Why I'm No Longer "Tableau Tim"

It’s pretty wild but here we are. If you’d rather watch the video of this click here.

I've stepped away from the Tableau Visionary Programme. As a result, I've changed the name of my channel away from a Salesforce trademark. It's now called Just Tim. (Tim.com wasn't available, so Just-Tim.com felt more appropriate. I’m still standing up the website so bear with me and yeah I’ll make that hyphen work hard 😄 )

This was my decision. Salesforce didn't ask me to leave. A chain of events set off a period of reflection, and stepping away was the conclusion I arrived at. There's no big falling out here. I still love Tableau, I'll still be making Tableau content, and I'm not going anywhere. But the context matters, so let me lay it out properly.

A couple of weeks ago, Salesforce raised a concern around my involvement in the Sigma influencer programme. Specifically, a line in a previous newsletter where I mentioned I had not yet been sponsored by Sigma, but would be in the future.

I want to be clear about something: to this day, I have never received a single penny from anyone as a sponsor. Not from Sigma, not from anyone. That's still the case as I write this. I've been approached by several companies this year, Sigma among them, but I have not yet taken a sponsorship. The newsletter was a signal of intent, not a confirmation of payment. I believe some people at Salesforce read it differently.

Their specific concern sat across two areas: payment and endorsement. Specifically, the idea that participating in a competitor's influencer programme signals an endorsement of that competitor as a best-in-class tool. I understand why that framing creates a tension. But I'd also point out that programme aims don't always align with creator intent. I've been in the Visionary Programme for years, and one of Salesforce's stated goals for that programme is to establish Tableau as a leading analytics provider. That hasn't stopped me from being very publicly critical of things I don't think are working, Tableau Next being the most recent example. I don't shy away from critique, but I work hard to make sure it's fair, grounded, and never personal.

Faced with the option of staying in the programme but having to step away from those kinds of conflicts of interest, I chose to walk away entirely. And here's where the reflection went deeper.

In the UK, the rules around social media disclosure have become very clear over the last few years (and they differ by country, which is worth noting). Any exchange of value, whether monetary, access, recognition, or product, that results in content being created should be disclosed as a form of sponsorship.

When I held that standard up against the Visionary Programme itself, the lines got blurry quickly. Members receive conference tickets, product access, career visibility, placement on official channels. That value is real. It's opened doors, built careers, launched businesses. And yet no one in the programme has ever labelled a piece of content as sponsored. I'm not saying they should have to. But if Salesforce wants to draw firm lines around endorsement and compensation, it's worth being honest that those lines are blurry on both sides.

That irony made my decision clearer. If I want to keep making content the way I do, with the audience I have, at the scale I operate at, I need to keep these things properly separate. And given the rule book had already been thrown at me once, I also didn't want to give Salesforce a second opportunity to come at me over a trademark. Hence, Tableau Tim is no more.

I've made over 600 videos. What sits behind every single one of them is a personal cost that most people never see: time, energy, sacrifice. And I wouldn't change any of it, because none of it was ever done for the programme. It was done because I saw a gap that wasn't being filled, by Salesforce or anyone else, and I put a tremendous amount of energy into proving that high-quality video content could be a genuine net positive for the community.

But what people also don't see is what happens after I post something critical. I've always made myself available to Salesforce's product teams to stand behind my comments. Sometimes that's three or four calls a month. Product managers, UX designers, developers, sales teams, marketing teams. I've worked with pretty much every part of the Salesforce organisation over the years, always on my own time, always unpaid. That labour sits behind all of this, and it fills me with a bit of dismay that given all of that open access, one engagement that hadn't even happened yet was enough to trigger the conversation it did.

I want to be direct about something here. I think there was an assumption in this situation that Salesforce had leverage. That the programme, the recognition, the association, these things gave them a position of strength. I don't think that's the case. It's a bit like Yamaha telling pianists they should be grateful for the platform, because without the world's best pianos, there'd be no world-class music. It's a strange framing, and I don't buy it. Actually realising as I edit, Bösendorfer make the best pianos but you get my drift. My Piano teacher had a lovely Yamaha though.

I got my YouTube plaque first. The Visionary recognition and the Golden Hoodie came along the way and after. That order matters. I was here for my audience before any of that, and there was never a point in this relationship where I needed the recognition to keep going. I was going to do it anyway. Stepping away hasn't changed what I do. If anything, it's made things simpler.

We live in a world where it's uncommon to see Tableau on its own in any organisation. I've been consulting for twelve years, and in at least the last three, I've consistently seen Tableau alongside Power BI, Sigma, and other modern tools. I have a client right now where Tableau and Sigma sit side by side, and the use cases for both make perfect sense.

At a time when you'd want your programme members championing the best of what's possible and showing how Tableau connects into a broader ecosystem, I don't think it's viable to expect them to be single-tool minded. There will come a time when Databricks' (a big Partner of Tableau) BI capability as an example rivals Tableau's, and when that happens, you'll want your visionaries showing how the two work together, not telling them they can't mention a competitor. The world doesn't wait for Salesforce to realise where the industry is going.

I call this out for the benefit of those still in the programme. I don't think the current expectation is right, and I think this situation has shown me I probably should have seen it coming.

Here's an honest reflection I didn't expect to have.

Last week, I realised that I'd been conflating my participation in the programme with being part of the community. When you're in the Visionary Programme, you're added to an internal Slack thread with other visionaries and ambassadors. That gives you immediate access to people in the programme, and it creates this feeling of being in the room. But being in the room isn't the same as contributing to it.

I've been lazy about that distinction. I let the programme carry me amongst the community, rather than engaging with it on my own terms. I've built relationships with individuals, yes, but I haven't invested in the collective the way I could have. Stepping away has been a wake-up call on that front. I want to push harder to collaborate directly with people, rather than relying on a programme to be the catalyst for that.

I'm taking a step back and rethinking everything, I already was. Over the coming weeks, you'll see changes to the Youtube channel: new thumbnails, new branding, new conversations. I've been setting up discussions behind the scenes with technology partners, some of whom I've mentioned in previous newsletters, others who've reached out since my posts. Next week, I'll be sharing a conversation with a new entrant in the data prep space.

Beyond that, I'm working on a learning platform that I'm incredibly excited about, alongside two people I hugely respect. When that's ready to share properly, I think it'll take this whole journey in a direction that none of us are quite expecting. More on that when the time is right.

Thanks for being here.

This is the first newsletter as Just Tim. and yeah. Changing newsletter domains and URLs is a right pain so bear with me while I figure this out.