AMA: Atlassian Director of Product, Sarah Joshi on Outbound Product Management

You may be ready to bring on OPM in your org if: You're seeing increased demand for high-touch, strategic customer engagement with large or complex enterprise customers and feature PMs don't have bandwidth to support breadth conversations beyond 10% of their time. This is especially true if your company offers a portfolio of products vs. a point product, where it's difficult to expect feature PMs to be able to represent the entire portfolio You have known Enterprise gaps / limitations in your pr ...Read More

Deep enterprise SaaS experience, especially working directly with large, complex customers. Relentless customer focus: comfortable engaging with C-level execs, landing deals, and de-escalating tough situations. Strong cross-functional collaborator: can partner with engineering, sales, and other teams to drive big initiatives. Excellent communication and influence: represents the product org with customers and influence both internal and external stakeholders at all levels Systems thinker: has a ...Read More

At my prior company, when I transitioned to building products as a traditional PM for Enterprise / Education customers, it was obvious to me that regardless of how cool the new tech you're building is, it's not worth much unless you have real adoption within your target market. Especially when it's early days, landing the first few lighthouse customers is super important to get real product feedback about what's working and what's not, and what the gaps are to broad market adoption. Over time, I ...Read More

A few that I would watch out for: Over-indexing on individual customer asks: Focusing too much on the most vocal or largest customers can lead to a fragmented roadmap and losing sight of what will benefit 1000s of customers, not just 1 Not being able to say "no": As OPMs, we can't solve every problem for every customer at exactly the same time. It's a hard but important part of being an OPM is to help understand customer challenges, identify potential solutions that can be unlocked today, vs. ar ...Read More

Obviously Atlassian products ;-) If we're trying to help our customers adopt Atlassian products at scale, of course we drink our own champagne! I spend a lot of time talking with customers about how we "Atlassian at Atlassian" and how our ways of working show up in our products. Loom for recording customer conversations (with consent) + Loom notetaker for capturing actions. With customer consent, we sometimes share snippets of the conversation to share direct feedback on specific feature areas w ...Read More

Not a framework or visual but I love to review any piece of data I can get my hands on about the customer before we meet. We also have an internal sync with the account team ahead of our customer briefings to align on goals for the meeting, background on the customer, and areas I should be prepared to speak about. We have some awesome internal tools that show me what Atlassian products the customer owns, adoption levels for each product and key features, open opportunities, etc. This is super he ...Read More

Not all companies need OPM. OPM is typically a role you see emerge when PMF has already been established, but the product is working to establish adoption within enterprise- or already has and is working to scale or gain significant market share. Signs may be ready to bring on OPM in your org if: You're seeing increased demand for high-touch, strategic customer engagementwith large or complex enterprise customers and feature PMs don't have bandwidth to support breadth conversations beyond 10% of ...Read More

I like to think about product investments in two key areas: product blockers and value drivers. Product blockers - block a customer from even purchasing and adopting the product. These are the areas we tend to get the most direct customer feedback on, and sometimes the most expensive to invest in (e.g. FedRAMP and other compliance blockers). These are critical investments that get our foot in the door for customers (and sometimes entire market segments) to consider adopting Cloud products (vs. s ...Read More

Outbound PMs and traditional PMs work hand-in-hand, but focus on different things: Outbound PMs serve as the key product person involved in pre-sales, escalations, and strategic post-sales conversations, and bring deep customer insight back to the product org. They’re not building features day-to-day, but they help prioritize what matters most for enterprise adoption and unify our messaging across teams. Traditional PMs focus on feature development and roadmap execution, and rely on Outbound PMs ...Read More