YouSaid · the spoken record

Barbra Gago

lines on the record: 62
first: 2022-10-27
most recent: 2022-10-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“LinkedIn is probably the easiest place to find me forward slash Barbara Dalgo. And for me, we're building a product in employee progression. So anybody who wants to share their stories or feedback or insights around their experiences there or if they're interested in getting product feedback. We're really interested in like actual user feedback, even though we're selling to HR teams.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she's done like an incredible thing with her agency because they started as making presentations more visually appealing. And then it migrated to storytelling. And then it's evolved to like change management and how to use story for driving change. And she's also evolved the agency so much over the years as well. So it's really, yeah, she's done a lot of impressive work. Barbara.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early days, I really appreciated Nancy Duarte. She's based in the Bay Area. She has an agency called Duarte Agency. She does a lot around storytelling and digital communication. She's been really great for me just in my career as a mentor. I've worked with her a couple of times, but also just following all the work that she does. She's amazing.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody hates it, but I like asking what someone's top 10 accomplishments are. They hate it because it's like, oh God, but it's really interesting to understand the level of quantitative versus qualitative in their accomplishments, like what they value. And also, yeah, if it's a lie ran 100 miles or I have a great family, whatever it is. It's really interesting to kind of get to know somebody and also what they value.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's based off of like an eight part graphic novel series by Neil Gaeem. It's really good. The TV version of it isn't exactly about the books. And I feel like the way that they portrayed the characters was really interesting and super diverse. It's a great show.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love cautionary tales. I don't know if you know this one, but it's a great podcast that basically identify and tell stories about the mental mindsets that we're in and the biases that we have. And then like historic events that have happened and just crazy things that have resulted from things that we do as humans because we're biased.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely radical candor. We give this out to customers. It's really good for management and best practices around giving feedback. I love the art of war just as like strategic thinking and then not work related. A book called Kafta on the Shore. It's one of my favorite Marakami books that I highly recommend.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem, and therefore are building a system that when it comes to performance evaluation, employee progression, we require companies to be more transparent about the levels of the company, the expectations for different levels and competencies. And we create accountability both on the employee and the manager side. But it's also like the right thing to do. Employees should feel that they're evaluated fairly and without a system kind of enforcing some of these things. It's just there's too much subjectivity in the process to make it good unless you really do a lot of work, which most companies don't do to create the right system. You don't have to use a platform to do it, but if you don't do the work anyway, you won't have the outcome. That you want, which is people feeling good about their career and paid barely”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, we are. It is opinionated and it's opinionated because the current way that performance reviews happen are full of bias and there's a lot of problems with it. It's like the best thing that companies can do and therefore they continue to do it. But that just perpetuates a lot of issues. The reason that companies have to go and look at compensation data and fix pay gaps is because they have systemic problems with how people are promoted and progressed in the organization. So they're recruited in a certain way. They may or may not be developed and then they're evaluated on their performance, which ultimately results in compensation and what people are paid. And that, as we know, there's plenty of problems. So companies are fixing this compensation issue by like updating the comp every year, but that doesn't fix the systemic problem. And so, yes, we have opinions about how to fix.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think at Lossing kind of built around a process that was already happening and growing momentum, and it was like, okay, let's build a solution to enable companies to do this with technology. So there was already a process that didn't have a technology integrated. And then with Greenhouse, it was like there's a better way to do it. And this is how it should be done. So I think there's two different approaches. Either find a process that just doesn't have technology that is a best practice or growing best practice. I think the same thing happened in like DevOps with many different tools. And then greenhouse, which is more like, what are companies missing? How can they do it better? How can we train them and teach them a better way? And then, by the way, our software helps you do that.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say it's anchored in some values. And because of those values, there will be certain rules that are built in that you can't really work around.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Opinionated software is basically software platforms that essentially have either best practices or maybe some rules integrated into the system. You have systems that you can customize any which way and however you want. And then you have other systems that enforce a certain way of behaving or doing work, as you said. And so I think probably a pretty well-known example for your audience especially is Atlassian, really building tools for like agile workflows and agile teams. And Greenhouse is another example from a recruiting perspective in terms of what we call structured recruiting. And there was a very specific sort of way to create a pipeline, build an interview kit, and all of that was important because it made recruiting better and more transparent and obviously less biased and all of those things. So it's principled.