AMA: Atlassian Former Head of Product Marketing, New Products & Solutions, Claire Maynard on Self Serve Product Marketing

At Atlassian, we've found that in-app feature announcements work really well as you have the ability to reach the user when they are in the context of your product vs perhaps checking email and thinking about something else. Here are some tips to make your in-product announcements more effective: Be highly targeted: Unless you're announcing a major feature or product that is useful to every type of user (which is rare!), it's most effective and definitely less annoying to customers, if you targe ...Read More

My team at Atlassian has a framework for how we launch new products that I would love to share. But before I dive into more detail I'll give you a few tl;dr tips for beta programs.  Create hypotheses that you want to test before your beta begins: Decide what you're trying to answer about your customer, product, or design via the beta program. This is important to keep your focus and ensure you come out learning something.  Great for product & marketing: Beta programs can be used to gather pr ...Read More

I believe it's important to start out with how product marketing is the same across a self-serve/product-led motion and a sales-led motion. In my opinion, the core pillars of the product marketing responsibilities remain: Target audience and buyer definition Positioning and messaging Pricing and packaging Product narrative and storytelling Product and feature launches and so on... With either motion, you have to be an expert in your product, customer, and market. Where the function starts to dif ...Read More

First off, is feature adoption the right KPI? In my opinion, focusing on feature adoption could be too narrow of a metric and doesn't shed light on what the end-user is experiencing. End users don't find value in features; they find value in getting their job to be done, done, and more effectively or efficiently than they did it before. At a basic level, product is responsible for building a feature that solves a job to be done effectively and efficiently. Product marketing is responsible for en ...Read More

I cannot speak to how the Slack team built their land and expand strategy but I can speak to how I understand and think about the strategy at Atlassian.  We have two methods of land and expand.  1) Product expansion - a user, let's say a product manager, lands in one product, Jira, and finds a ton of value. They then discover that Atlassian also offers Confluence, a knowledge management product that they can also use, so they expand into that. Then they discover one of the new products in our po ...Read More

In my eyes, much of the time you spend and core fundamentals and responsibilities are the same. As a PMM for self-serve and sales-led motions, you need to be an expert on the product, customer, and market. Doing this well involves time with customers (and non-customers!), analyzing data, partnering with product teams, and so on. Where you spend the rest of your time will depend on the GTM motion (or combination of motions) you've decided are best for your product/company. See my answer to: 'How ...Read More

An age-old question: how do you get product marketing a seat at the table? Product marketing has a vital role in product and roadmap development even within a product-led organization. There are many reasons why product marketing deserves a seat at the table. Here are a few: Product narrative drives product roadmap: The product narrative should drive the product roadmap, not the other way around, and product marketers are the storytellers behind the product. Voice of the customer, sales, and mar ...Read More

Great question! The goal of the new products team at Atlassian is to both expand our existing users and customers into new products and solutions and to reach new or adjacent audiences outside of Atlassian's customer base. Depending on the product and strategy, the product marketers on my team may focus more on one over the other. I'll give a few examples from the portfolio: Jira Work Management is a Jira-family solution designed for non-technical users. Jira Software is for product and engineer ...Read More

At Atlassian, we use many methods for understanding customers both qualitatively and quantitatively.  The most standardized, larger-scale tool we use across all of our cloud products is our Happiness Tracking Survey known as HaTS (developed by Google). Our research teams sends out weekly emails to employees who subscribe that give the overall customer satisfaction score and short clips of customer feedback such as what customers find frustrating about our products or what they like best. This is ...Read More

(copying this question from a previous answer) At Atlassian, we use many methods for understanding customers both qualitatively and quantitatively. The most standardized, larger-scale tool we use across all of our cloud products is our Happiness Tracking Survey known as HaTS (developed by Google). Our research teams sends out weekly emails to employees who subscribe that give the overall customer satisfaction score and short clips of customer feedback such as what customers find frustrating abou ...Read More

I believe it may be important to start out with how product marketing is the same across a self-serve/product-led motion and a sales-led motion. In my opinion, the core product marketing responsibilities remain the same: Target audience and buyer definition Positioning and messaging Pricing and packaging Product narrative and storytelling Product and feature launches and so on... With either motion, you have to be an expert in your product, customer, and market. Where the function starts to diff ...Read More