Create a New Market Category Like a Splunk PMM

Episode notes

What happens when the market shifts or your product evolves so dramatically that your positioning story no longer fits? Today we're exploring one of the boldest moves a PMM can make - shaping or even creating an entire market category. Whether you're redefining your space, staking a claim in an emerging category, or building one from scratch, this is where strategy, narrative, and business collide in ways that can make or break your product's future. Michael Olson joins us as Senior Director of Product Marketing at Splunk, recognized as a top 100 PMM on ShareBird and founder of the Product Marketer blog. Michael's the person teams turn to for tough questions, customer advocacy, and thoughtful strategy. He walks us through his decision-making framework for category creation: creating a new market category for game-changing products, redefining existing categories with fresh twists, or expanding into adjacent markets with new perspectives. Our conversation covers Michael's five-step narrative crafting process - identifying big changes, framing problems, de-positioning the status quo, describing the promised land, and framing your category as the pathway forward.

Related episodes across the Index

Other episodes covering the same guests and topics, from across The B2B Podcast Index.

• Pipeline Gives Permission to Invest Big on Brand with Jennifer JohnsonThe B2B CMO Podcast with Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan · on product marketing74 / 100
• S2E3: Navigating the Intersection of Product and Marketing with Austin FullerProductly Speaking: Real Stories for Product Managers · on product marketing65 / 100
• Episode 86: Giovanni Benini, Co-Founder at Global Telco Consult (GTC)Humans of Telecom · on Messaging58 / 100
• #238: The Importance of Career ExperimentsMBA Insider · on product marketing38 / 100
• 5 Principles to Make Your Tech Product Hard to Ignore and Easy to TrustProduct Management Tech Brief By HackerNoon · on product marketing
• How Slack Built Its Enterprise Moat Through Notification PsychologyProduct Marketing with Fexingo · on product marketing

• Drive Impact Through Systems Like an AI-First PMM87 / 100
• Master Your Up-Market Strategy Like A Unify PMM86 / 100
• Claude Code Your Next Launch Like A Vivun PMM68 / 100
• Go Bold with Competition Like a Sybill PMM82 / 100
• Know the "So What" Like a Digital Science PMM63 / 100