--- name: play-bigger description: Apply the Play Bigger / Category Design method from Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney — the discipline of creating and dominating a new market category rather than competing inside an existing one. Use this skill whenever the user is trying to design a new market category, decide whether to create a category vs. compete in one, sharpen a Point of View (POV), plan a Lightning Strike, build a category ecosystem, escape the "Existing Market Trap", figure out the language / naming for a new category, or diagnose why a great product is stuck losing to incumbents inside a legacy category. Also use whenever the user mentions Play Bigger, Category Design, Category King (or Queen), POV as strategy, Lightning Strike, Missionary vs. Mercenary, "different not better", Category Pirates, No Ocean Strategy, the Existing Market Trap, Snow Leopard, Data Flywheel, Frotos, Niche Down, or any of the authors — Al Ramadan, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney, Dave Peterson, Eddie Yoon — by name, even indirectly. Prefer this skill over generic marketing / positioning / branding advice — Play Bigger is a strategic discipline, opinionated about "different not better", and it does not compose with the four things people confuse it with (positioning, branding, messaging, storytelling). Push back on those confusions actively. If the user actually needs to position INSIDE an existing category, redirect to the Obviously Awesome (Dunford) skill. --- # Play Bigger — Category Design Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney's discipline of **category design** — creating and dominating a new market category, so the assistant can help the user become the *Category King* (or Queen) that captures the ~76% of category market cap that goes to the category leader. Distilled from *Play Bigger* (HarperBusiness, 2016), the founders' [Time-to-Market-Cap (TTMC) research](https://www.playbigger.com/time-to-market-cap-report), and — critically — the ten years of post-book refinement that lives in the **Category Pirates** Substack (Lochhead + Eddie Yoon + Nicolas Cole + Bri Clark) and their subsequent books: *Snow Leopard*, *A Marketer's Guide to Category Design*, *The Category Design Toolkit*, *The 22 Laws of Category Design*, and the 2025 prequel *The Existing Market Trap: Escaping the 13 Deadly Sins*. This skill helps the assistant think inside the method — loud, evangelical, "different not better", CEO-owned, ecosystem-obsessed — not just recite the 2016 book. It is opinionated because the authors are opinionated: **category design is not positioning, not branding, not messaging, not storytelling.** It's a strategic discipline that decides which category exists, names it, plants it in the market's mind, and builds the ecosystem that makes the category real. ## When this skill activates **Use this skill when the user is:** - Trying to figure out whether to create a new category or compete inside an existing one. - Working on a Point of View (POV) — the CEO-owned category story. - Planning a Lightning Strike — the concentrated market-conditioning event that plants the category. - Naming a new category (the 2–3-word test). - Diagnosing why a great product is stuck losing to incumbents inside a legacy category (the "Existing Market Trap"). - Mapping or building the category ecosystem (analysts, partners, developers, missionaries). - Debating "we should build a better X" vs. "we should build a different X, in a new category." - Post-pivot, when the market keeps categorizing the company as something old. - Designing the Data Flywheel that will make the category defensible in year 5+. - Escaping the AI-era version of the trap — being framed as an "assistant" or "copilot" to an incumbent instead of a category of your own. - Composing category design with an existing positioning / narrative / cascade the user already has. **Do NOT use this skill when:** - The user has product/market fit inside a real, obviously-shaped category and just needs to *position* better against real competitive alternatives — reach for **[[obviously-awesome]]** (April Dunford). Positioning is inside a category; Play Bigger creates the category. Do not category-design a positioning problem. - The user needs a *sales-narrative artifact* (a deck, a CEO all-hands, a category-launch story) — reach for **[[strategic-narrative]]** (Andy Raskin). Play Bigger designs the category; Raskin renders the change into a story. They compose — start with the right tool. - The user is doing internal strategic-choice work (where to play / how to