Pandas - transpose one column

Since you aren't performing an aggregation, pd.DataFrame.pivot should be preferred to groupby / pivot_table:

res = df.pivot(index='date', columns='name', values='quantity')

print(res)

name      A  B  C
date             
1/1/2018  5  6  7
1/2/2018  9  8  6

If you wish you can use reset_index to elevate date to a column.

By no means is my proposed solution better than jpp's. I just happened to run into the same problem and solved it differently.

df.set_index(['date', 'name']).unstack()

The result looks a little messier too but it worked in my case: