When to Invent a Category, and How Miro Rebranded Itself into One

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Barbra Gago, who led marketing at Miro, Greenhouse and CultureAmp, explains how she decides whether a new software category is worth the effort. She covers the Greenhouse attempt that failed, the visual collaboration category that worked at Miro, and the logistics of renaming RealtimeBoard in a few months. She finishes with the case for building opinionated software around real best practices.

1A category only exists once competitors show upGago says it was a big lesson that rivals tagging themselves with your category label is validation, not a threat.
2Check for budget and for the words customers use before inventing a categoryGreenhouse tried "recruiting optimization platform", but buyers kept calling it applicant tracking, so the team gave up and worked to make the ATS category more valuable instead.
3You can sell into an existing category while building a bigger oneMiro kept optimizing for online whiteboard and similar labels while it assembled "visual collaboration" from the many ways customers described it.
4Analysts and directory sites decide what counts as a categoryMiro was not listed under visual collaboration on G2 Crowd until the team met the site and explained how the category differed from others.
5Rebrand like a product launchMiro named itself in October and launched at South by Southwest in March, using sprint teams, clear owners and constant customer feedback. The domain switched to miro.com about 48 hours before the event.
6Brand values work best when they are short and tied to something concreteGago says Airbnb's values were too long to remember, while Miro tied each letter of its name to a value such as agility.

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Category creation is about ambition, budget and competitors

Gago says Miro looked at category creation because "online whiteboard" was too small a box. The product had room to be useful to every company, not only product teams, engineering teams or schools. She jokes that Miro was an ever-expanding universe, and that a niche label would have capped how people saw it.

Her checklist for whether a new category is realistic starts with budget. Do companies already have a line item for this? What words do buyers use to describe the pain, and who else is competing? At Greenhouse, applicant tracking systems had a budget but a terrible reputation. At Miro, she says there was no budget for visual collaboration yet.

Founders often assume they want no competition, but Gago argues it is not a category until other companies are in it. She calls it a big learning that new entrants claiming your category is validation. She defines a category practically, as the groupings on review sites such as G2 or Software Advice. These are sets of products that solve a pain point customers already budget for.

Greenhouse tried to escape the ATS label and learned to fix it instead

Gago calls Greenhouse a failed attempt at category creation. Applicant tracking systems were widely disliked as transactional and not strategic, so she tried to reposition the company. The team settled on "recruiting optimization platform" and spent time on content and press around it.

It did not stick. Whatever Greenhouse called itself, customers' budgets and everyday language still said applicant tracking. After seeing that, the team stopped fighting the label. It decided to spend its money raising the value of the ATS category instead of replacing it.

She says that shift, alongside what CultureAmp was doing, helped start a wave of stronger people practices in both recruiting and employee engagement. Her advice is to fail fast. If a new name is not being picked up, try other things and drop it. Established companies that already sit squarely in a category will find that a new label rarely brings in business.

Miro built visual collaboration from the way customers already described it

Miro had no budget line for visual collaboration at first. Gago calls that the vision piece: customers did not yet share the idea, but they could grow into it. The product was new in the enterprise and was called online whiteboard, mind mapping, diagramming and more, depending on who used it.

"Visual collaboration" was a way to tie these jobs together. Early users were product and engineering teams used to whiteboards who now worked remotely, but Miro quickly packaged use cases for HR, marketing and design. Without a shared name, she says, every team would have called it something different.

Miro did not give up its existing categories while doing this. It kept optimizing for them and used lots of content marketing to explain the larger idea. Other companies then began tagging themselves with the same label, which created a multi-company category. Gago adds that new categories tend to appear at inflection points. She names the consumerization of IT and the shift to distributed work during COVID, which brought employer-of-record platforms like Deel and Oyster.

Building a category takes customer language, PR, analysts and content

Gago says her best positioning came from huge numbers of customer conversations. Step one is understanding who the buyers are, how they describe the product, and what the differentiator is. She says category names should come out of that language and not out of a brainstorm.