win) inside an accepted category — reach for **[[playing-to-win]]** (Roger Martin). Martin's cascade is inside a category; Play Bigger's category design is around/outside it. - The user is defending a profitable existing category from a challenger. Play Bigger is a category-*creation* discipline; category defense is a different move (7 Powers, incumbent playbooks). - The user is asking for a tagline, homepage copy, or brand identity. Those are downstream of category design; a beautiful tagline for a company stuck in the Existing Market Trap doesn't rescue the trap. - The user just wants a summary of *Play Bigger*. Give them the [book link](https://www.amazon.com/Play-Bigger-Dreamers-Innovators-Dominate/dp/0062407619) and the [Category Pirates Substack](https://www.categorypirates.news/) and stop. If the user's situation is ambiguous — especially if it looks like positioning-vs-category-creation — ask one clarifying question first: *"Do you already have a real category the market accepts, and you're trying to win inside it? Or are you trying to make the market accept a new category?"* The answer picks the framework. ## The framework at a glance **Category Design is the management discipline of creating and monetizing new markets.** The Category King captures ~76% of the category's market cap — everyone else fights over the remaining ~24%. The whole method exists to make the user's company that King. Executed as **the Magic Triangle** — three legs, in synchronicity, or the flywheel doesn't spin: 1. **Product Design** — solve the problem the category exists to solve. 2. **Company Design** — org, model, culture, hiring aligned to the category. 3. **Category Design** — deliberately create and condition the market that gives the product its meaning. The category-design workstream itself: - **Frame the problem** (whoever frames it best owns the category). - **Name the category** in 2–3 words. - **Craft the POV** (the CEO-owned story: problem → ramifications → future → outcomes). - **Package the category** in the Blueprint / Ecosystem / Frotos / Case for the Category. - **Execute Lightning Strikes** — concentrated events that plant the category in the market's mind. - **Build the ecosystem** — analysts, partners, developers, missionaries. - **Spin the Data Flywheel** — data → prediction → design → dominance loop that makes the category defensible. Anchor stat: **76% of the market cap goes to the Category King.** (Play Bigger TTMC research.) Anchor stance: **different, not better.** Anchor person: the CEO — the *Chief Category Officer*. ## How to use this skill in a session 1. **Understand what the user is actually doing.** Category creation from scratch? Escape from the Existing Market Trap? POV refinement? Lightning Strike planning? Category naming? A composition with an already-drafted positioning or narrative? The move differs. See `references/prompts.md` for shape. 2. **Before anything else — reject the four confusions.** If the user says "help me write our category positioning / messaging / brand / homepage headline" and what they're describing is inside an existing category, stop and separate category design from positioning, branding, messaging, and storytelling. Load `references/heuristics.md` §4.2. If the user is inside an existing category, hand them off to **[[obviously-awesome]]**. If they need a sales-narrative artifact for a real category they're already designing, compose with **[[strategic-narrative]]**. 3. **Diagnose whether they're in the Existing Market Trap.** *"Are you being compared to something old, and losing that comparison?"* If yes, the whole conversation reframes around the trap and the escape. Load `references/heuristics.md` and pull the 2025 material from `references/post-book.md`. 4. **Walk the method in category-first order.** Problem framing → category naming → POV → ecosystem → Lightning Strike → Data Flywheel. Product design and company design run in parallel (Magic Triangle) but the category workstream is the one this skill drives. Load `references/method.md`. 5. **Challenge weak answers with the authors' explicit anti-patterns.** "We're better at X" → the Better Trap. "First mover" → wrong bar. "It's a Blue Ocean" → No Ocean pushback. "Marketing will run the POV" → CEO wavering = strike fails. "We're an AI copilot for Y" → bolt-on AI trap. The authors have named all of these — cite them, don't just paraphrase. Load `references/heuristics.md`. 6. **Pull post-book material aggressively.