Barbra Gago
Founder and CEO of Pando; former CMO of Miro, VP Marketing at Greenhouse
Where to hear and read about Barbra Gago1 episode or test
Barbra Gago is the founder and CEO of Pando and a former CMO of Miro, where she led the rebrand and built the visual collaboration category. The thing most worth learning from her is to build a category or brand from how customers already talk and from real company values, and to drop the effort when buyers won't follow.
Our goal with Miro was to create a love mark rather than a trademark.
Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp)
Barbra Gago: the story and the lessons
1Barbra Gago's path from Yammer to Pando
Gago has taken people-tech products from early stage to hypergrowth. She worked on enterprise social networking at Yammer, helped bring Culture Amp and Greenhouse to market, and was most recently CMO at Miro, where she led the rebrand.
At Culture Amp she helped build the go-to-market plan and close the first 50 customers.
She founded Pando because leaders lacked tools to coach their teams. Pando is an employee progression platform that gives leaders structure for developing their people. Structure and transparency create accountability on both sides.
Her big goal is killing performance reviews, and she says the final category is still to be seen. Nancy Duarte was an early mentor.
Gago screens people by asking for their top 10 accomplishments. The answer shows what someone values and how quantitative or qualitative their accomplishments are.
2When Gago creates a category and when she doesn't
Gago treats a category as real only when buyers budget for it. Before inventing one she checks for a budget line, the words buyers use for their pain, and whether competitors exist. If customers still call you by the old name, you are in that category.
A category does not officially exist until rivals join it, so competitors are validation: "you're not building a category until there is competition".
At Greenhouse she tried a new category, then abandoned it. The ATS label was disliked as transactional, so Greenhouse pushed "recruiting optimization platform" with content and press. Customers kept calling it an ATS and budgeting for it as one.
Greenhouse dropped the effort and raised the value of the ATS category instead. In her words: "it's good to try things and also abandon them and that's okay".
Miro chose category creation for scope, not novelty. Online whiteboard was a real category but small and rarely searched, and the aim was to be needed by every company. Customers called the product online whiteboard, mind mapping and diagramming, and Miro tied them into visual collaboration.
That let HR, marketing and design teams describe it the same way, and competitors began using the term too. She says "all of my best marketing and positioning literally comes from having a million conversations with customers".
She won over directories and educated buyers to make the category stick. Miro was not listed under visual collaboration on G2 Crowd, so it met them to explain how the category differs from adjacent ones. She advises building relationships with analysts such as Gartner and Forrester too.
PR, content and thought leadership then teach buyers that the category exists and that they can budget for it.
She sells in the existing category while building the new one. Pando lists itself as performance management, where budget exists, while building employee progression through content and thought leadership. Miro stayed the best whiteboard while building the visual collaboration brand bottoms up.
She calls the investment high. Pando is not trying to dominate the new category yet.
She says new categories arrive at market inflection points. Covid and distributed work produced global employment platforms like Deel and Oyster, with four or five companies in about three years.
Category creation is a poor bet for established or undifferentiated companies, since squarely fitting a category means the work won't bring new business.
3How Gago rebranded Real-time Board as Miro
She made permission to rename the company a condition of joining. Real-time Board was so literal that she almost declined the job. The company had about a million users and a couple of million in revenue, and the founders agreed easily.
Her rule is to rebrand after product-market fit but before investing too much in a brand that can't carry the scale.
She kept a nod to the people who loved the old brand. The old Post-it yellow became the new M. A hot pink M was proposed first and rejected as too far from the past.
Early customers saw case studies and logo drafts, and some still preferred the old name. They were involved without slowing a very short timeline, and at about 100 people the staff needed to feel good about it too.
She ran the rename like a product project, not a marketing task. Naming began in late October and the launch was at South by Southwest in March, run by sprint teams with named owners. A name touches legal, contracts, the website, the product and every URL.
The miro.com domain switched about 48 hours before the event, after materials were already printed.
4Gago on brand, values and opinionated software
Gago builds brand from company values so touchpoints reflect it untrained. Each letter of Miro was a different shape tied to a value, and agility, for example, was a shape that moved. Miro also built a visual language so people from different countries could understand each other.
Miro's mission was to help companies build the next big thing, so the brand had to look like a big thing itself.
She runs a values workshop, then hands the wording to one writer. The leadership team did a brain dump, grouped ideas into themes and voted on the most important. One good writer then drafted the definitions and the team gave feedback.
Miro's values were already set when she arrived, and they were too long to remember. Her advice: "make them simple but also don't make them generic".
She treats a brand as a system, not a logo. It covers logo, colors, fonts, photography versus illustration, voice, and how customers and staff talk about the company. Reusable concepts, like Miro's shapes and colors, let it extend everywhere.
All of it adds up to the "fuzzy feeling" people get from the company.
She builds opinionated software with rules users can't work around. There are two routes: find a best practice with no technology yet, as Atlassian did for agile, or teach a better way, as Greenhouse did with structured recruiting.
Greenhouse set a way to create a pipeline and an interview kit, which made hiring more transparent and less biased.
