Craft product launch tiers like an Atlassian PMM
Product launches are never “just a launch.” Some are quiet releases that keep customers happy. Others change the trajectory of the business. And if your team treats every launch like it deserves a full Tier 1 campaign, you end up with two outcomes: burnout internally, and noise externally.
I sat down with Ashley Faus, Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Atlassian, to unpack how Atlassian thinks about launch tiers and why it matters. Ashley has seen the full spectrum, from acquisitions to product sunsets to entirely new products, and she brings a rare mix of strategic rigour and practical realism to the messy question every PMM eventually faces: how do we decide what deserves the big moment, and what just needs to ship well?
Why Launch Tiers Exist in the First Place
Launch tiers are not about bureaucracy. They’re about clarity. When you have a tiering framework, you stop arguing in circles about effort and start aligning around impact. Ashley’s advice on where to start is refreshingly grounded: audit what already exists in your organisation. Look at past launches, how they were treated, and what actually moved the needle. You’ll quickly spot patterns, gaps, and the unspoken rules people have been following without ever naming them.
That audit becomes your baseline. Not a perfect system, but a shared starting point that makes the next conversations far less emotional.
Align the Business Around Impact, Not Workload
One of the strongest themes from Ashley is that launch tiers should be defined by impact, not by how much work went into the development. At Atlassian, impact is considered across multiple pillars, including customer impact, company impact, and ecosystem impact. That last one matters more than most teams realise. Partners, integrations, and the broader ecosystem can be a growth lever or a risk multiplier depending on what you ship and how you communicate it.
This is also why tiering cannot live inside marketing alone. Ashley emphasised cross-functional alignment with product, sales, partnerships, and finance. If you want a tiering framework that sticks, it has to reflect how the business actually operates, not just how marketing prefers to run campaigns.
The Roadshow That Creates Buy-In
Once you’ve got a draft framework, Ashley recommends a roadshow. Not a “big reveal” presentation, but a deliberate feedback loop across departments to pressure-test your criteria. The goal is to surface the things you might miss if you build the framework in isolation. Hidden dependencies. Downstream impacts. Internal teams that will be affected but never invited to the conversation.
This step is where the framework becomes real. It’s also where you earn buy-in, because people support what they helped shape.
Map Tactics to Tiers Without Turning It Into a Checklist
A common mistake with launch tiers is assuming higher tier equals more tactics. Ashley’s approach is smarter: match tactics to the intended impact. A Tier 1 launch might justify broader plays like paid campaigns, media outreach, and coordinated multi-channel pushes. A smaller launch might not need any of that, but could benefit massively from employee engagement, internal enablement, and a focused social push.
It’s not “do everything.” It’s “do the right things.” That distinction is what keeps tiering frameworks from becoming performative.
Messaging Critique: What Contentstack Gets Right (After Getting It Wrong)
This episode’s messaging critique was a perfect companion to the launch tier conversation, because it highlights something PMMs learn the hard way: your launch is only as strong as the message people land on.
We looked at Contentstack, a content management system, and specifically a moment where their channel messaging was out of sync. They ran an outdoor billboard with a sharp, specific promise: “Want to publish content 90% faster?” Great hook. Clear value. Easy to repeat. But when you actually went to the website, the headline was vague and abstract: “Gain your experience edge.” That’s the kind of line that sounds like marketing, but doesn’t say anything. And it breaks the journey. If the billboard is the spark, the website has to be the fuel. Otherwise, you’ve paid for attention you can’t convert.
What made this story interesting is what happened next. Ashley shared that after she called out the disconnect on LinkedIn, Contentstack’s CMO engaged with the feedback, and within hours the website messaging was updated to something far clearer and more aligned: “The first AI-powered CMS platform.” That’s not just a copy tweak. It’s a signal. It shows a brand willing to listen, move fast, and protect the customer journey from curiosity to clarity.
Their updated messaging leans into a more sophisticated buyer, with language that signals they understand the world of digital experience, headless CMS, and enterprise complexity. Some phrases still drift into generic territory, but the overall shift is the real lesson: specificity wins, and consistency across channels is not optional. If your top-of-funnel message is concrete, your homepage cannot be a fog machine.
Keep the Framework Alive
Ashley also stressed that launch tiering is not set-and-forget. Markets change. Products evolve. Teams grow. An annual review helps you evaluate what worked, refine your criteria, and update the tactics that actually deliver results. Without that refresh, frameworks get stale, and stale frameworks get ignored.
Stop Ignoring the Small Launches
Micro-launches and Tier 4 announcements are often treated like admin. Ashley flips that thinking. Smaller releases can drive meaningful value when you empower people closest to the work to share it. Employee-led social sharing, internal excitement, and lightweight activation can create organic reach that feels authentic because it is.
