongly by asking: ‘What is the specific customer problem that we hope to solve?’. Legendary marketer Christopher Lochhead co-authored the category design process. My favourite Lochhead phrase is: “Marketing is Sales at scale”. A great salesperson asks good questions, listens, understands, and plays back. They aim to identify and articulate a painful, unsolved problem that they can solve for their customer. The category design process does the same thing at scale. It identifies and frames a common, painful, unsolved problem.

Second, the process makes excellent use of timeless, proven, strategy fundamentals. Lochhead and his co-authors stand on the shoulders of giants like Michael Porter and Theodore Levitt. Porter taught the need for a unique value proposition that defines both the customers and the problem that will be targeted. Likewise, category design demands us to frame the customer problem and then design a unique solution. (“Different not better!”, as Lochhead often says). Levitt taught us that firms should define their business in terms of customer needs, like transportation and entertainment, rather than products, like trains and movies. Similarly, category design frames and markets the problem, not the product.

Porter defines strategy as a set of integrated choices that align a firm’s processes to the target market’s needs. This leads to the third reason for choosing this process. It defines a unique point-of-view (PoV) statement about the problem and the solution. The PoV should then be used, as per Porter, to align all processes (R&D, marketing, sales, delivery etc.) to the customer problem identified at the very start.

So, please consider category design when looking for a clear process that uses proven fundamentals and provides a clear outcome for the whole firm to align to.