There’s a particular kind of room where someone eventually leans back, folds their hands like a prophet, and announces, “We’re going to be iconic. We’re going to define a category.”
Maybe you’ve been in that room. Big dreams, big decks, big adjectives. Circles labeled “Category King.” Someone name-drops Uber or Kleenex as if becoming a verb is a go-to-market motion instead of a weird historical accident.
In my career I’ve gotten to be in a few rooms like that, all at companies that were developer-focsed and convinced they were on the cusp of “creating a category.”
Here’s the quieter truth:
Being iconic is not a plan. Category creation is not “be great and hope the world notices”. It is a specific, tedious, strategic kind of work aimed at one very explicit outcome.
In the world I’ve inhabited, creating a category means you describe how the market should be structured, then you grind until Gartner and Forrester agree with you by publishing a diagram you have basically been handing them in slow motion for years.
Everything else is warm-up.
From the operator seat, here is what that really feels like.
Theory brain vs. operator brain
Theory brain
The theory version of category creation is lofty. Sweeping metaphors. “We’re reinventing identity.” “We’re redefining communications.” “Developers will build differently now.” Great for dinner parties. Lovely for brand decks.
I enjoy that version. But theory brain is not the one dealing with sales when they ask, “What are we aiming at this year?” It is not the one rewriting the homepage for the sixth time or explaining to an analyst why your product is not a decorative feature inside someone else’s platform.
Operator brain
Operator brain wants coordinates. It sounds like:
What do we want the analyst report to be called in three years?
How do we want the quadrant drawn, and what are the axis labels?
Where does our logo sit, and who is allowed to sit near it?
The theory line is “We’re building a category-defining, iconic company.”
The operator line is “We want Gartner publishing a Magic Quadrant using our framing, and we want to be in the Leader box.”
Only one of those lines helps you decide what goes above the fold on the website.
Okta: When identity decided to be a platform
Okta is where this clicked for me.
Identity was crowded but shapeless. Old-school directories, on-prem IAM, VPNs, perimeter security, and a vague cloud haze around SSO and SaaS access. Identity was usually treated like a bolt-on that literally no one actually wanted to deal with, and everyone was scared of.
Inside Okta, the bet was simple: identity should be its own cloud platform. A control plane. Not a feature. Not an accessory.
That was the shot.
Not “we will do login better,” but “identity is a standalone category, and we will define its boundaries before anyone else does.”
The map
If you are in GTM or content, that kind of call infects your whole job. Suddenly you are not explaining the product, you are explaining the world in a way that makes the product feel inevitable.
In analyst briefings, we did not show up to defend features. We brought a map. Workforce identity, customer identity, access management, lifecycle, security signals. Legacy IAM vs. cloud-native. Suites vs. platforms. What belonged in identity and what did not.
The goal was not “convince analysts we are good.”
The goal was “convince analysts this is the correct way to draw the space, and once you draw it like this, Okta belongs in the top-right.”
You know it is working when analysts start using your vocabulary back at you. “IDaaS.” “Independent cloud identity.” “Access management.” Your internal language becomes external language.
The result
Eventually the reports drop. Magic Quadrants for Access Management. Waves for IDaaS. Workforce Identity Platforms. Zero Trust diagrams with identity as the first pillar. The boxes and labels look suspiciously familiar.
And the logo is in the Leader section.
Inside Okta, that was not a trophy. It was a confirmation that the map had become real. The outside world accepted the drawing we had been carrying around for years.
The work did not end. Microsoft still loomed. Features still had to ship. Deals still needed closing. But the hardest narrative problem, the category definition, finally had a shared answer.
Twilio: Watching someone else run the same playbook
While all that was happening, we watched Twilio closely.
Twilio was doing its own version of the dance in a totally different corner. Programmable communications. SMS, voice, later email. APIs that made telecom feel like a friendly weekend project instead of a carrier negotiation.
They pushed “Communications Platform as a Service” long before analysts put ink to it.
Twilio did not just market Twilio. They talked about CPaaS like it already existed and the rest of the world just had not caught up.
