Stop competing in someone else's category. Name your own. Nine boxes that take you from a painful problem to a named category you can lead — problem, customer, landscape, point of view, solution, name, business model, category lead and the unfair advantage that makes it defensible.
Category design is the discipline of creating and naming the market you want to win, rather than fighting for share of one that already has a leader. The canvas forces a specific sequence: understand the problem and the person before you touch the solution, take a public point of view before you take a name, and prove you can defend the category before you announce it. Most positioning work goes wrong because it starts in the middle — with the product — and works outwards. This canvas starts at the edges.
Built for: Founders and product leads positioning a new product, or repositioning one that is losing on price.
Work the boxes in the numbered order. The order is the method.
What is wrong or painful about the situation as it stands?
Who cares about this problem and is directly affected by it?
Are there direct or indirect competitors in this space?
What do you believe about this problem that the incumbents don't?
Describe the problem as if you were explaining it to a five-year-old.
How does your solution directly solve the problem as you framed it?
The category name should describe the nature of the problem, not your product.
What do you have that nobody else can copy quickly — a dataset, a distribution partner, a method, a licence, a decade of domain knowledge?
Explain how the offering makes money using a familiar comparison, so people can picture it instantly. Example: “the Lululemon of scrubs” (Figs).
Who is seen as the leader of this category today — or of the nearest existing category?
The free edition is the whole canvas — nothing held back except the watermark. The pack is for people who will run it more than once and want it clean, in Miro, with the full guide.
The full canvas at A3 with every prompt, and a two-page quick guide. Watermarked with the DSH mark, otherwise complete.
Print at A3 landscape. Or open the PDF in Miro / FigJam as a board background.
All five canvases, clean and print-ready, with the full walkthrough guides. Buy once, use it in every workshop you ever run.
Secure checkout by Lemon Squeezy. Instant download. VAT handled at checkout. Single-team licence — run it on your company and your clients, don't resell it.
The full guide in the pack adds what good looks like for each box, a worked example, the agenda and the mistakes.
Take the named category and the unfair advantage into the FLYWHEEL canvas to score whether the business behind it can compound, and into REWIRED if the thing holding it back is the operator rather than the strategy.
Yes — both editions. Run it in your workshops, your company and your client work. The one thing you can't do is resell the files or upload them to template marketplaces.
A light tiled DSH mark and the site address across the sheet. Prompts, boxes and layout are identical to the pack version. The preview above is the free edition.
The pack includes a 4K PNG of each canvas. Drop it on a board, lock it, and put sticky notes on top.
Pack buyers get every new version of every canvas by email. The free edition is always the current version on this page.
Four rings from what they see to what they feel.
Score every competitor against the stories your user actually has.
The clever “how” between a business goal and a design team.
Design the person first. Then the agent that serves them.