Barbra Gago
Former CMO at Miro / Greenhouse / CultureAmp
Former CMO at Miro where she led the rebrand and created the 'visual collaboration' category; previously VP of Marketing at Greenhouse and Head of Marketing at CultureAmp; now building an employee progression platform startup.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Barbra Gago, former CMO at Miro, Greenhouse, and CultureAmp, shares deep expertise on category creation strategy, including when to create a new category versus winning in an existing one. She details how she rebranded Miro from 'online whiteboard' to 'visual collaboration,' the mechanics of building buyer awareness for a new category, and the importance of building opinionated software that takes a clear stance on how work should be done.
Leadership Principles
- → When creating a category, you need analyst validation, thought leadership, and buyer education — you're teaching buyers to budget for something new
- → Category creation makes sense when your existing category is too small to capture the full potential of your product
- → Sometimes you should abandon category creation — at Greenhouse they tried and pulled back because it wasn't the right strategy
Notable Quotes
"When you're building a category, you need to make sure that there is a category that's validated by analysts and directory sites. But also, you want to have a lot of traction in terms of thought leadership — why is this the category? When you're generating a new category, you're also needing to educate buyers that there is a category that they can now budget for."
— On the mechanics of category creation from her Miro experience
"There was this concept of an online whiteboard, which is a category, but it's a much smaller category. The biggest motivating factor of thinking about category creation at Miro was how do we become something really big and needed by every company and not just this little thing."
— On why Miro moved from 'online whiteboard' to 'visual collaboration'
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