For years there was no Magic Quadrant, no Wave. Just Twilio insisting the category was real.
Then the reports arrived. Magic Quadrant for CPaaS. IDC MarketScapes. Twilio squarely in the Leader section.
Same spine every time:
Call your shot.
Repeat the map.
Wait for the analysts to print it.
What the work feels like inside GTM
This all sounds grand. In practice, it is 90% repetition and unglamorous precision.
Starting with a real shift
It starts with a real shift in the world. You cannot conjure a category out of nothing. At Okta it was SaaS, remote work, zero trust. At Twilio it was cloud and developers owning customer experience. At Stormpath it was drop-in auth before that was common. At Builder.io it is teams wanting a better way to collaboratively build and ship experiences without wrestling fifteen tools.
If you do not have a real shift, you do not have a category. You have a product.
Naming the space
Once you have the shift, you name the space in a way people can actually use. Teams get lost chasing poetic brand expressions no one repeats. Category names are not poetry. They are tools.
The practical checklist:
Boring enough to sound like a budget line
Specific enough to exclude things
Flexible enough to survive your roadmap
“Identity as a Service.” “CPaaS.” “Workforce identity.” “Visual IDE.” Slightly bland by design.
Messaging takes over
Then messaging takes over. For a long stretch, category creation is basically a messaging discipline.
The website becomes a guided terrain lesson.
The blog becomes a steady beat of “old world vs. new world.”
Sales decks begin with “here is the landscape.”
Content teams become narrative version control. When product wanders, you feel it. When sales invents lore for quarterly goals, you feel that too. Your job is to keep dragging everyone back to the same map.
Analyst briefings require painful consistency. You are not just demoing. You are helping redraw the market. Segments, evolution paths, who is a platform vs. who is a feature in costume. You propose evaluation criteria that reflect both your strengths and what excellence truly looks like.
You are not the only vendor doing this. Analysts hear conflicting maps. Consistency becomes your vote.
Looking for signals
Between “we have a story” and “the report is published,” you look for softer signals. Customers using your language. Competitors adopting your phrasing. Partners launching “[your category] solutions.” Job descriptions mirroring your terminology.
Then one day a PDF hits your inbox. The name is familiar. The diagram resembles your slide from three years ago. You are in the right quadrant. The groupings look like your internal docs.
That is the finish line for the category campaign. After that, the problem shifts from “prove the category exists” to “compete inside a category everyone agrees on.”
What category creation is not
Common misconceptions
Some fantasies worth clearing out:
Hitting an ARR milestone and self-declaring leadership
Getting Twitter hype and assuming you are now canonical
Rebranding every six months and calling it evolution
Shipping something good and assuming analysts will retrofit a category for you
You can be very successful and still live entirely inside someone else’s box. That is fine. Pretending otherwise complicates planning.
You can build something genuinely new and still get miscategorized because your story was muddy, late, or inconsistent. The market does not owe you a new bucket.
A gut check for operators
If leadership is preaching category creation, I like to ask:
Could I name the analyst report we want to exist in three years?
Could I sketch a quadrant with our competitors and justify the axes?
Does our messaging explain the whole landscape, not just our corner?
In briefings, are we presenting a map or just answering forms?
Are customers, partners, or competitors already using our terms?
If most answers are “not really,” then you are not creating a category. You are doing normal GTM with aspirational labeling.
The trouble starts when the slideware declares “iconic category leadership” and the underlying work has no target.
Calling your shot on purpose
Here is the core issue.
“Iconic” is something said after the fact. It will not tell you what to put on the homepage or what to tell analysts next quarter.
Category creation gives you clarity if you treat it seriously.
The framework
It sounds like:
The world has changed in this specific way.
This shift deserves its own box.
We are going to describe that box so consistently that analysts, buyers, and competitors eventually describe it the same way.
And then one day the report drops, and page three looks suspiciously like your whiteboard sketch from years earlier. Your dot is there. Your axis labels survived. Your thesis has become enterprise purchasing logic.
That is the moment worth grinding toward.
You called your shot.
They drew it.
Category creation: complete.