Akshay Kerkar

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

December 22 @ 10:00AM PT
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How has your product marketing team traditionally worked with demand generation / growth marketing?
At our company, demand gen is a much bigger function than product marketing so they drive all of the campaigns with our input, but I came from an organization where we lead the campaign strategy a bit more since we had more numbers. Anyone have a good solid process they use with their demand gen team?
Akshay Kerkar
LaunchDarkly Vice President Product Marketing5y
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 r...
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7599 Views
3 requests
I am product marketer for an enterprise-level ERP. I am faced with a situation where I do not have access to the end-users of the software. The account managers are willing to help me acquire the user list but we are debating the best ways to acquire the same. Have you been in a such a situation and done something great about it?
The list of end-users with their details will allow us to target educational product content that will help them do their jobs better. We would like to engage them via such content and also the Product Managers will benefit a lot from this direct access to end-users.
Akshay Kerkar
LaunchDarkly Vice President Product Marketing5y
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 t...
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957 Views
2 requests
Akshay Kerkar
LaunchDarkly Vice President Product Marketing5y
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. ...
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1698 Views
1 request
Akshay Kerkar
LaunchDarkly Vice President Product Marketing5y
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 s...
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1543 Views
2 requests
Akshay Kerkar
LaunchDarkly Vice President Product Marketing5y
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/responsibili...
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2457 Views
2 requests
Akshay Kerkar
LaunchDarkly Vice President Product Marketing5y
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 ...
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1971 Views
2 requests
Akshay Kerkar
LaunchDarkly Vice President Product Marketing5y
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 P...
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2506 Views
Akshay Kerkar
LaunchDarkly Vice President Product Marketing5y
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 ...
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2217 Views
4 requests