Marketing and management assignment

CASE: E-632 DATE: 2/10/18

Matt Saucedo (MBA 2015), Professor Amir Goldberg, and Lecturer Robert Siegel prepared this case as the basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. Copyright © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Publicly available cases are distributed through Harvard Business Publishing at hbsp.harvard.edu and The Case Centre at thecasecentre.org; please contact them to order copies and request permission to reproduce materials. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or by any means –– electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise –– without the permission of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Every effort has been made to respect copyright and to contact copyright holders as appropriate. If you are a copyright holder and have concerns, please contact the Case Writing Office at [email protected] or write to Case Writing Office, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Knight Management Center, 655 Knight Way, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5015.

TABLEAU: THE CREATION OF TABLEAU PUBLIC

“You have to be selective with what you build—you can t just build everything for everybody.” Ellie Fields, Senior Director, Product Development

2009 was a tough year for Tableau, the Seattle based data visualization software company. Many of its customers were hit hard by the economic tumult of the Great Recession, and while the company had about doubled year over year up until then, its growth in 2009 had slowed to about 37%. Ellie Fields, then Director of Product Marketing, explained the situation: We had ac i n, b e en ne f he e a i h a n f c ed ha a hi ing he f n age f Tech C nch e e da . However, the team was on a mission to reimagine the way in which users answered questions with data, and customers that used Tableau to create data visualizations were loyal to the company and its product. The founders believed that they had achieved product/market fit, but needed to come up with a way to scale the company and increase conversion for the core enterprise product. As Fields explained, We e e a e mi i n d i en c m an . B f ea ,

e e e a al n b d . E en he l cal Sea le ech bl g ldn e n ne d c la nche f Tablea , n ma e h la he d c e e i h e . So the founders and the team came up with a radical approach they planned to create a public version of the enterprise product and distribute it for free on the web. It was a risky approach that forced Fields and her team to think deeply about the types of customers the company should target and how to best leverage a free product to better market an enterprise solution.

BACKGROUND: TABLEAU SOFTWARE

The catalyst for the idea behind Tableau came in 1999 when the Department of Defense (DOD) brought a project aimed at increasing peoples ability to analyze information to the Stanford University Computer Science department. Chris Stolte, then a Ph.D. candidate in the department, was researching visualization techniques for exploring and analyzing relational databases and

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data cubes. His early career as a database programmer helped him see the problems with existing data analysis tools. Stolte was intrigued by the challenges set forth in the DOD project. His Ph.D. advisor, Professor Pat Hanrahan, also realized that this project could have a profound impact on the way in which people interacted with data, and as a founding member of Pixar, Hanrahan had extensive experience with creating new visualization experiences in the digital realm. Stolte, Hanrahan, and a team of Stanford Ph.D. realized that computer graphics could deliver huge gains in e ability to understand data. The breakthrough came when they brought together two computer science disciplines for the first time: computer graphics and databases. Their invention, VizQL, let people analyze data by building drag & drop pictures of what they wanted to see. Soon, Stolte and Hanrahan teamed up with Stanford Graduate School of Business alumnus Christian Chabot and set about establishing a business. Together, Stolte, Hanrahan, and Chabot formed Tableau and spun out of Stanford in 2003.

TABLEAU DESKTOP

Before the creation of Tableau Public, the primary products for the company were Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server. Tableau Desktop allowed users to create live visual analytics and interactive dashboards, which helped uncover actionable information from datasets. Tableau Server allowed users to publish data and analyses, to collaborate securely with colleagues. According to the company, Tableau harnessed people s natural ability to spot visual patterns quickly, revealing everyday opportunities and Eureka moments alike. Tableau Desktop worked with on-premise and cloud-based data including SQL databases and spreadsheets. No coding was necessary for basic use, but power users could develop their own calculations and manage metadata to optimize their data sources. Users could also create dashboards for their data, which allowed them to spot trends, identify opportunities, and make stronger arguments for data-driven decisions within their organizations.

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Exhibit 1: Screen shot of Tableau Desktop (source: Tableau Software)

Tableau Desktop Pricing

Tableau offered personal and professional editions of Tableau Desktop. The company sold both editions for a set price per named user with a perpetual license and an annual maintenance fee. The personal edition cost $999 and allowed users to connect six data sources, including Microsoft Excel and CSV files, came with one year of updates and support, and allowed for local saving and sharing. The professional edition cost $1,999 and allowed users to connect to 44 data sources, came with the same one year of updates and support, and allowed for local saving and sharing. Additionally, the professional edition was also compatible with Tableau Server. Tableau Desktop was free for students and instructors at accredited academic institutions doing specific coursework.

