Copyright © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. candidate in the department, was researching visualization techniques for exploring and analyzing relational databases and 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. 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. 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. But for years, we were a total nobody.' Even the local Seattle tech blog wouldn't report on new product launches for Tableau, no matter how popular the products were with our users." 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. As Fields explained, "We were a very mission driven company. 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. Ellie Fields, then Director of Product Marketing, explained the situation: "We had traction, but weren't one of these startups with a ton of cred that was hitting the front page of Tech Crunch every day." 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. ![]() 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%. ![]() BauCase Study.pdf 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.
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