Atlassian fmr Head of Growth on Growth Products (Part 2)
When I started at Atlassian, my number one question was “how are we going to grow?” The CEO drilled us on the “land and expand” model for growth products. In other words, you need to land within a business team in an organization that requires a specific service. For example, a marketing team needs a source code tracking solution and you focus on driving success with that team.
If you can make one team successful, then this will enable you to expand into other segments of an organization. Because we’re in the business of collaboration software, it’s easy for other teams to find out about the success of your first team. For example, starting out with software development for engineering can quickly be adopted by the product team. Furthermore, this can integrate further into the marketing team and other functions.
This is very easy to say – but it’s quite hard to execute. For example, your revenue is going to equal your customer base times the value of your customer’s footprint. Trying to acquire a large number of users through marketing or to deploy a sales force to increase your footprint is very expensive. Usually, you have to pick one or the other.
When Atlassian first started, the founders created an amazing piece of software (JIRA). The problem is that they didn’t have the resources for a sales team. As a result, they priced JIRA as cheap as possible to effectively make the product “sell itself.” In order to be profitable, they recognized that they needed a global customer base to increase volume.
In other words, customers need to take the product from you rather than have you give it to them. This is very difficult to achieve, but when you do, this is how growth products are able to land and expand most effectively.
Looking for Part 1? Click here to view.
Looking for Part 3? Click here to view.
About the speaker
Shaun Clowes is the Chief Product Officer at Metromile, a $200 post Series-D startup that is transforming the car insurance market through user-centered design and data science. Prior to Metromile, Shaun spent 6 years at Atlassian, initially leading product for JIRA Agile (now Jira Software). In addition, Shaun built the growth team to include designers, developers, data scientists and product managers. Shaun's team was one of the first to scale Growth techniques to the B2B and Enterprise software space, bringing a data-driven and rapid iteration approach to optimizing acquisition and retention of users.