dbt Labs · Strategy · Senior · 45 to 60 minutes

Should Fishtown bet on dbt?

dbt Labs makes software that helps data teams transform and manage analytics data in cloud data warehouses. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

Strategy
Product sense
Prioritization
Go to market judgment
Metrics

The situation

Tristan Handy, founder of Fishtown Analytics, asks you for a recommendation on what the company should do next with dbt, a command line tool the team built for its own consulting work and released as open source. The consulting business has found a repeatable client profile and is bringing in revenue, but a new signal has appeared: after adding event tracking, the team can see that about 100 companies are using dbt, even though Fishtown has only worked directly with about 20 of them. A small Slack community is forming, technical users are finding the tool through GitHub and blog posts, and some clients are asking to use dbt themselves. At the same time, the product is rough, there is no business model around it yet, and every hour spent supporting external users is an hour not spent serving paying clients. Assume the company has enough consulting revenue to keep operating, but not enough people to pursue every path well. Handy wants a 12 to 18 month strategy that addresses whether to stay consulting led, invest in dbt as a product bet, or pursue a staged hybrid approach.

What to produce

A 2 page strategy memo.

Your answer must

State your recommended company strategy for the next 12 to 18 months, and make a clear call on the role of consulting versus dbt.
Compare at least three options, including a consulting led path, a product led path, and a hybrid path, with explicit tradeoffs.
Define the primary user and customer you would optimize for first, and explain the core problem dbt solves for them.
Lay out a sequence of the first three major investments or milestones across product, community, go to market, and team.
Specify 4 to 6 success metrics and decision triggers that would tell leadership to double down, stay the course, or change strategy.

Constraints

The team is small and engineering bandwidth is limited.
dbt is free, open source, and primarily a command line tool today.
Existing consulting clients and revenue cannot be put at immediate risk.
If your plan depends on outside capital, specify what proof points you would need before pursuing it.

Format

Use five sections: recommendation, options considered, target user and value, 12 to 18 month plan, metrics and risks.

How dbt Labs actually played it

The CEO traces how a two-person consultancy turned an internal tool into an open-source product and a business, and how a community ecosystem formed around it. Shows consulting as a discovery engine.

Consulting can reveal a product worth open-sourcing
An ecosystem lowers the cost of acquiring early users

Built from dbt Labs' Path to Product-Market Fit by First Round Review.