Bruce Cleveland is the founder and CEO of Traction Gap Partners, named for the period between an initial product launch and the demonstration of minimum viable traction in the market.
He was a general partner at two venture capital firms and a first investor in category leaders such as Marketo, which Adobe acquired for $4.75 billion; C3 AI (NYSE: AI); Doximity (NYSE: DOCS); and Vlocity. He helped guide startups to more than $10 billion in value, a notable record in an industry where 80% of VC-backed startups fail, as do 40% to 60% of new products launched by mature companies.
Before that, he led engineering and product teams at Apple, then one of Oracle’s most successful product divisions before and after its IPO. As a senior executive at Siebel Systems, he helped grow its customer relationship management business from $2 million in revenue to $2 billion.
In short, he has the breadth of experience to advise companies of every size on how to “blitzscale with purpose,” the theme of his new book, “Market Engineering: Because Markets Don’t Build Themselves.” He may even draw insights from his experience as a sailor and a U.S. Ferrari Challenge driver.
So what exactly is market engineering?
"It's the discipline of orchestrating every factor that makes a company become the sustained leader in its market, including its category definition, positioning, messaging, storytelling, and thought leadership," he told Startup Savant. "The era of product-led and sales-led growth on their own is over, since even great products and sales execution can get lost without an operating system to build and sustain real advantage. Market engineering integrates strategy, narrative, and execution."
Market engineering requires resources from across the company, beyond marketing. Marketers can help execute the plan, but business leaders must own it.
The Five Tenets of Market Engineering
Cleveland identifies five tenets that companies must align to engineer and lead a market:
- Category Design/Redesign: Even if your company is not known for inventing all the underlying technologies in its space, it needs to be recognized for defining the problem correctly and offering the right solution.
- Positioning: This is how you anchor your company’s advantages relative to competitors, especially in crowded markets.
- Messaging: This is the art and science of expressing your company’s value proposition and differentiation across every blog post, sales call, tweet, ad, and presentation.
- Storytelling: The best market engineers distill their value and promise into a memorable and compelling story.
- Thought Leadership: Thought leaders drive debate about industry issues and competitors, from regulation to investment, shaping what comes next.
The Market Engineering Battle Plan
Cleveland turns those principles into five practical components:
- Market Blueprint: Who is the target audience? What messaging is needed for the market, category, positioning, and differentiation? Update the blueprint as you learn.
- Market Validation: Prove that your solution is correct with data and validation from notable customers.
- Challenge the Old Market: Prove what is obsolete in the old market and what is possible in a new one.
- Category Launch: Orchestrate a category launch with high-intensity events and notable customers who can discuss their experiences with your products.
- Monitor Feedback: Monitor feedback from customers, noncustomers, analysts, and partners.
Until your company is recognized as a category leader, don't bother with "demand engineering." Before then, costly marketing will deliver little return. Track category and market power using Google Search Console and Semrush, monitoring website rankings against competitors, average visit duration, and bounce rate.
Equip your website so generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity can surface its content. Format it for generative engine optimization using metadata tags, JSON, and FAQs. Weekly reporting can show whether your white papers, webinars, podcasts, bylined articles, and other efforts are paying off.
Unlike anecdote-driven business books, papers, and posts, "Market Engineering" is a prescriptive guide showing leaders how to apply its lessons, strategies, and tactics.
"We need to move beyond the usual comparison of businesses with chemistry or manufacturing, in which each step of the process is designed to squeeze out variance and deliver identical results," Cleveland writes. "The reality is that companies (even chipmakers) don't operate solely in clean rooms. Rather, they operate in kitchens--disorderly, improvisational, creative, and endlessly variable. A business is more like a restaurant than a factory."
He notes that his market engineering ideas are based on "decades of scar tissue in the company of legendary operators and untold burnouts." The value lies less in the individual ingredients than in how they are combined. Market engineering requires choosing the right ingredient at the right moment, sequencing operations that may defy traditional rules, and adjusting relentlessly based on feedback. Cleveland provides readers with a market engineering “cookbook” of tried, tested, and proven recipes for their companies and markets.
"Ask yourself why two companies employing the same tactics, employing similar growth hacks, even serving the same customer profile, see wildly divergent results? It's because recipes are more than the sum of their ingredients, such running positioning and messaging sprints with the product and Go to Market teams vs. outsourcing. Or the choice of whether employees learn storytelling from founder-led narratives or professional outsiders."
Cleveland concludes that enduring excellence must be based on battle-tested experience rather than the theories that dominate business school curricula and shape how companies of all sizes operate.