Sometimes the most effective launch is not the loudest one. It’s the one that’s clear, timely, and shared by people who genuinely care.
Ashley’s perspective is a reminder that a strong launch strategy is not about flashy campaigns. It’s about thoughtful alignment, clear impact criteria, and execution that matches the moment. Launch tiers give you a way to protect your team’s energy, respect your audience’s attention, and still show up big when it truly matters.
And the Contentstack critique reinforces the other half of the equation: even the best tiering framework falls apart if your messaging is inconsistent across channels. Your billboard, your landing page, your sales deck, your internal enablement all of it has to tell the same story, just at different depths.
LINKS:
Messaging Critique:
Contentstack:
Connect with Ashley:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleyfaus/
Connect with Elle:
LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/elle3izabeth/
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[00:00:36] Elle: Okay, product marketers. I know you've been in this situation. You finally get your hands on the product roadmap and it's packed. Now I know you've got those big, beautiful tier one launches covered. The ones with revenue impact, executive visibility, and all the cross-functional bells and whistles, but then you see all the other stuff. the minor improvements, the quality of life [00:01:00] updates, the, could we get another blog for this one too? Asks from your pm and suddenly you're wondering, do these really matter? I can't give everything a blog, an email, sales enablement. All the things, and maybe most importantly, how do I make sure my PMs feel heard and valued even when those smaller updates don't warrant a full go-to market motion? Well, this is your opportunity to show up for the small things to build trust and oversee a strong outcome for your product, and that's where today's conversation is going. Today we're talking about how pmms at Atlassian created product launch tiers and how they support even the tiniest product launches. With that, it is my absolute pleasure to have Ashley Foss on the show. Ashley is one of the most multidimensional product marketers in the industry. She's head of lifecycle marketing at Atlassian, where she works across the entire Atlassian suite of products. She's also the author of a new [00:02:00] book. Human-centered marketing, how to connect with audiences in the age of ai, which introduces three powerful frameworks that help marketers build, trust, attract and convert, and even retain customers in an era where AI is reshaping how people consume information. Her work has been featured in Time Forbes, the next Web Content Marketing Institute, and she's spoken on major global conference stages from inbound to marketing profs.
[00:02:27] And of course, Ashley is well known for her personal motto, marketer, writer, speaker by day, singer, actor, fitness feed by night, you guys. She brings strategy, creativity, and pure energy to every corner of her work. Ashley, it's amazing to have you on the show.
[00:02:44] Ashley: Thanks for having me. I feel like I need to have you like narrate whenever I go places and just be like, this is Ashley. Like you have so much passion in your voice. It makes me very happy.
[00:02:54] Elle: I'm such a natural, like hype man. I'm like, let's go. So [00:03:00] thank you. Okay, let's dive right in 'cause we have such a great topic today. Um, I can't imagine anyone would not know this, uh, certainly the pmms who are in the more B2B space, but just to get everyone on the same page, what is Atlassian exactly.
[00:03:16] Ashley: So, I mean, this is like the hardest question of the whole podcast, right? Like, can I do the, the messaging and positioning effectively for my own company? But no, we are, uh, a collaboration software on a mission to unleash the potential of every team. Um, and you were probably familiar with most of our products, but, um, big products like Jira, confluence, Trello, and Loom are probably most relevant to this audience.
[00:03:39] Elle: totally. I think I've used absolutely every single one of those products. Um, and it's funny, I bet a lot of. Professionals out there don't even realize that what they're using is Ned Atlassian product. So I'm sure everyone has at least touched the product before and maybe didn't even know it. today's conversation is around creating product [00:04:00] launch tiering and how to support even the tiniest launches or releases. And this is honestly like potentially one of the biggest ways that a product marketer can truly drive trust, but but with the relationship with, with pm so the, for the first segment of our show, I wanna start with a case study for how you and the pmms at Atlassian solved this challenge.
[00:04:23] So I guess tell us more about what was going on, at Atlassian, just kind of with your overall environment when you and the PMM team decided that maybe there needed to be a change with how you guys look at product launch tiers.
[00:04:37] Ashley: So Atlassian has grown a lot over its 25 year history. Um, I've actually been at Atlassian for a little over eight years. I've worked across a number of different teams, um, including our product marketing team. And so as you can imagine over that time between acquisitions, um, sunset products, bringing new features to market, that actually turned out to be so robust that hey, [00:05:00] we need to expand them and turn them into products.
[00:05:02] It was a lot. Um, and one of the values that Atlassian is be the change you seek. And so the good news with that is that people are empowered to solve problems. The kind of neutral news with that is that sometimes it means that folks might be solving the same problem that someone else is solving. And so we have a ton of really smart product marketers at Atlassian, and so they realize like, Hey, this is a problem.