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it can't be generic, but also can't be too much that nobody knows what they are. Like they need to be simple and straightforward and easy to remember.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's because they were too long. It was something that we were constantly working on because they were like too long and there were too many things in them to remember. That was the problem.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of all of the different things that you're going to be doing visually, or when you talk to customers or how you present the product, et cetera.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, all of those things that you mentioned, I would say the logo, the colors, the fonts, all the kind of general aesthetic do you have photography? Do you use illustrations? Is it all illustrations, all graphics, whatever, you decide those things? You need to understand like what the voice is of the brand, how the brand sounds when you write things when you market it, how people talk, all of that stuff is part of the brand. If you want to build a brand that's really like scalable, you think about it more as a system, like a brand system. So this is creating things that like with Miro, for example, we had the letters and we had the colors and we had these concepts of agility. And I don't remember all of them off the top of my head, but all of these different concepts that then were represented by different shapes or different colors that could be used in various forms. So it's really like how does it become an”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something like that, where it's like brain dumped group, vote. And then you have like your short list of things that you can then work to define.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did iterations of it while I was there. They already had a stake in the ground. What I have done in the past with values is we just did an exercise with my leadership team, for example, where we did a workshop format. We actually used Miro where everybody just like brain dumped their ideas around values. And then it was, okay, from there, let's group them into themes. And then from there, let's vote on the most important things. And then from there, how do we start to articulate and define these things? Ultimately, coming up with the definitions is not really something you can do as a group because it's just not very productive. It's better if somebody who knows how to write well can come up with the first dab of the sentences if it's operating principles, if it's values, and then get feedback on it. But you can get everybody's input and kind of make the process pretty structured by doing.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely, how we build the product, how people around the product act, and then that shaped itself was like agile and moved. That's awesome. Agile.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of them was around agility. And so one I don't remember which letter it was, maybe the I. It's like it was shaped like Liggly. And then we also had a visual manifestation of it. So they all behaved differently. So they all had their own kind of behavior. And one of the things that was really important to us is that we were creating like a visual system or a visual language so that people that were from different parts of the world working together could understand each other without necessarily speaking the same language. And so this was a way to invoke this connection of different perspectives and different languages in a way that kind of got all pulled together.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Authenticity as a value, candor as a value, thoughtfulness as a value. If you have a value around like a bias for action or something like that, these things can translate to how the brand manifests in terms of the language that's used, the colors, the objects with mural, for example. We had each character of the word mural in a different shape and each shape had different characteristics. And those were kind of tied back to different values. So they each kind of represented something different.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, train people, okay, these are all the touch points, and this is how the brand needs to manifest. It already will because it's part of the DNA of the company. So I think really integrating the values can help with that and also, of course, make the brand itself human and authentic and something that people really feel emotional connection to.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mission was to help companies build the next big thing. Like, this is what we want to do. We want to be the platform that helps companies build the next big thing. We also had to be a big thing. Like we need to show what big things are. And so your company values, for example, can shape how big and how deep you go with your brand, how authentic it is to the experiences that people have. Because ultimately values play a big part because values are foundational to how people behave at the organization, how they work together, how they work with one another, how they work with customers, how they talk to customers. The best way to kind of incorporate your brand and how people are interacting with people that you are selling to customers or whoever partners is to have those values incorporated because then it's every touch point isn't something that you have to.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's something that companies should think about as early as possible and have it not be an afterthought. The product and the brand are the main things that will get customers and keep them and also keep them loyal and engaged. So I think you have to have both. You can't have one or the other. Like you could have a great brand and if the product sucks, there's only so far a brand can go. And you also can have a great product and maybe not that thoughtful of a brand, but what I've found is that the more the brand is interchangeable with the people at the company and the company itself, the stronger it is, the more authentic it is. Like when you talk about Google, you also talk about its people like they're one and the same Googlers and a lot of companies have that same approach. And I think with Miro, we definitely incorporate our values into the brand.