I despise the title "Thought leader" because it is often artificial and as the author wrote, it doesn't necessarily mean very much. It is also used by conferenc

I despise the title "Thought leader" because it is often artificial and as the author wrote, it doesn't necessarily mean very much. It is also used by conference organisers to make their speakers sound more impressive! Anyway, I think this scenario sounds very much like the "pigs and chickens" metaphor in agile development. An external thought leader is a chicken. They have no skin in the game and their ideas are easy to communicate without really understanding the context. In many of these scenarios, multiple product teams are supposed to exist specifically to allow you to use whatever the hell DB engine makes sense to your team. The question isn't then "is squeaky better than bongodb" but which is suitable in this scenario? Will it perform well for this project, can it be supported by this team etc. Perhaps engineering leadership likes the idea of homogeny across the entire company "we use MySQL exclusively", but is that really necessary? Let's ask the Thought Leaders!