Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney
Play Bigger is a four-author collaboration:
- Al Ramadan: Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, co-founder of category design advisory firm Play Bigger Advisors
- Dave Peterson: Partner at Play Bigger Advisors, former Silicon Valley executive
- Christopher Lochhead: Former CMO of Mercury Interactive and Scient, partner at Play Bigger Advisors, author and podcaster
- Kevin Maney: Author and journalist, technology columnist for Newsweek and Condé Nast Portfolio
Together they developed the Category Design methodology after studying 10 years of data on which technology companies captured the most market value and why. Their research finding: companies that created new market categories — rather than competing in existing ones — generated disproportionate value and held that advantage for decades.
Core Ideas
The Economics of Category Kings
The research foundation: in most technology categories, the category king captures 70–80% of the total market capitalization, leaving scraps for second-place players and nothing for the rest. This is not a minor advantage — it is orders-of-magnitude difference in outcomes.
“Like it or not, there is increasingly no middle class in business. The wealth goes to the kings.”
— Play Bigger
Category Design vs. Product Design
The authors’ key insight: most companies focus on product design and product strategy. The companies that win focus simultaneously on product design, company design, and category design — the deliberate creation of a new market space.
“Category kings take it upon themselves to design a great product, a great company, and a great category at the same time.”
— Play Bigger
See category-design for full treatment.
The Point of View (POV)
The external expression of category design is the POV — a story that defines the problem the category addresses and frames why the company is the natural solution. The POV must express different, not better:
“A POV tells the world you’re a company on a mission, not a missionary company looking to make money any way it can.”
“Better reinforces the power of the category king you’re trying to beat (who by definition is not you). If customers think two companies are tied in the better wars, they just choose the category king—or the lowest price if there’s no clear king.”
— Play Bigger
Lightning Strikes and Thunderclaps
Category creation requires orchestrated market events that cut through noise and shift perception at scale. A lightning strike combines air war (perception, media, narrative) with ground war (working product, sales capability, ecosystem). Without both, the strike fails:
“A successful lightning strike needs the equivalent of both an air war and a ground war.”
— Play Bigger
Market Insight vs. Technology Insight
Category creation can begin from either a market insight (seeing an unmet need) or a technology insight (inventing something new). But both must ultimately answer three questions: What problem are you solving? What category would you be in if you solved it perfectly? How large is that category’s potential?
First Mover Advantage Is Mostly Myth
The authors explicitly challenge the “first mover advantage” doctrine: the first mover only wins if they have the wherewithal to become king and deliver on their promises. Speed matters, but the ability to define and dominate matters more.
“The first inventor is an innovator to be thanked. The first to define and develop a category is a category king to be followed.”
— Play Bigger
Category Design for Large Enterprises
The book extends category thinking to incumbent companies, arguing that large enterprises should explicitly ask — for every new product initiative — whether the product would define a new category or enter an existing one dominated by a king:
“If big companies understood the difference, they’d more rarely spend a dime entering someone else’s category.”
— Play Bigger
Google’s Alphabet structure — separating the core search/ads business from category-creating bets — is their model for how large enterprises can institutionalize both harvesting and creation.
The Personal Category
The authors extend category design logic to individual careers: a person can design their own category by identifying a unique problem they can solve, building a POV about why they’re the answer, and consistently communicating that POV:
“Design yourself, what you can do, and your category together.”
— Play Bigger
Key Book
Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets (2016) — A business strategy book grounded in data analysis of 10 years of technology market outcomes. Introduces category design as a formal discipline and provides practical frameworks for how to identify, develop, and dominate a new market category.