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I do. I know. I mean, I just love it. So I really, I get into this stuff. And I think, yeah, rebranding and category creation and brand in general. I think, you know, what our goal with Miro was to create, there's this concept of like a love mark rather than a shadow mark. It's like, how do you build a brand? I think Airbnb has done a great job with that as well. But like, how do you build a brand that people really love and feel committed to and invested in? And that you have to put a lot of thought into it and it needs to be authentic for it to really work. But if it does, it's super, super powerful.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's just everything. I think there's also luck involved with any success and also in rebrands because a million things could go wrong. We got our domain name changed to Miro.com. I think it was like 48 hours before the event. All the material had been printed with the new URL. Like we had to just. Make a leap of faith. Super stressful, but thankfully, we have less on our side. But ultimately, team process, clear structure, transparent for everybody, getting feedback from customers and making sure stakeholders feel like they're involved. I think ultimately it's really powerful way to create defensibility for a product and a brand in the market. But it's also a lot of work related to category creation.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“development process with sprint teams and agile coming back and you had owners for different parts of things and all reporting back and it really required everybody in some way to be involved as i mentioned we did it in a very condensed period of time i think we kicked off the naming process in the end of october and we launched publicly at south by southwest with a fully three-dimensional booth in march so it was like very short to get a name and then once we had the name to do all the actual brand and then not only that but produce an entire booth and event collateral and all of that stuff so i think mobilizing having a really strong clear process and delegating and letting go and in the marketing role not trying to own everything like it has to be owned by everybody else because you need sales”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So rebranding is just like the visual aesthetic. And I think that's important to make sure you can transition in a way that you're still nodding to the original things, but you've reinvented it or transformed it in a way that makes more sense for where you're at and where you're going. If you're changing the name, it's way more complicated because everybody has to be involved legal, all the contracts, the website, the product, like all the links. We changed our URL. Like everything changed. And so I think it's really important that you have to mobilize and align and have a very clear vision about the process and the steps and be very transparent about it. I think a lot of times marketing teams just go and do their thing and come back. And it's like, here we go with the rebrand at Miro. It was very much like rebrand as a product approach. It was a very much a product.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it wasn't like super small company. And everybody had thoughts and feelings and the company had been around for quite a long time before that. So it was like a big change for many people.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“yeah oh the early folk we definitely got feedback from along the way like we did case studies throughout the process we got feedback on logos we got feedback on brand and designs and there were plenty of people who were like i like real-time board it's straightforward they loved their product but ultimately we kept many of them informed and we really involved them in the process to the degree of not slowing us down, but still getting feedback because we did all of this in a very short period of time on top of it. And I think, yeah, it was worth it because they felt really good about the outcome as well. And a big part of rebranding also means that you have to bring the whole company along too and make sure they feel really good about the outcome. And that was probably one of my big takeaways is just at that time we were already about 100 people.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we actually proposed the hot pink M initially. And the yellow M was, okay, we don't want to go too far from the real-time board with the yellow post-it. And this was a way to kind of nob to the early base of customers and keep something that was pretty standard and pretty core to the initial sort of brand and name.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give me the right to explore this. They were pretty receptive to it. The company was not US-based. I had spent my whole career in Silicon Valley, a lot of time with brand and kind of inbound and community focused brands. So they were pretty receptive. It was not that hard to convince them, which was great. I think the scary part for them and many people was just there was some equity. They did have advocates like how would this impact the people who really loved the product right now. And so one of the things that was really important as we sort of transitioned was that we kept as much of the essence of the initial brand before the logo was like a post-it and then real time board. And so that post-it, for example, that yellow became the new M that we used.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the sooner, the better, like rebrand before I even joined, will they let me change the name was my criteria for joining. And I would say in general, the sooner the better. But obviously after you know that you have product market fit and you have something to scale. So you don't want to invest too much in a brand that isn't going to get you as far as you want to get if you're going to obviously scale.