[00:05:23] We need to solve it. We need to have these launch tiers. We can't put a hundred percent. Effort and like go full force, both from an internal capacity standpoint and from an audience fatigue standpoint, uh, and market fatigue standpoint, right? So budget, resources, and of course the audience gets fatigued.
[00:05:40] So, um, we had a number of different tiering frameworks floating around. Uh, some folks called them, uh, like gold, silver, bronze. Other people had like sailing metaphors or, you know, diving metaphors, swimming metaphors. Some people just called them one, two, and three, right? Um, but we didn't have shared criteria.
[00:05:58] We didn't have shared language in [00:06:00] terms of how we define a tier one launch. in some cases people had five tiers, others had three tiers. So we couldn't totally agree on exactly how many tiers we needed. and then we couldn't agree on the tactics necessarily for each launch. And so we were just seeing, um, a lot of silos and, and misaligned incentives and definitions, and obviously from a product management standpoint.
[00:06:25] They're seeing their peers in other teams or other products getting a certain level of support, and they're like, why didn't I
[00:06:32] get that
[00:06:32] Elle: I have
[00:06:33] Ashley: right? How come so and so got this for their tier three launch and I didn't for my bronze launch? And it's like, oh, the list of tactics they have, the criteria are not aligned between someone else's tier three and our bronze, which in theory should be the same.
[00:06:48] So, um, that was a big thing. And obviously when we got a new CMO, um, she saw this and, and really was like, Hey, let's, let's do some, you know, leadership alignment on this to make sure [00:07:00] that we have the right criteria and the right tactics. And then this gets shared broadly.
[00:07:04] Elle: That's really helpful. Yes. And I feel like I've been there where, especially even at a really big organization where things have just changed since the original framework was put in place and you acquire new companies and you, as you said, sunset products. And so, um, I could see that opportunity for a realignment of tiering. So then help us understand, I guess like what was your action or the team's action when it was like, okay, we need to rebuild the, the tiering. How does that work? Like where do you, where did you guys get started with like, I guess like just getting right to work on building out those tiers?
[00:07:46] Ashley: Yeah. So the first thing, and this is advice for, you know, anyone who's looking to do this, is to do an audit. Go, go find all of the different frameworks that people have out there and start to understand what are the common threads, where do they di, where do they diverge. [00:08:00] Um, the other big thing that we did is we took a step back and said, you know, what is the difference between like release marketing and a launch?
[00:08:07] Um, and I think that's another pitfall that a lot of people run into. They're like. Especially in SaaS, and especially with the pace of releases. Like at this point, if you're deploying once a day, twice a day, three times a day, a day, not a week, a day, all of those naturally cannot be considered launches, right?
[00:08:26] Like in some cases those are bug fixes. In some cases they're performance enhancements that don't warrant a whole big announcement.
[00:08:34] Elle: change management
[00:08:35] Ashley: Yeah.
[00:08:36] I just put it in the change log. Um, and I think this was more common to have to do release marketing when folks were on, uh, you know, data center server deployments where you, the release of, you know, 9.1, point a 0.2 was like actually kind of a big deal, right?
[00:08:53] Like you were gonna have all of these mid releases before you got to release 10. But now with continuous [00:09:00] deployment, we just, we can't talk about everything. So first step is like, we stepped back and we were like, all right, what are the things that are, you know, are we gonna. Um, term as more kind of release marketing versus product launches and, getting alignment on those pillars of, you know, what are the criteria for an actual launch.
[00:09:20] And then thinking holistically, not just about one channel, one product, one tactic, but really thinking about the impact on our customers, the impact on our business, the impact on our ecosystem. So Atlassian has a lot of channel partners. We have a lot of developers in our marketplace who build on top of our APIs.
[00:09:39] So even things like, you know, significant updates to our APIs. So, um, we have kind, I guess it's, I guess it would be basically a platform called Forge. Um, and that was a huge launch because it was this massive change to basically make it much easier for developers to build on top of our platform. Um, and so, you know, that would, that would be a perfect example of like, [00:10:00] that's a huge change from an ecosystem perspective, um, that
[00:10:03] will
[00:10:04] Elle: Sounds like a tier one
[00:10:05] Ashley: Yeah, like a deal. It was tier one launch. Um, so looking across, you know, the impact of customers, um, you know, revenue or business impact partnership or ecosystem changes, um, and really understanding, like going back to those first principles of what, what should be in each launch. And then figuring out, you know, how many tiers we actually need to make sure that we're accommodating all of the different types of impacts that we could have.
[00:10:32] And then, I do think at a certain size of company, there does have to be a tops down. You can't do it bottoms up. And I think previously given be the change you seek. We had, we had tried to do this bottoms up and kind of say like, all right, everybody threw in what you think. Right? And at some
[00:10:48] point you do, you need someone senior enough to say, Hey, we've heard all the feedback.
