Barbra Gago: evaluation

Transcript context

…Performance reviews. Very exciting. It's true. We'll talk about that a bit at the end more. And there's a bunch of stuff I want to dig into. You have such a cool background on so many interesting experiences. The first is something that you mentioned just now, which is category and category creation, which I know is near and dear to your heart. I was reading a bit about your background, and I learned that at Miro, you invented this category that's now called visual collaboration. And at CultureAmp, I think you helped lead the creation of this category, employee experience. I imagine at Greenhouse, you did something similar. And I know startups are often trying to decide, should I create my own category? Should I try to win in an existing category? And so I want to spend some time talking through your experience there. And so the first question is just say at Miro or Greenhouse, can you just talk through your thought process of trying to decide, should we invent a whole new category that we're going to win or should we just try to win an existing category and how did that go? They're both great examples because in one, we did create a new category and in the other, we tried and abandoned ship. With Miro, I think when I joined the company, there was this concept of an online whiteboard, which also is a category, but it's a much smaller category and it wasn't something that a lot of people searched for. And I think 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 that maybe product teams would use or maybe engineering teams or schools or something like that. When you're thinking about category creation, it's really, for us, it was really about the scope of what we're trying to do and not wanting to be in something too small. And I think with Miro, the platform that it is, there is so much possibility. I used to joke that it was, even as a company, we were the ever expanding universe. There's just so much to do there, but online whiteboard was really small. Greenhouse is in the ATS category, which is applicant tracking system. And at the time, applicant tracking systems had a really bad name. I don't know if folks that listen to this know of Jobvite or remember Jobvite, and there were a lot of systems before that. Jobvite had come in the mid-2000s as the new and improved ATS and it was all about social recruiting, but it was very transactional and it wasn't very strategic. And so we wanted to steer clear of the ATS space even though we were an ATS. We can talk more about what we tried and what we ended up doing, but I think the main factors when you're thinking about category creation is really what budget companies have, if they have a budget, if they don't have a budget. Companies did have a budget for ATS, for example. Until now, I don't think companies had a budget for visual collaboration. For example, what's the language and the words that people use to describe their pain points and their situation, the things that they need? And then is their competition? And sometimes, competition, you would think like, "Oh, we want to not have competition, so let's build a new category." But ultimately, you're not building a category until there is competition. It's not officially actually a category until there's more companies that do that. And that was a big learning for me in this whole process of category creation, is that it's actually okay when new companies come in that say they're that category because it's just validating the fact that there is a new category. So I think it's really ... If and when is really about what the overall objective is and also what the current situation is with competitors and the space. The ATS market is still the ATS market, for example, and Miro has created visual collaboration as a category but also ticks off boxes for other categories as well. I have a thousand questions I want to ask to dig deeper. Before we get in there, can you just define, well, what is a category? Folks that are just like, what the hell have you been talking about? What is a product category? What's the high level way to think about this?…

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