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's like a maturity piece. Like a lot of companies are started and you just come up with a name and you don't put a lot of thought into it. And then you grow to a certain level. At that time, I think we're a million users, maybe like a couple million in revenue. So it was very early days. You had a name. You came up with it. You got the website and then the business grew. And at some point, it's, can it be as big as we want it to be as we think it can be with that name? And I think that was my biggest thing with real-time boards specifically. It was so literal and matter of fact. And the product itself had so much more potential than the name was doing justice for. So I think at some point, it's common for companies to do a rebrand like once they go into scale mode before you have too many people and before you invest too much, obviously in building that brand.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Real time board was interesting. I almost didn't join because it was called Real Time Board. Honestly, I was like, oh my God, this is so literable why I was walking the dogs with my husband. I'm like, am I really going to join a company called Real Time Board? Like, can this be a big company with that name? Like I was really concerned about it. And ultimately, I spent more time with the leaders there.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I think it's like a bottoms up mentality, much like our business model was there, because with marketing automation, it wasn't a progressive kind of buildup. It was marketing automation. Like that's what the category was. And we just had to, I was working for a company that was doing market animation. There was like Elifla and Marquetto and several others. And we all were just like telling everybody, educating the market on what that was. And that was very top down.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Category. So it's not necessarily one or the other, but I do think the investment is high if you want to build a new category and we're committed to an investment of time and thought leadership and content and all of that stuff. But it's also not our strategy right now to go and create and play progression and own and dominate this. We're going to work our way up to that over time.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There could be some middle ground. I would say for Pando, for example, performance management is a very established category that we technically fit into. And also there's a line item on the budget and people have money to pay for performance management. But we're sort of introducing this concept of employee progression, which is more of a long tail strategy. While we want to educate the market and build this new category of employee progression because it's related to the differences between what we're doing and traditional performance management, we're still going to rate ourselves in directory sites, for example, or categorize ourselves as performance management and talk about performance management and sell to companies that are looking for performance management. But ultimately, we want to shift everybody's mindset and change the”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Category where there was already the ability to hire people in all of these distributed places, but you had to find a company in that place that would then hire the people. And then, of course, they created these platforms where, hey, here's the system. You can manage it all here. We'll go and build all those relationships on the ground and NAA is a new set of new category with four or five companies just in the last three years that have cropped up. So I think it's more, yeah, it's more about what the market demands and what's happening in the market rather than whether or not one company it makes sense for, if that makes sense.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It goes in waves with the tech innovation. So, for example, when there was the whole first web wave and then there was this whole social enterprise and like consumerization of IT was like a big kind of change in how technology occurred in the workplace and a lot of new categories came at that point. So I feel like it's less about a raw percentage and more about general kind of inflection points that are happening that are causing the need for this. And I think COVID, for example, and this very quick shift to distributed work was one of those type of inflection points that has changed a lot, like a new category that has grown extremely fast is, and I don't even know exactly what they call it, but it's these employment platforms like Deal and Oyster that have propped up and grown significantly fast and also have created a new.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Category, you need to make sure that there is a category that's validated by analysts and directory sites and things like that, but also you want to have a lot of traction in terms of thought leadership, like why is this the category? What are the unique kind of value propositions of this particular thing? What are the pain points it solves? And then, of course, getting a lot of content around because when you're generating a new category, you're also needing to educate buyers that there is a category that they can now budget for and why they should allocate budget for that.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which the analyst, like Gartner and Forrester and all these guys, at least in B2B and enterprise, they really shape for customers what the categories are. And you need to build relationships with them. You need to work with them to create your category as well. So with the visual collaboration, for example, we weren't ranking, we weren't categorized in visual collaboration on G2 crowd. And we had to meet with them and explain what it was and talk to them about the differentiation of this category versus other categories in terms of features and all of that kind of stuff so that they could understand how they would differentiate this category from another category. So I think those are really good sort of channels to look at. And then tactically, it's a lot of content marketing and a lot of thought leadership. When you're building a”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The main thing, which we've talked a little bit about already, is really understanding your customers and their pain points and how they talk about things. All of my best marketing and positioning