Databricks: Professional Services, the Key to Unlocking Consumption
2025
| Case No.
SM401
| Length
10 pgs.
Jason Martin, vice president of professional services at Databricks, designs the professional services motion in a platform-as-a-service business to unlock consumption, preserve margin quality, and grow scale. The case examines strategic choices between invested and paid engagements and clarifies the role of shadow services. It also explores incentive design, including dollar parity between product and services for compensation and the choice of tying rewards to revenue or commit. It weighs direct delivery against partner-led channels, balancing capacity, execution quality, and the product feedback loop. Professional services are positioned as a strategic motion, with Martin setting the dial on invest versus monetize, deliver versus enable, and how sales, services, and partners are rewarded to accelerate adoption and scale without eroding economics.
Learning Objective
This case is designed to help students analyze how professional services can function as a strategic lever in a consumption-based platform business. Students evaluate how leaders decide which services to invest in versus monetize, how to design incentives that align sales, services, and partners around long-term product consumption, and how compensation choices tied to revenue or commit shape behavior, margins, and growth. The case also enables students to assess trade-offs between direct delivery and partner-led models, including their implications for scale, execution quality, and the product feedback loop.
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