PR is a way to test whether a positioning resonates, and analysts and directory sites help shape which categories exist. Gartner, Forrester and G2 Crowd all influence buyers in B2B. Miro had to meet G2 to explain what visual collaboration was and how its feature set differed from neighbouring categories.

On top of that comes content and thought leadership. The team must explain why the category exists, what value it offers and which pain points it solves. Buyers also have to be taught that they can now budget for it. Lenny's reaction is that it sounds like a lot of work, and Gago agrees.

You can grow into a new category without abandoning the old one

Lenny asks whether there is a middle path between being a better ATS and declaring a new category. Gago says yes, and points to her current company, Pando. It still lists itself under performance management, which is an established category with a budget line, and sells to people looking for that.

At the same time, Pando is introducing "employee progression" as a longer-term idea, aimed at changing how people think about performance management. She stresses that the investment in time, content and thought leadership is high. Pando does not plan to try to own the new category right away.

Lenny connects this to Miro, which stayed the best whiteboarding tool while building the broader brand. Gago adds that the path differs by business model. Miro's approach was bottoms-up, while the marketing automation vendors she worked for earlier simply told the market what marketing automation was, a very top-down effort.

Renaming RealtimeBoard to Miro was run like a product launch

Gago nearly turned down the job because the company was called RealtimeBoard, which struck her as too literal for a product with so much potential. She made permission to change the name part of her decision to join. The founders were receptive, and she says that rebranding is easier early, once product-market fit exists but before you invest heavily in the brand. At that point Miro had around a million users and a few million in revenue.

The worry was how loyal fans would react, so the team kept the essence of the old brand. The old logo was a yellow Post-it, and the yellow carried over into the new M, even though the first proposal was a hot pink M. Customers were consulted through case studies and feedback on logos and designs. Gago says it was worth it because they felt good about the result.

She separates a visual rebrand from a name change, which pulls in legal, contracts, the website, the product and every link. Miro ran it like product development, with sprint teams, owners for each piece and regular reporting back. Naming began in late October and the launch came at South by Southwest in March, with a three-dimensional booth. The domain moved to miro.com roughly 48 hours before the event, after materials were already printed, which Gago calls a leap of faith and some luck.

A lasting brand comes from values that are simple and authentic

Gago wants a brand that people love, not just recognize, and says authenticity is what makes that work. Brand and product both matter, because a great brand cannot carry a poor product. In her view the strongest brands are interchangeable with the people and the company, the way Google is with Googlers.

Values are the route to that authenticity. Miro's mission was to help companies build the next big thing, which meant the company had to act big itself. When values like candor, thoughtfulness or a bias for action are in the company's DNA, they show up in language, colors and every customer touchpoint without extra training. Miro tied each letter of its name to a value, and one letter wiggled to show agility, within a visual language that people from different countries could read.

To develop values, she has run workshops where everyone dumps ideas, groups them into themes and votes. A good writer should then draft the definitions, since groups do not write well. She describes a brand as a system, including logo, colors, fonts, photography or illustration, and voice. She says Airbnb's values were too long to remember, so keep them simple but not generic.

Opinionated software works when it encodes a real best practice

Gago defines opinionated software as tools with best practices or rules built in, as opposed to fully customizable ones. She cites Atlassian's tools for agile teams and Greenhouse's structured recruiting, where pipelines and interview kits had to be built in a particular way. This made hiring more transparent and less biased, and rules that people could not work around came from underlying values.

She sees two routes. One is to find a process that is already gaining momentum but has no technology, as happened with Atlassian and with many DevOps tools. The other, as with Greenhouse, is to spot what companies are missing, teach a better way and offer software that supports it.

Pando is opinionated because Gago believes performance reviews are full of bias and keep systemic problems in place. Companies fix pay gaps every year without addressing how people are promoted. Pando requires transparent levels, expectations and competencies, and creates accountability for both employee and manager. Lenny agrees that performance reviews are among a manager's most powerful tools.