Pando enforces structure where subjectivity produces unfair outcomes. Performance reviews are full of bias that flows into promotions and pay gaps. Pando requires transparent levels and competencies and creates accountability for both manager and employee.
She says most companies skip the work without a system: "without a system kind of enforcing some of these things it's just there's too much subjectivity".
Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp)
Barbra Gago explains when to create a new product category versus compete in an existing one, how to run a rebrand, and why to build opinionated software. She draws on creating the visual collaboration category at Miro, a failed category attempt at Greenhouse, and the Real-time Board to Miro rebrand done in about five months.
Gago has taken people-tech products from early stage to hypergrowth. She worked on enterprise social networking at Yammer, helped bring Culture Amp and Greenhouse to market, and was most recently CMO at Miro, where she led the rebrand.
At Culture Amp she helped build the go-to-market plan and close the first 50 customers.
She founded Pando because leaders lacked tools to coach their teams. Pando is an employee progression platform that gives leaders structure for developing their people. Structure and transparency create accountability on both sides.
Her big goal is killing performance reviews, and she says the final category is still to be seen. Nancy Duarte was an early mentor.
Gago screens people by asking for their top 10 accomplishments. The answer shows what someone values and how quantitative or qualitative their accomplishments are.
Gago treats a category as real only when buyers budget for it. Before inventing one she checks for a budget line, the words buyers use for their pain, and whether competitors exist. If customers still call you by the old name, you are in that category.
A category does not officially exist until rivals join it, so competitors are validation: "you're not building a category until there is competition".
At Greenhouse she tried a new category, then abandoned it. The ATS label was disliked as transactional, so Greenhouse pushed "recruiting optimization platform" with content and press. Customers kept calling it an ATS and budgeting for it as one.
Greenhouse dropped the effort and raised the value of the ATS category instead. In her words: "it's good to try things and also abandon them and that's okay".
Miro chose category creation for scope, not novelty. Online whiteboard was a real category but small and rarely searched, and the aim was to be needed by every company. Customers called the product online whiteboard, mind mapping and diagramming, and Miro tied them into visual collaboration.
That let HR, marketing and design teams describe it the same way, and competitors began using the term too. She says "all of my best marketing and positioning literally comes from having a million conversations with customers".
She won over directories and educated buyers to make the category stick. Miro was not listed under visual collaboration on G2 Crowd, so it met them to explain how the category differs from adjacent ones. She advises building relationships with analysts such as Gartner and Forrester too.
PR, content and thought leadership then teach buyers that the category exists and that they can budget for it.
She sells in the existing category while building the new one. Pando lists itself as performance management, where budget exists, while building employee progression through content and thought leadership. Miro stayed the best whiteboard while building the visual collaboration brand bottoms up.
She calls the investment high. Pando is not trying to dominate the new category yet.
She says new categories arrive at market inflection points. Covid and distributed work produced global employment platforms like Deel and Oyster, with four or five companies in about three years.
Category creation is a poor bet for established or undifferentiated companies, since squarely fitting a category means the work won't bring new business.
She made permission to rename the company a condition of joining. Real-time Board was so literal that she almost declined the job. The company had about a million users and a couple of million in revenue, and the founders agreed easily.
Her rule is to rebrand after product-market fit but before investing too much in a brand that can't carry the scale.
She kept a nod to the people who loved the old brand. The old Post-it yellow became the new M. A hot pink M was proposed first and rejected as too far from the past.
Early customers saw case studies and logo drafts, and some still preferred the old name. They were involved without slowing a very short timeline, and at about 100 people the staff needed to feel good about it too.
She ran the rename like a product project, not a marketing task. Naming began in late October and the launch was at South by Southwest in March, run by sprint teams with named owners. A name touches legal, contracts, the website, the product and every URL.
The miro.com domain switched about 48 hours before the event, after materials were already printed.
Gago builds brand from company values so touchpoints reflect it untrained. Each letter of Miro was a different shape tied to a value, and agility, for example, was a shape that moved. Miro also built a visual language so people from different countries could understand each other.
Miro's mission was to help companies build the next big thing, so the brand had to look like a big thing itself.
She runs a values workshop, then hands the wording to one writer. The leadership team did a brain dump, grouped ideas into themes and voted on the most important. One good writer then drafted the definitions and the team gave feedback.
Miro's values were already set when she arrived, and they were too long to remember. Her advice: "make them simple but also don't make them generic".
She treats a brand as a system, not a logo. It covers logo, colors, fonts, photography versus illustration, voice, and how customers and staff talk about the company. Reusable concepts, like Miro's shapes and colors, let it extend everywhere.
All of it adds up to the "fuzzy feeling" people get from the company.
She builds opinionated software with rules users can't work around. There are two routes: find a best practice with no technology yet, as Atlassian did for agile, or teach a better way, as Greenhouse did with structured recruiting.
Greenhouse set a way to create a pipeline and an interview kit, which made hiring more transparent and less biased.
Pando enforces structure where subjectivity produces unfair outcomes. Performance reviews are full of bias that flows into promotions and pay gaps. Pando requires transparent levels and competencies and creates accountability for both manager and employee.
She says most companies skip the work without a system: "without a system kind of enforcing some of these things it's just there's too much subjectivity".
Miro