| name | category-map |
| description | Map a market category by customer jobs, segments, solution types, substitutes, value chains, channels, business models, and boundaries so teams understand structure before choosing competitors or positioning. |
Category Map
Use when a market is poorly understood, emerging, fragmented, or broader than a simple list of direct competitors.
Procedure
- Define the customer problem or job and geography or context that bounds the category investigation.
- Identify customer segments and the different ways they currently solve the problem, including internal work, services, manual processes, adjacent products, and doing nothing.
- Group solution types by how they create value rather than by company marketing labels alone.
- Map key value-chain roles such as producers, platforms, distributors, integrators, service providers, marketplaces, infrastructure, or regulators where relevant.
- Record common business models, pricing units, buying channels, switching dynamics, and dependencies between layers.
- Identify category boundaries, adjacent categories, convergence, and places where companies span several roles.
- Add representative players as examples without turning the structural map into a logo collage.
- Validate the map against customer behavior and current market evidence and update it as the category evolves.
Decision rules
- Start with customer jobs and solution structures, not a preselected competitor list.
- A company can occupy several category roles at once.
- Category names are market language, not immutable natural boundaries.
- Substitutes matter even when they do not call themselves competitors.
Quality gate
The map is ready when customer segments and solution types are understandable, substitutes and value-chain roles are visible, category boundaries and overlaps are explicit, representative players fit the structure, and the team can use it to scope research or strategy without confusing labels for market reality.
