TSPPB: Dave and Thomas with Stephanie McReynolds on category creation

We have a discussion with former Alation CMO Stephanie McReynolds on the topic of category creation and her learnings as she helped drive the creation of the data catalog category and establish Alation as the leader in it [1].

In addition to her gig at Alation, Stephanie’s had a great career at many leading and/or category-defining vendors including E.piphany, Business Objects, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Aster Data, ClearStory, and Trifacta.

Questions we address include:

• Does a vendor create a category or do market forces?
• In creating a category do you lead with product or solution?
• How do you know if you should try to create a category?
• What role do industry analysts play in category creation?
• What happens once you’ve successfully created a category?  What next?