Leadership Advantage - Issue 19

by Andrea Michalek

Hi Leaders,

Picture this scene:

Your engineering team just closed their most productive sprint ever.
You shipped three major features this quarter.
Stakeholders are sending congratulatory Slack messages.

And yet…

You’re staring at your dashboard, wondering if any of this actually moved the needle on breakthrough impact.

When I created a new category in scholarly metrics at Plum Analytics, we faced a measurement problem most product leaders never encounter:

How do you track progress toward something that’s never existed before?

We were scrappy and intuitive about it.

Conventional tracking methods didn’t apply when users didn’t know they needed the solution, and there was no comparable market to benchmark against.

Looking back, I realize we were tracking breakthrough impact instinctively.

Here’s what I’ve learned since:

The same measurement challenges exist right now within your existing product.

You might not be starting a new company, but you can still identify and create new market value within your current role.

The question is: Are your metrics designed to catch breakthrough opportunities, or just optimize what already exists?

The difference is clear:

Most product leaders measure incremental improvement.

Category creators measure market transformation.

Here’s the assessment question to ask yourself:

“For your last three major releases, can you quantify their breakthrough impact, not just user satisfaction, but actual market behavior change?”

If you’re hesitating, you’ve found your gap.

Most leaders can tell you how features performed against existing benchmarks.

Far fewer can tell you how those features created entirely new value propositions or competitive advantages.

The shift from optimization metrics to category creation metrics isn’t just about better measurement.

It’s about thinking like a market maker, not just a feature manager.

Here are three ways to make that shift:

1. Measure Market Creation, Not Just Market Penetration

Most teams measure how well they’re competing in existing spaces, not whether they’re creating new ones.

Category creator insight: At Plum Analytics, we intuitively tracked how we were changing the academic conversation about research impact. We measured market creation, not just penetration.

The bridge: Within your existing product, you can identify opportunities to create new usage patterns, solve previously unaddressed problems, or enable entirely new workflows.

Instead of: ”Let’s track adoption rates for our new dashboard feature.”

Try this: ”Let’s measure whether our dashboard is creating new decision-making patterns that didn’t exist before and whether competitors are scrambling to copy what we built.”

The shift: You’re measuring whether you’re creating new market behaviors, not just capturing existing demand.

2. Track Competitive Moat Building, Not Just User Growth

Most leaders track lagging indicators of success, missing the leading indicators of strategic advantage.

Category creator insight: We instinctively focused on becoming “impossible to ignore” for major publishers, building competitive moats around our new categories of metrics.

The bridge: Within your organization, you can track whether your product decisions are building sustainable competitive advantages or just matching industry standards.

Leading moat indicators:

Customer behavior changes that would be expensive for competitors to replicate
strategic partnerships that create exclusive advantages
proprietary data or insights that compound over time

Lagging moat indicators:

Market share growth, competitive win rates
strategic acquisition interest

The shift: You’re measuring strategic positioning alongside product performance.

3. Build Strategic Value Proof Points, Not Just User Value Metrics

Most teams measure what users love, missing what strategic stakeholders need to see.

Category creator insight: When Elsevier acquired us, they weren’t buying user satisfaction scores. They were buying proof we’d created an entirely new way to measure research impact. Something they needed to own, not compete against.

The bridge: Every feature you ship should create proof points that demonstrate strategic value. Build capabilities that make your product a “must-have” rather than a “nice-to-have.”

Instead of: ”We increased user engagement by 40%.”

Try this: ”We increased user engagement by 40%, creating proprietary behavioral data that gives us unique insights into market trends our competitors can’t replicate.”

The shift: Every metric becomes evidence of strategic necessity, not just user happiness.

4. Address the Organizational Reality

The biggest barrier to category creator measurement isn’t knowledge, it’s organizational incentives designed for incremental improvement.

The hard truth: If your performance review is based on optimizing existing metrics, you’ll optimize existing metrics, regardless of breakthrough opportunities.

Three signs your organization isn’t ready for category creator measurement:

Success stories focus on beating last quarter’s numbers, not creating new market opportunities
Leadership asks “How does this compare to competitors?” more than “How does this create new competitive advantages?”
Budget conversations center on improving existing features, not exploring unmet market needs

If this sounds like your company, you have two choices:

Start small and prove the breakthrough value. Pick one feature launch and obsessively track its market-creation impact. Share those insights widely. Create demand for category creator thinking.
Have the strategic conversation. Help leadership understand that optimizing for incremental improvement while competitors are creating new categories is like running faster on a treadmill.

The shift: You’re not just changing how you measure. You’re changing how your organization thinks about competitive strategy.

Habits to Develop

Category creator thinking compounds over time:

Monthly outcome reviews - connect recent work to business metrics and identify unmet user needs worth exploring
Launch retrospectives with strategic focus - beyond what worked, ask “Did this create competitive advantages?” and “What strategic value did we prove?”

Key Takeaways

✅ Start with proof points, not proclamations.

Don’t announce you’re thinking like a category creator.

Just pick one launch and obsessively track its breakthrough impact. Let the strategic insights speak.

✅ Create measurement partnerships with strategic stakeholders.

Work with business development, partnerships, and leadership to understand what capabilities would make your product strategically necessary.

Your product metrics should connect to their acquisition and competitive strategy.

✅ Think like a market maker, not just a feature factory.

Market makers identify and create new value propositions.

Feature factories optimize existing ones.

Wrapping It Up: Put Category Creator Measurement into Action

This week, reflect on launches in the last 6 months and work backward to identify their strategic impact potential.

You might be surprised by what you discover.

Some features that felt successful might show only incremental improvement.

Others that seemed tactical might have created genuine competitive advantages.

The goal isn’t to regret past decisions.

It’s to build the muscle for recognizing category creation opportunities within your existing product.

When you master this shift, you’ll start to see breakthrough possibilities that your competitors miss. You’ll measure progress toward strategic necessity, not just user satisfaction.

You don’t just ship features that users love.

You ship features that create market advantages.

Next week, we’ll explore the personal conviction that fuels category creator thinking, because measuring breakthrough impact means nothing if you don’t have the passion to persist when others doubt.

Until next time!

Andrea

P.S. - This systematic measurement approach is what I wish I’d had when building Plum Analytics. We succeeded through intuition and grit, but imagine what you could achieve by applying these category creator insights intentionally from day one.

Andrea Michalek - @ThatAndreaM
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