Leadership Advantage - Issue 27

by Andrea Michalek

You don’t win by building a better product than the competition.

You win by creating a space where competition doesn’t exist.

That’s category creation: not improving what's already there, but building the market around a problem only you can solve.

Most product leaders aren’t doing this.
They’re professional optimizers. Making things faster, cheaper, prettier… and call it breakthrough thinking.

Real category creators don’t optimize.

They declare war on entire ways of doing business.

Passion without execution is a dream.
Execution without passion is a job.
Category creation needs both.

Unfortunately, most product leaders lean to one side:

• Visionaries with conviction, but without the operational excellence to make it real.

• Operators who execute flawlessly, but can't escape existing market boundaries.

True category creation lives in the tension between the two.

A mission that you can’t let go of, plus the operational firepower to bring it to life faster than anyone else.

Without both, you’re just building a better version of what already exists.

Performance = your systematic capability to innovate.

Not once. Not twice. Consistently.

• Your team has an operating rhythm where everyone knows their role.

• You move at a pace the competition can’t match.

• You test bold hypotheses when others are tweaking features.

• You measure impact, and consistently hone in on the next step to take.

Passion = your obsession with the problem.

Not because it’s your job.

Because it’s your mission.

• You see possibilities others miss.

• You push through resistance with conviction.

• You tell the story that rallies customers and teams.

• You build the systems to sustain your passion long-term.

Breakthrough leaders shape the categories themselves.

I have created products in new market categories twice in my career. Not by accident. Not through passion alone.

At Plum Analytics, we helped define the emerging “altmetrics” category: a new way to measure research impact.

At Summon, we were first to market in “web-scale discovery”: a new approach to academic search.

In both cases, the work began at the intersection of performance and passion.

Note that it’s not enough to have the core innovation.

You need the complete ecosystem of partners, competition, and supporting infrastructure.

The Four Stages of Category Creation

Stage 1: Problem Recognition

“Something fundamental is broken here”

Performance: You have the data and systems to see gaps others miss

Passion: You care enough to challenge why things work the way they do

At Plum Analytics, we saw that traditional research metrics missed huge parts of real-world impact.

Our systems proved it wasn’t just a hunch. It was measurable.

Warning: Don't try to create a new category because no one else is there. Stay grounded by solving for genuine customer pain points.

Stage 2: Solution Hypothesis

“What if we approached this completely differently?”

Performance: You can build and test radical approaches, not just incremental fixes

Passion: You take the career risk to champion a different way of thinking

We hypothesized that social media mentions, news coverage, and policy citations could tell a more complete story of research impact beyond traditional citations.

This wasn’t a feature request from customers. It came from conviction about a better way.

Stage 3: Market Evangelism

“Here’s why the old way no longer works”

Performance: You have systems to measure adoption and iterate on messaging

Passion: You evangelize authentically, with conviction that can’t be faked

Our early messaging attacked the status quo: “These are not your grandfather’s metrics.”

We partnered with early customers to show what was now possible.

Our early users became missionaries for the category, not just users of our product.

Stage 4: Category Establishment

“Now everyone talks about the problem your way”

Performance: Your execution creates sustainable competitive advantages

Passion: Your mission attracts talent and customers who share your vision

Soon competitors copied our language.

Conferences created tracks around the category.

Customers couldn’t imagine solving the problem the old way.

Why This Also Creates Breakthrough Career Results

Most people will spend their careers inside someone else’s category. They make them faster, cheaper, prettier. And call it innovation.

Category creators play a different game. They shape the conversation. Set the standards. Decide the language everyone else copies.

This is not just career advancement. It is career transformation.

Category creation often begins with individuals who think differently within existing organizations.

Many category creators started as product managers, designers, or engineers who championed new ways of solving problems until they earned the authority to act on them.

Are you optimizing the rules? Or are you creating the game?

Category creators get different career opportunities:

Strategic Influence: You shape industry conversations, not just product roadmaps
Talent Magnetism: People want to work on category-defining innovations
Market Authority: You become the expert others consult when entering your space
Venture Opportunities: Investors seek out proven category creators for new ventures

The Category Creation Assessment

Ask yourself:

Performance Check: “If I had unlimited resources, could my team consistently ship breakthrough solutions that redefine customer expectations?”
Passion Check: “Am I driven by genuine conviction about a better way, or just professional ambition?”
Integration Check: “Do I have both the systematic capability AND the authentic mission to sustain category creation through inevitable resistance?”

If you can’t answer “yes” to all three, you’re probably stuck in incremental innovation.

You are building better versions of existing solutions rather than creating new possibilities.

Moving Beyond Incremental Innovation

Instead of asking: “How do we build a better version?”

Try asking: “What if the entire approach was wrong?”

Instead of asking: “What do customers want?”

Try asking: “What do customers need but don’t know how to ask for?”

Instead of asking: “How do we compete in this category?”

Try asking: “What if we created a category where competition doesn’t exist yet?”

The Breakthrough Difference

Most frameworks teach you to innovate within existing categories.

Breakthrough Leadership teaches you to transform the categories themselves.

When Performance meets Passion, you don’t just ship products.

You ship new ways of thinking that change how entire markets approach problems.

Category creation isn’t about building products that fit existing markets.

It’s about building markets around problems you’re uniquely positioned to solve.

When systematic execution meets authentic mission, you create possibilities others can’t see, and competitive advantages they spend years trying to match.

Key Takeaways

✅ Most “innovation” is just optimization. Faster, cheaper, prettier products rarely create new markets.

✅ True category creation needs both Performance and Passion. Systematic execution turns vision into reality, and passion sustains it through resistance.

✅ Breakthrough leaders shape markets, not just products. They create spaces where competition doesn’t exist and own them.