“Decoding” the Gartner Magic Quadrant

We love a good chart, and every year, Gartner provides us with one that gets a *lot* of buzz. In this episode, Aaron Sheehan joins Phillip to unpack and unlock the mysteries and myths of the Magic Quadrant and ways it can benefit those having a look and those who have been placed on it. Why is context so important in understanding this and other reports, and why doesn’t anyone talk about The Critical Capabilities report that comes out simultaneously? Listen now to this insightful discussion!

Smoke-Filled Rooms

• {00:17:05} - “These methodologies get a little calcified probably over time, but that's by at some level design. They're not meant to be sort of continually updated because they're meant to be a point of comparison year over year.” - Aaron
• {00:18:36} - “If Gartner or Forrester or whoever had a completeness of vision rubric, let's say they understand every single vendor's vision, their roadmap, and where they are on their progression of the roadmap, then in reality, every point on this quadrant, at least on the Gartner Magic Quadrant, is not relative to each other, but relative to their product roadmap.” - Phillip
• {00:26:37} - “It's not about movement within a fixed scale, it's that the scale is constantly moving in both directions and your velocity as a business and your total addressable market as a business determine where you stay on that stretching canvas.” - Phillip
• {00:26:56} - “Like a lot of human endeavor, the analyst reports are an attempt to impose a scientific rigor on what is often a somewhat emotional set of judgment calls.” - Aaron
• {00:38:00} - “It probably hurts you not to show up and participate in the RFI because you lose the chance to present your vision and your roadmap and cast yourself in the best light to the analysts. So that's a good thing for you to do if you are wanting to rank well.” - Aaron
• {00:57:57} - “The more specific context you can bring into your graphic, the better, the more useful your two-dimensional graphic probably is because that context is the actual third dimension in that 3D visualization that I was advocating for at the beginning. It's the context that helps you interpret the graphic.” - Aaron

Associated Links:

• The long-form breakdown of the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Commerce Platforms — from Cocktails and Commerce by Brian Walker
• The 2021-2023 comparison chart of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Commerce Platforms by Slava Kravchuk, CEO of Atwix
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