The Strategic Power of Storytelling
Cleveland cites Steve Jobs: "The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come."
Market-leading companies weave stories that highlight what is broken in the status quo, position the customer as the hero, and show how their frameworks, and indirectly their solutions, "lead to a superior reality." A story told well "wins more mindshare than any PR spend ever could."
Performance across revenue, profit, and customer and employee retention shows how few companies practice what they preach in their stories.
Cleveland offers C3 AI as an example of how a company’s story can influence an entire market: "It was about how Enterprise AI was the inevitable evolution of business through digital transformation, not just another software application, that galvanized investors, partners and customers. That simple, compelling narrative did more to unlock adoption and scale than any technical demo or presentation."
One might think successful tech companies are built entirely on Boolean algebra and lines of computer code, "but the truth is the opposite," Cleveland says. "They are all manifestations of something far older and deeper, the 50,000 years or longer of storytelling. Prehistoric cave paintings are evidence that early humans were telling stories as part of ritual and nostalgia for past events."
Storytelling is misunderstood as the opposite of logic, but it precedes reason, and we often bury the subjective, imaginative thinking behind logical solutions. Mathematicians and theoretical physicists engage in this process, which has been "behind almost every great innovation in human history." We must imagine something new before we can create it, including a business.
Cleveland states, "What makes us uniquely human is metaphor, the act of taking two seemingly unrelated words, phenomena, or ideas and bolting them together in a novel way that enables us to see the world in a different and even better way." Metaphors are often embedded in narratives that help us see how ideas can be applied to our daily lives. He also quotes David JP Phillips, known for his TED Talks: "storytelling is the most underrated skill in business today, the most powerful way to communicate."
Why Do Stories Work?
- Memory: We are wired to remember stories, not statistics.
- Emotion: Stories generate an emotional charge that facts can’t. MRI studies show they activate neural pathways associated with empathy and decision-making.
- Belief Formation: We instinctively use stories to make sense of complexity, uncertainty, and risk.
- Social Transmission: We retell stories we believe are true and simple enough to spread, not only among customers but also among investors, partners, and the media.
Cleveland cites Airbnb, Nike, Salesforce, Microsoft, IKEA, IBM, and Procter & Gamble as companies that used stories to launch products and reshape their images. But how can a company create one that is more than a passing anecdote or slogan?
Make a Story the Backbone of Market Engineering
- Find the Tension: This is usually a problem that remains unsolved. Salesforce did this by calling enterprise software "a swamp of bloat and cost." Airbnb reported that travelers "feel like outsiders, not locals," when they stay at hotels.
- Craft the From/To Arc: ServiceNow described a transition from businesses with out-of-control IT spending to a world where cloud-based self-service helps rein in costs. C3 AI offered to take customers from disconnected sensors and chaos to controlled and predictive insight.
- The Hero Is the Customer: Put the customer’s aspiration or pain at the center, such as "here's how you can conquer digital disruption with us as your guide."
- Make Stories Easy to Repeat: Make your story crisp and instantly understandable.
- Anchor in Values and Mission: Values such as courage, ingenuity, and resilience help a story cut through competing features and price wars. But provide evidence, not just assertions, and make sure reality does not contradict the story.
Build and Embed Your Story
In his book, Cleveland explains how to create a Messaging Matrix, which shows how a category and company fit into and stand out in the market, alongside a Market Blueprint. Together, they contain an origin narrative, problem statement, from/to transition, elevator pitch, competitive talking points, and proof points. They should guide all internal and external content, and every board member, advisor, and investor should be able to succinctly explain who you are, what you do, and why you are uniquely qualified.
Use these documents and success stories to onboard employees and reinforce the narrative in meetings with employees and customers.
Adapt the stories as the company evolves, as Netflix did when it moved from mailing DVDs to becoming a streaming giant.
A story is the connective thread running through the activities used to reach a company’s total addressable market, making its vision real for early customers and those who follow.
"How to operationalize your story in your company? Conduct in-depth interviews to find out what pain your company solved. Distill the core story into a single page that will capture the reasons employees are excited to work there. Code it into everything, including the website, sales emails, product onboarding, and PR, adapted to each audience. Hire evangelists and good writers and track your net promoter score (NPS) and revenue, social media mentions, attendee recall at events. In a world of increasing information density and shortened attention spans, meaning is the rarest of commodities. The startups and enterprises that win are those who have mastered the art of storytelling."
Cleveland’s book is not for beginners, and no summary can do it justice. Readers who want to master market engineering may need to revisit the pages most relevant to their goals.