Category Point Of View

Category Point of View

When to use

Use this skill when you need to build, sharpen, or pressure-test a category point of view for a B2B company, product, campaign, founder narrative, executive content program, or market education motion.

Use it for:

• Defining the problem the company wants to own
• Creating a category narrative before a launch, fundraise, or executive campaign
• Moving beyond a crowded label such as "AI CRM," "AI SDR," "copilot," or "workflow automation"
• Turning product positioning into a broader market belief system
• Building a content strategy that can survive the coming flood of AI-generated slop
• Giving practitioners useful language while giving leaders a reason to care
• Creating a measurement plan for category creation and narrative adoption

Do not use this skill to create a vague brand manifesto, inflated category claim, or thin thought-leadership calendar. A category POV must make a buyer say, "that is exactly the problem we are living with," before it asks them to believe the solution.

Inputs

Ask for or infer as much of the following as possible. If an input is missing, state the assumption and mark confidence as low.

• Company and product name
• Product description and core capabilities
• Existing category or market label
• Target audience: practitioner, buyer, economic buyer, influencer, industry, company size, maturity
• Problem the company wants to own
• Current alternatives, status quo, and competing category labels
• Market shift that makes the problem newly urgent
• Practitioner pains and daily workflows
• Leader-level business consequences
• Differentiated belief, mechanism, data, benchmark, model, community, or proof
• Customer language, stories, objections, and examples
• Existing content, founder opinions, product roadmap, and proof assets
• Distribution channels and founder or executive strengths
• Constraints: claims to avoid, regulated topics, competitive boundaries, launch timing, content capacity

Core principles

• Lead with the problem. Own the problem. Every time someone feels the pain, they should think of the company.
• Build and own the category instead of borrowing the most flooded label. Salesforce is CRM. HubSpot is inbound. Do not settle for "AI [existing category]" unless the existing frame is truly the strategic one to win.
• The category should name a meaningful change in how the market works, not just rename the product.
• The POV has to make it outside the AI slop filter. In the next 3-6 months, every channel will be flooded with generic AI-generated content. Winning requires specific, useful, opinionated, human work.
• Serve practitioners, win deals with leaders. Practitioners should see their daily pain and get useful advice. Leaders should see risk, economic impact, and strategic urgency.
• Human touch becomes a differentiator when everything is AI. Do not remove specificity, judgment, customer stories, or taste in the name of scale.
• Category creation is not claiming a market because you want one. It is repeatedly teaching a problem, naming a new standard, and proving why your approach is the answer.
• Benchmarks, named concepts, and recurring language can become category infrastructure when they are useful to the audience.

Workflow

1. Identify the problem to own

Name the painful, recurring problem the company wants to become associated with.

Clarify:

• Who feels the pain first?
• What are they doing when the pain appears?
• What breaks, slows down, creates risk, or wastes money?
• What does the pain cost practitioners emotionally and operationally?
• What does the pain cost leaders economically or strategically?
• What phrase should people associate with the company whenever the pain appears?

If the answer is a product feature, keep going. The category POV should own a customer problem, not a capability.

2. Separate practitioner truth from leader urgency

Build the POV from both levels:

Practitioner truth:

• Daily frustrations
• Manual workarounds
• Broken handoffs
• Exact language
• Moments where the pain is most visible
• Useful advice the audience can apply even before buying

Leader urgency:

• Revenue impact
• Cost, risk, quality, speed, compliance, retention, or margin impact
• Strategic implications of ignoring the shift
• Board, CFO, CIO, CRO, or CEO language
• Why the issue deserves budget now

The best category narratives do not choose between these. They serve practitioners with specificity and help sales win deals with leaders.

3. Define the market shift

Explain what changed that makes the old way fail.

Possible shifts:

• AI has made output cheap, but quality control, trust, review, and differentiation harder
• Small AI-armed teams can now produce the output of much larger teams
• Buyers are filtering generic content faster than companies can generate it
• Revenue teams are being asked to do more with fewer people and less predictable demand
• Human trust, taste, and judgment become more valuable as automation becomes common
• A workflow moved from back-office efficiency to front-office growth, risk, or strategic control

The shift should be true without the product. If the only reason the shift exists is because the company says so, it is not strong enough.

