AMA: Atlassian Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise, Akshay Kerkar on Stakeholder Management

The structure of any team needs to be driven by the success criteria for that team. At Atlassian, we typically look at KPIs like # of paid users and pipeline (MQLs) for PMM. Enterprise-focused PMM teams typically have a couple more things they need to solve for: Sales enablement, and account-based programs (which can vary from events to ABM campaigns to EDR programs). Currently, my team is a mix of core PMM who own the GTM for specific products, as well as “horizontal” PMMs who own programs (lik ...Read More

The structure of the PMM team is usually a function of the size of the company and it’s GTM model. The “typical” SaaS PMM team has a set of Core PMMs that are focused on product, and usually a sister PMM team in the form of Industry/Solutions Marketing that is focused on solutions for specific verticals or segments.At Atlassian, since we have a flywheel model, PMMs have a lot more focus on activities that deal with acquisition (self-serve), cross-sell, and upsell. So while our PMM teams are orga ...Read More

Great question! Demand Gen team tend to be bigger than PMM teams, and also have access to a lot more budget :) Modern PMM teams should consider pipeline (and ultimately revenue) to be their primary success metric. If PMM teams are led based on this approach, it drives perfect alignment with our DG partners since DGF is typically on the hook to generate sufficient pipeline for Sales every quarter.In my experience, the best way to work w/ DG is to consider them to be true partners. PMMs are expert ...Read More

Success should be measured based on impact to the org, and in B2B Marketing that really means pipeline (and ultimately conversion to revenue). PMMs that take this “full stack” approach to our craft will not only maximize their ability to have meaningful impact at their company, but will also put themselves in a position to acquire skills along the way to set themselves up for leadership positions in the future (whether that’s CMO or GM of a business line).The challenging part here is that PMM te ...Read More

Messaging is tricky, since everyone and their uncle tends to have an opinion on messaging :) The challenge with not having a clear approval process and roles/responsibilities defined upfront is that the review exercise will then typically lead to a lot of churn and take a long time to boot. So it’s really important to define the process upfront, including who the final approvers are, who needs to be informed, and who can provide feedback (you can use something like the DACI framework here). Ulti ...Read More

Not all launches are created equal, so it’s important to have a t-shirt sizing exercise upfront to determine how large a launch is (and hence what level of effort/mix of activities should be dedicated to launch). Once that’s done, the sooner we can put a launch plan in place, socialize that, and kick-off the launch process, the better. The process can then include checkpoints like getting the messaging finalized, locking the website copy, etc. with each activity having a mini-process to get sign ...Read More

The ability to really engage with our end users - whether through 1:1 conversations or broader campaigns - is critical to the success of any PMM team. If we aren’t able to continuously keep a pulse on our users and what they care about, we won’t really be able to do our jobs effectively. I’m not surprised that this is the problem you are facing though. Some Enterprise organizations tend to be very protective of their end users and allow only certain teams to “own” the conversation with customers ...Read More

I must admit that design disagreements have been rare in my experience. The best way to ensure alignment is to really think of your design partner as a true partner (vs. just a service role), bring them in early and upfront, provide them with context (e.g. maybe even have them be part of planning sessions), and take a collaborative vs. directive approach.While there may always be one-off disagreements on individual efforts, overall a collaborative approach should lead to a much better working re ...Read More