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.

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