4. Audit the existing category labels

List the labels the company could use, then decide whether to accept, reject, or reframe them.

For each label, assess:

• Is the audience already searching for it?
• Is it too crowded or generic?
• Does it make the company sound interchangeable?
• Does it frame the problem too narrowly?
• Does it help budget owners understand the value?
• Does it let the company own a meaningful problem?

Avoid defaulting to labels like "AI CRM," "AI SDR," "AI analytics," "copilot," or "automation platform" if they put the company in a flooded conversation. A category POV can borrow demand from an existing category while teaching a sharper frame.

5. Choose the category strategy

Pick one primary strategy:

1. Own an existing category with a sharper POV

• Use when the category already has demand and the company can credibly become the memorable voice inside it.

1. Reframe an existing category around a neglected problem

• Use when buyers know the old label but the decision criteria are changing.

1. Name an emerging category

• Use when the company can repeatedly educate the market, produce proof, and create useful language around a problem that does not yet have a good name.

1. Create a named benchmark, model, or movement

• Use when a recurring asset can become the wedge into the category, such as a benchmark for revenue operations work or a named POV about small AI-armed teams producing large-team output.

Be honest about category ambition. Not every product needs to invent a category. The goal is to own a problem and the language around it.

6. Build the category narrative

Use this structure:

1. Old world

• How the audience used to work
• Why that approach made sense

1. What changed

• The market shift, technology shift, buyer behavior shift, or operating constraint

1. New pain

• Why the old approach now creates risk, waste, delay, mistrust, or missed revenue

1. New standard

• What good now looks like
• What the market should expect instead

1. Category or strategic frame

• The category name, POV name, benchmark, or problem frame
• Plain-English definition

1. Why this company

• The differentiated mechanism, data, workflow, expertise, proof, or community that makes the company credible

1. Human stakes

• Why this matters to the practitioner, the leader, and the business

7. Decide the content pillars

Create 4-6 content pillars that repeatedly teach the category.

Each pillar should include:

• Core belief
• Audience served
• Problem it teaches
• Content formats
• Example topics
• Proof or source material needed
• Practitioner value
• Leader value

Recommended pillar types:

• Problem education: make the pain visible and nameable
• Market shift: explain what changed and why old playbooks fail
• New standard: show what excellent teams do differently
• Benchmark or data: create proof, comparisons, or diagnostic tools
• Practitioner craft: give useful workflows, templates, checklists, and examples
• Human trust and judgment: show where human touch matters when AI scales output
• Customer proof: show before/after stories without turning every asset into a product pitch

Use ideas like these only when they fit the product:

• A benchmark such as RevBench for evaluating revenue operations tasks
• A named POV such as the 5-Person Hundred: small AI-armed teams producing the output of much larger teams
• A human-touch thesis: when every channel is full of AI content, the scarce thing is judgment, taste, and trust

8. Plan distribution

Match the POV to channels where the company can show up with consistency and specificity.

Distribution guidance:

• Founder or executive LinkedIn: sharp opinions, problem language, category teaching, customer examples
• Practitioner content: templates, teardown posts, workflows, benchmarks, checklists, office hours
• Long-form essays: category narrative, market shift, new standard, named frameworks
• Webinars or live sessions: teach the problem and facilitate practitioner discussion
• Benchmarks or reports: create data the market can cite
• Sales enablement: turn the POV into discovery questions, slides, talk tracks, objection handling, and proof
• Website: make the category frame and problem language obvious within the first screen
• Community and customer programs: collect language, examples, and stories that keep the POV grounded

Distribution rules:

• Repeat the core problem language until it becomes associated with the company.
• Do not publish generic daily AI content just to maintain volume.
• Package one strong idea many ways instead of creating many weak ideas.
• Use human examples, named situations, customer language, and original data whenever possible.
• Put practitioners first in content value, then connect the pain to leader-level consequences.

9. Define measurement

Measure whether the market is learning, using, and acting on the narrative.