literally comes from having a million conversations with customers and listening to how they solve problems and how our system helps them solve problems and what they're doing and how they talk about stuff. So I think that's step one is really understanding who those buyers are how they talk about the product, what's the unique differentiator and selling points. One thing that's really important in category creation as well is actually like PR. You need to get this category and positioning out there at a high level in order to test it out and see if it makes sense and if it's resonating. And then the other piece is really those direct”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Category is and package that. And that's going to be done mostly by continuing to talk to customers and listening to how they talk about things. And it all comes from what you hear from them ultimately and what will resonate. So I think, yeah, if you're already established, if you really aren't differentiated from other categories in your space, then you probably are in that category and doing category creation is a lot of work that is not going to be fruitful if you're pretty squarely in something already. And then if you really aren't, but you need to figure it out, you're just going to have to keep iterating till you figure out what makes sense to your customers.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sooner, the better if you're gonna try and fail and iterate. I think if you already are well established, I don't think category creation is really a meaningful effort if, you know, you already have, it's not going to be necessarily a way to just all of a sudden generate new business by creating new category once you've already kind of gone far enough down the path. I think that if you're not getting like with the greenhouse situation as much as we use this other language and it did get picked up a bit in terms of context that people would use to talk about greenhouse, it really just wasn't sticking. And so I think it's good to try things and also abandon them. And that's okay. Like you can always sit back into the category. If you really don't fit into any other category, then you probably do need to figure out what the category.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so, and it's really where you get the inputs from your customers and your users. We heard all these things. Miro had a big, like we did a lot of content marketing. That's a big piece of doing category creation generally, I would say. But there's a lot of different ways that people talked about it. And so that's an opportunity to actually come and say, okay, here's what it is because no one knows. And it's all of these things and all of these things together equals this now. And then that kind of created momentum where other companies started thinking like that. And then they started typing themselves as that category as well. And then you had a category of multiple companies now that were doing similar stuff.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“platform or diagramming or whatever like all of these little things and so visual collaboration was our way of kind of like putting a nice bow around this thing that could then be an enterprise product that solved a lot of different problems for a lot of different use cases and different types of users so like we started out selling and having a lot of users that were in product and in engineering and teams that were used to using whiteboards anyway and then needed to do it in a distributed way but very quickly kind of packaged different types of jobs for like hr teams or marketing teams or design teams and pretty much anybody in the organization but it needed to all come together cohesively otherwise it was like everybody in the org just calls that a different thing because they use it in a different way”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is more of the vision piece, I would say like sometimes you can have a vision that customers aren't, they don't have it yet or they don't share it, but they can grow to share it and they did in that case. And I think that with Miro, we still worked to optimize where we could in terms of the categories that we did fit into or how people talked about us, but it was also such a new format and it was really kind of a disruptive product that didn't exist before in the enterprise so that it was called a lot of different things. So it was much more like fluid and people talked about it in different ways. And this was our way of hearing the feedback about how people talked about it as like online whiteboard or lots of jobs to be done were framed mind mapping.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And improve it. And we spent time getting content out there, talking to press about it, positioning it in this way, and ultimately at the end of the day, like the budget that customers had and the way that customers talked about what we did. We were just going to spend all of our resources to make this whole category much more valuable to the users, to companies. And that really was along with what Culture was doing at the time in the same space, what kind of set off this whole trajectory of like really good, strong people practices and people organizations that were really doing cool stuff on the recruiting side as well as employee engagement.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Greenhouse is a great example to talk about a failed approach at creating a category. So I mentioned before the ATS or the applicant tracking system category at the time was just it carried so much disdain. Like people had such bad experiences with that whole category of products no matter what they were strategic. They didn't help people be good at recruiting. It was just like a pretty terrible, very transactional experience. And I came in and was like, okay, let's reposition ourselves. We're going to create a new category. We tried several things. One of the main things that we zeroed in on was recruiting optimization platform. And it was really like we are doing that. Like we're helping companies really structure the process, identify where they have gaps, where people are falling through the cracks, where they're flying through the process and really tweak and iterate it.”
2022-10-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source