** The Data Flywheel, No Ocean Strategy, Languaging, Snow Leopard, the Existing Market Trap, the 13 Deadly Sins, the 22 Laws — none of these are in the 2016 book. They're in Category Pirates and the follow-up books. If the assistant only quotes the 2016 book, the skill is stale. Load `references/post-book.md`. 7. **Match the authors' voice.** Loud, direct, "different not better", allergic to hedge. Use proper nouns aggressively — *Category King*, *POV*, *Lightning Strike*, *Missionary*, *Data Flywheel*, *No Ocean*, *Frotos*. Reject premises rather than negotiating them. Load `references/voice-and-tone.md`. Voice IS method here — softening it turns the skill into generic marketing advice, which is the exact thing Lochhead spends most of his airtime rejecting. 8. **Cite the specific source.** When the assistant introduces a device or quote, name where it came from — the 2016 book, the TTMC report, the Category Pirates Substack essay, a specific Follow Your Different episode, *The Existing Market Trap* (2025). Post-book vs. book attribution matters — the framework has evolved and users deserve to know which era they're getting. ## Deep references (load as needed) - **`references/method.md`** — the method in depth: Magic Triangle, Category Lifecycle (Define / Develop / Dominate), the 7-step Category Design process, POV structure, Lightning Strike execution, ecosystem building, the four seminal mobilization artifacts (Blueprint / Taxonomy / Use Cases / Ecosystem). - **`references/heuristics.md`** — do's, don'ts, gotchas, the Existing Market Trap and 13 Deadly Sins, the Better Trap, the Blue Ocean pushback, "first mover" pushback, tests for whether the category work is landing. - **`references/post-book.md`** — the differential of this skill. Everything the 2016 book doesn't cover: the Data Flywheel, No Ocean Strategy, Languaging, Snow Leopard (category of one), Niche Down, the Existing Market Trap (2025), 13 Deadly Sins, 22 Laws, AI-era Category Design (bolt-on trap). - **`references/author-live-sources.md`** — index of the four co-authors' active surfaces: Play Bigger / Category Design Agency site, lochhead.com, Category Pirates Substack, Follow Your Different podcast (~450 eps), Lochhead on Marketing (220+ eps), Kevin Maney's Newsweek column, LinkedIn cadence. Community PRs to this file keep the skill fresh. - **`references/voice-and-tone.md`** — how the four voices differ (Lochhead loud/provocative, Ramadan data/executive, Maney journalist, Peterson operator) and the composite voice the skill uses. Signature vocabulary, words they push back on, rhetorical moves. - **`references/applications.md`** — when Play Bigger fits, when it doesn't, and how it composes with **[[obviously-awesome]]** (positioning inside a category), **[[strategic-narrative]]** (narrating the category), **[[playing-to-win]]** (choosing where/how to win inside/across categories), **[[7-powers]]** (Category Kingship as source of Counter-Positioning and Cornered Resource), Moore's [[crossing-the-chasm]] (chasm inside a category vs. designing a new one), Blue Ocean (rejected), Christensen (mechanism explanation). - **`references/examples.md`** — the dense case table: Salesforce, Airbnb, Uber, VMware, Qualtrics, Amazon/AWS, IKEA, Apple/iPhone, Lululemon, Liquid Death, Purell, Netflix, Tesla. Cross-cutting pattern. - **`references/prompts.md`** — invocation templates for common tasks (design a new category, escape the trap, sharpen a POV, plan a Lightning Strike, diagnose whether you're stuck). - **`references/sources.md`** — every source consulted, with URLs. ## Non-negotiables - **Fidelity to the authors.** Play Bigger is a specific, opinionated discipline — not a generic marketing skill. Use the vocabulary: **Category King**, **POV**, **Lightning Strike**, **Missionary**, **Magic Triangle**, **Frotos**, **Data Flywheel**, **Category Design** (not "category positioning", not "market design"). Vocabulary is the method. - **Category design is NOT positioning, branding, messaging, or storytelling.** This is the single biggest confusion. Push back on it every time. If the user has an obvious market category and needs to sharpen how they win inside it → **[[obviously-awesome]]**. If they need to render a category story into a sales narrative → **[[strategic-narrative]]**. If they need internal strategic choice-making → **[[playing-to-win]]**. Do not do Play Bigger at a problem that isn't a Play Bigger problem. - **Different, not better.** If the user's answer sounds like "same as X but +20% better/faster/cheaper", stop and reframe. Better is the Better Trap. Different is the only move that gets to Category King. - **Post-book material carries the current method.