Track:

• Category awareness: direct traffic, branded search, search volume for the category term, analyst or influencer mentions, inbound using your language
• Audience growth: relevant followers, subscribers, community members, webinar attendees, repeat visitors, target-account engagement
• Engagement depth: saves, shares, comments from the right people, time on page, content completion, replies, qualitative feedback, repeat attendance
• Pipeline influence: influenced opportunities, source touches, sales-cycle use, win/loss references, target-account movement, enterprise stakeholder engagement
• Narrative adoption: prospects repeating the POV, customers using the category language, sales using the story, competitors reacting, partners or analysts citing the frame

Do not rely only on vanity metrics. A smaller audience of the right practitioners and leaders can be more valuable than broad engagement from people who will never buy or influence the category.

10. Pressure-test the POV

Before finalizing, check:

• Problem ownership: Is the company clearly associated with a painful problem?
• Specificity: Does it name a real audience, workflow, and moment of pain?
• Differentiation: Would the POV still sound distinct if a competitor's logo replaced the company name?
• Credibility: Is the claim supported by customer truth, product capability, data, experience, or proof?
• Usefulness: Would practitioners get value from the content even if they are not ready to buy?
• Executive relevance: Can leaders connect the problem to business outcomes?
• Category discipline: Is the category frame meaningfully different from a crowded label?
• Slop resistance: Does it contain enough specificity, judgment, human examples, and original insight to avoid sounding AI-generated?
• Repeatability: Can the company publish, sell, and speak from this POV for at least 6-12 months?

Output format

Produce the category POV in this structure:

1. Executive summary

• One-paragraph recommendation
• Category strategy selected
• Confidence level and proof gaps

1. Audience and problem ownership

• Primary practitioner audience
• Primary leader audience
• Problem to own
• Moment when the pain appears
• Current alternatives
• Business consequences

1. Market shift

• What changed
• Why the old way fails now
• Why this is urgent

1. Category decision

• Existing labels considered
• Recommended category or strategic frame
• Plain-English definition
• Why this frame is better than the obvious label
• What not to call it

1. Category narrative

• Old world
• What changed
• New pain
• New standard
• Category or POV name
• Why this company
• Human stakes

1. Point-of-view statements

• Core belief
• Contrarian or differentiated belief
• Practitioner promise
• Leader promise
• One-line category definition
• Short manifesto paragraph

1. Content pillars

• 4-6 pillars
• For each: belief, audience, problem taught, example topics, formats, proof needed, practitioner value, leader value

1. Distribution plan

• Primary channels
• Repurposing model
• Founder or executive angle
• Practitioner value assets
• Sales enablement translation
• 30/60/90-day rollout

1. Measurement plan

• Category awareness
• Audience growth
• Engagement depth
• Pipeline influence
• Narrative adoption
• Qualitative signals to watch

1. Quality bar and risks

• What is strong
• What is weak or unproven
• Claims to avoid
• Proof needed next

Quality bar

A strong category POV:

• Leads with the customer problem before the product
• Owns a specific pain the market can recognize
• Serves practitioners with useful specificity and leaders with business urgency
• Avoids crowded labels unless they are strategically useful
• Explains a real market shift that exists beyond the company
• Creates language the market can repeat
• Includes content pillars that can support months of high-quality output
• Identifies proof gaps honestly
• Gives sales a clearer story, not just marketing a new slogan
• Includes measurement beyond impressions and follower count
• Sounds like a human with judgment, not a generic AI content calendar

Anti-patterns

Avoid:

• Starting with the product, platform, architecture, or feature list
• Claiming a category only because the company wants one
• Calling the product "AI [existing category]" when that frame is already flooded and interchangeable
• Creating a category name that buyers cannot understand or repeat
• Writing a manifesto with no practitioner utility
• Serving leaders with abstract thought leadership while ignoring the people who feel the pain daily
• Publishing generic AI-generated content at high volume and calling it category creation
• Treating vanity metrics as category traction
• Making unsupported market-size, ROI, replacement, or inevitability claims
• Using fearmongering about AI instead of concrete examples and useful guidance
• Overclaiming that a fictional benchmark, movement, or category is already accepted by the market
• Building a POV sales cannot use in discovery, demos, or executive conversations

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: adam-lagerhausen
• Source: adam-lagerhausen/b2b-marketing-skills
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.