TABLEAU PUBLIC

The idea for Tableau Public was to create a data visualization platform that would allow anyone to create, publish, and share interactive data visualizations on the web. These vizzes would be embeddable into any web page or blog and were shareable via social media and email. Users would create vizzes in the new Tableau Public Desktop application, which anyone could download and use from Tableau s website.

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Tableau Public Desktop functioned similarly to Tableau Desktop users could open data sets and e he f a e s drag and drop interface to easily create a variety of data visualizations. Users could then save and store their visualizations on the Tableau Public cloud service, where others could see their vizzes. Additionally, users could share their vizzes with the world through social media or by embedding them on any site or blog. Vizzes would remain live and interactive regardless of how users shared them. In contrast to the Tableau Desktop application, Tableau Public would be distributed for free.

Why develop a free public product?

The sales and marketing teams were wary of Tableau Public in their initial briefings on the project. Fields ecalled, S meb d n he ale eam c m lained, I m kn cking n d ing to get people to buy a $1,999 version of our software, and now you want to give it away for f ee? However, others in the company, including cofounder Christian Chabot, saw a major benefit for Tableau Public: it could help the firm advertise its enterprise product. In particular, he hoped that people would create vizzes using Tableau Public that would be embedded in data driven articles across the web and help drive awareness of he c m an en e i e d c . There were several differences between Tableau Public and Tableau Desktop. The key limitations of Tableau Public were:

x Security. Any created content could only be saved to the public web, so it was not appropriate for most corporate data.

x Connectivity. Tableau Public was only able to connect to the same data sources as Tableau Personal.

x Data size. Tableau Public initially could only work with data of 100,000 rows or fewer. One of the key points behind the above restrictions was to prevent end users from building a paid application on top of the free Tableau Public platform. Tableau stressed to its users that all published documents and data were public information and that there was no security or user management for authors on the platform.

Who To Target?

Beyond shoring up commitment within the company, Fields and her team had to decide which customer segment to target for their initial rollout of Tableau Public. She soon set off on exploring the viability of the product with different customer types. As Fields considered each of the following target audiences, she had two key questions in mind:

1. Would this audience use Tableau Public? 2. Would this audience be willing to pay for Tableau corporate products?

Jock Mackinlay, vice president of research and design at Tableau, explained the difficulty in creating a new product designed for a variety of target customers:

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When de igning a d c like Tablea P blic, e g ing ge fea e and design requests and input from your customers based on how they currently do things. Quality design work is to look deeper than just a simple request and

ide a l i n f i , beca e f en ime , ha n e ac l ha he e really needs. Good design work is to figure out what the users are really trying to accomplish and satisfy that, as opposed to giving the user exactly what they said, which is often not anywhere close to what they really need.

Additionally, Fields and her team were split on whether to style Tableau Public as a destination site or more of a tool for users to design vizzes and then publish them elsewhere on the web. The team was flummoxed since either decision would lead the team down a different design path at a time when they were still unsure of which customer group to target for launch.

Quant blogger Fields considered quant bloggers to be the core Tableau Public audience. The typical quant blogger ran a blog and was passionate about economics, politics, real estate, or some other quantitative bjec . Thi e n bl g a mainl a h bb (f e am le, a bl g n he Sea le h ing ma ke ) an ancilla hei ima b ine (f e am le, a en e ca i ali personal blog). There was no strict range to the audience size of these blogs: they could range from a target audience of friends and family to an industry-focused blog read by thousands of e le. Acc ding Field , he an bl gge g al a c n ib e meaningf ll a

di c i n and g he bl g a dience.

Knowledge worker Fields believed that knowledge workers would serve as another core audience for Tableau Public. In her mind, the ideal customer within this audience worked at a government agency or otherwise had public data related to their work that they wanted to visualize. An example would be someone from a University who wanted to publish a viz of his or her student applications (in aggregate) over the last few years.

Journalist/media property This was a core potential audience for Tableau Public. The target user would write (or manage writers) professionally and make money from selling ads on either a traditional news site or a la ge, fe i nal bl g like he H ffing n P . Thi e n need were to author quickly and embed easily, and to make sure the viz stayed available and responsive while it was on a hosted site. An example of this type of customer would be a network such as CBS a j nali primary goal would be to use Tableau Public to grow and engage readers.

Tech-interested individual This segment was a secondary potential audience for Tableau Public. These people would include those who read technology oriented online publications such as TechCrunch, were generally interested in startups & technology, and tended to sign up for new services. These potential customers were possibly an important audience to the extent that they would be influencers but did not have a traffic-generating site in which embed a i . Thi e n g al would be to learn about cool services and appear to be cutting-edge.

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The decision Fields and her team worked late into the night debating the merits and disadvantages of each customer group. She wondered whether the concerns of the sales team were warranted would a public product run the risk of cannibalizing revenue from paying customers? Fields knew that the potential reward was worthwhile, but she also knew that a large part of the success of the product would come from targeting the right first group of customers.