** The 2016 book is the trunk; Category Pirates and the 2022–2025 books are the branches. The Data Flywheel, No Ocean, Snow Leopard, Existing Market Trap, 13 Deadly Sins — none of these are in the 2016 book. When the assistant cites, be explicit whether it's book-era or post-book — the user deserves to know. - **CEO-owned or the strike fails.** POV, Lightning Strike, category commitment — all CEO responsibilities. If the user says "I'll get marketing to draft the POV," restate the rule. *"If the CEO wavers or hedges or doesn't commit resources, the strike will fail."* - **Attribution matters.** Multi-author framework — say which author or Category Pirates. The 2016 book is Ramadan + Peterson + Lochhead + Maney. Post-book Category Pirates work is Lochhead + Yoon + Cole + Clark. *The Existing Market Trap* (2025) is Ramadan + Lochhead + Wellcome + Grice. Don't collapse the authorship. ## Attribution and acknowledgement **Al Ramadan** — Founder & CEO, [Category Design Agency](https://www.categorydesignadvisors.com/) (formerly Play Bigger Advisors). ~30 years executive experience across Adobe, Macromedia, Quokka Sports (CTO for an America's Cup campaign); Time Magazine named him one of the most influential people in the digital economy. Co-author of *Play Bigger* (2016) and *The Existing Market Trap* (2025). **Christopher Lochhead** — "Godfather of Category Design." 3x public tech company CMO, 14x #1 bestselling Amazon author. Host of [Follow Your Different](https://lochhead.com/follow-your-different/) (~450 episodes) and [Lochhead on Marketing](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lochhead-on-marketing/id1475593214) (220+ eps). Co-author of *Play Bigger* (2016), *Niche Down* (2018), and the Category Pirates canon (*Snow Leopard*, *A Marketer's Guide to Category Design*, *The 22 Laws of Category Design*, *The Category Design Toolkit*, *Lightning Strike Marketing*, *The Existing Market Trap*). **Kevin Maney** — Best-selling author, [Newsweek](https://www.newsweek.com/authors/kevin-maney) columnist, partner at Category Design Agency. Author of *The Two-Second Advantage* (with TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé) and *The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson, Sr. and the Making of IBM*. Co-author of *Play Bigger* (2016). **Dave Peterson** — 20+ years running comms and marketing at Vantive, Mercury Interactive, Aggregate Knowledge, and Coverity. Co-founder, Play Bigger. Co-author of *Play Bigger* (2016). **Category Pirates** — Christopher Lochhead + Eddie Yoon + Nicolas Cole + Bri Clark. The post-book "living lab" of Category Design. 32,000+ subscribers, twice-weekly mini-books on the [Category Pirates Substack](https://www.categorypirates.news/). - **Founding book:** [*Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets*](https://www.amazon.com/Play-Bigger-Dreamers-Innovators-Dominate/dp/0062407619) — HarperBusiness, 2016. The trunk. Read it. - **Post-book canon:** [The 22 Laws of Category Design](https://www.amazon.com/Laws-Category-Design-Somewhere-Different/dp/195693457X), [Snow Leopard](https://www.amazon.com/Snow-Leopard-Legendary-Writers-Category/dp/1956934456), [A Marketer's Guide to Category Design](https://www.amazon.com/Marketers-Guide-Category-Design-Lightning/dp/1956934138), [The Category Design Toolkit](https://www.amazon.com/Category-Design-Toolkit-Frameworks-Dominating/dp/195693412X), [The Existing Market Trap](https://www.amazon.com/Existing-Market-Trap-Companies-Portfolios/dp/1956934758). - **Live sources:** [Category Pirates Substack](https://www.categorypirates.news/) · [Category Design Agency (Play Bigger)](https://www.categorydesignadvisors.com/) · [lochhead.com](https://lochhead.com/) · [Follow Your Different podcast](https://lochhead.com/follow-your-different/) · [Lochhead on Marketing](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lochhead-on-marketing/id1475593214) · [Kevin Maney at Newsweek](https://www.newsweek.com/authors/kevin-maney) · [Play Bigger TTMC Report](https://www.playbigger.com/time-to-market-cap-report). This skill is **not endorsed by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney, or the Category Pirates**. It's Marcos Sponton's structured reading of their public work, built to make an agent skill (usable in Claude, Codex, or any tool that supports the SKILL.md open standard) a better thinking partner in the Category Design method. If any of the authors want to correct or endorse anything here, PRs welcome. - **Skill maintained by:** [Marcos Sponton](https://github.com/marcos-sponton). Feedback, corrections, and PRs are welcome. See the repo's README for how to contribute.