Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp)

**Barbra Gago** (0:00)
When you're building a category, you need to make sure that there is a category that's validated by analysts and directory sites and things like that. But also, you want to have a lot of traction in terms of thought leadership. Like, why is this the category? What are the unique kind of value propositions of this particular thing?
What are the pain points it solves? And then, of course, getting a lot of content around, because 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 and why they should allocate budget for that.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:39)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny, and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Barbra Gago. Barbra was Chief Marketing Officer and Global Head of Marketing at Miro, where she helped build their global brand and create a whole new software category for the space. Before that, she was VP of Marketing at Greenhouse, where she brought the product to market and led their go-to-market strategy. And she was also Head of Marketing at Culture Amp, where she helped build their go-to-market plan and close their first 50 customers. In our conversation, we focus on three topics. Creating your own category, when it makes sense to explore that, when to avoid it, and how to go about it.
Building your brand and rebranding, when it makes sense to. And building opinionated software. I've never seen a post or podcast get as deep into category creation or rebranding, and I'm confident that you will learn something valuable from this podcast. With that, I bring you Barbra Gago.
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Barbra, welcome to the podcast.

**Barbra Gago** (4:07)
Thanks Lenny, excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:09)
Just to start off and set a little context for listeners, can you give us a 55 second background on some of the wonderful things you've done in your career and what you're up to now?

**Barbra Gago** (4:21)
Definitely. So I spent my, pretty much my entire career in B of E SaaS tech, building and scaling through hyper-growth, oftentimes with disruptive technologies, kind of at the center of people tech, future of work, I would say. I helped bring products like Culture Amp and Greenhouse to market in the people space.
Before that, I did some work in enterprise social networking in the Yammer days. And most recently I was the CMO at Miro, where I also let the rebrand and kind of introduced that product to the world, which was very exciting.