[00:10:54] Here's the decision making criteria. Here's what goes under each of those criteria based [00:11:00] on, you know. Data history, resources, et cetera, and this is what the tiers are going to be and the decision criteria for those tiers. And then that, once we got the buy-in for that, then it was much easier to go through and talk through tactics.
[00:11:13] Um, and again, thinking through the tactics, not just from whatever makes sense today, but the first principles of the tactics. So how much of your audience are you trying to, um, tell this story to that for a tier one launch, for example, right? Like maybe you're doing a bunch of ad campaigns and you're spending tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars depending on the size of the company
[00:11:37] to reach millions of people.
[00:11:39] If you're doing a tier four launch and it's just gonna reach a small segment of the audience, those types of paid channels might not make sense. So again, it's less about do we run ads on LinkedIn or do we run ads on Google? We do ads on both for tier one, and it's more like
[00:11:53] Elle: Yeah.
[00:11:54] Ashley: what size of audience are we trying to reach and what types of resources and channels.
[00:11:59] Help you [00:12:00] reach that size of audience, right? Or, or a specific segment?
[00:12:04] Elle: let's say, and I know you kind of, you've covered step one already with what I'm about to ask, but like, let's say that you were starting at a new company as CMO or Head of Marketing or even like head of product marketing, whatever, that like, my point is some kind of like senior leadership type of position where you are the one who has the say in creating these tiers or recreating them. and first you're doing your audit and your team, your or your team. Does that audit when you're doing those things that you mentioned, you talked about impact rate, um, you talked about customer impact, business impact. do you set a criteria for each of those, like a hard number based on whatever size of business and size of market like is and is that part of the criteria that you set for. the product roadmap and anything that's coming out of it.
[00:12:51] Ashley: Yes, with some caveats. We actually usually set it more as a range, and part of this dovetails in our case with our go to market motions. So, [00:13:00] Obviously it's not fair to compare growth rates or revenue rates from some of our more established products like Jira, confluence that have been
[00:13:06] around
[00:13:06] for, you know, a decade or two decades.
[00:13:09] Like even if something is a 10% increase in the Jira business or the Confluence business, like that's orders of magnitude of actual dollar impact then something that is a brand new product, um, that just got launched last year where it's
[00:13:23] like,
[00:13:24] Elle: Totally fair.
[00:13:25] Ashley: you know, so we do usually think of it more in terms of range and then we also think of it in terms of the core go to market motion for that product set.
[00:13:34] So if it's basically, you know, we've historically grown through, um, product-led growth and so having land products where this is the thing that we know if people land in these products, they are more likely. To stick with us, grow, buy, et cetera, and become a paying customer. And then we know there are expand products where it's like, what's the next best thing to offer them?
[00:13:54] So we would treat those a little bit different in terms of the number and the impact to make [00:14:00] sure that it's matched properly. Otherwise, our new products would basically never get a tier one
[00:14:04] Elle: Yeah, right. Then it
[00:14:05] Ashley: they don't have the revenue impact that,
[00:14:07] like,
[00:14:07] Elle: Yes. That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, so step one, do your audit, and I really appreciate the, the things that you talked about, where you're measuring impact across, you know, business, customer, et cetera. so then what's step two? What's the next thing that A
[00:14:24] PMM doing this should do?
[00:14:25] Ashley: Yeah. So step two, is basically aligning across those pillars and, and the, the elements that you want to change. Um, so for us, some of the big things that we wanted to consider across our launches. included like the change category. So is it very high? It's gonna require, um, a lot of people to make a lot of changes, whether that's on the engineering or product side, whether that's on the partner side, whether that's on the pricing side.
[00:14:51] Um, so AI for example, there's a number of different pricing models. Most of them are consumption based. That's quite different from the way that most of our other [00:15:00] products behave. in some cases there's licensing, right? So do you. Do you do licensing? Do you do consumption based? Um, we've got some pipelines products that also have, you know, have that same debate about consumption based versus license based or flat rate.
[00:15:13] Um, so if there's significant pricing changes that would go in there. and then thinking about the different impact. So customer impact, company impact, and ecosystem impact. And in that, in our case, that's what we're looking at. Um, and defining what each of those should be. And then basically road showing that around and make sure that you're getting everybody.
[00:15:31] So, again, the ecosystem is one that often gets missed because it tends to sit outside of marketing. Um, same thing with customer success, particularly in a large org, they tend to sit somewhere else. Uh, they either sit in sales or in some cases they might actually sit in the engineering organization.
[00:15:48] And so the idea that you only share this with. Basically marketing and product, and it's like, no, no, you actually need to share this more broadly. Make sure you share it with sales, you know, uh, [00:16:00] partnerships, ecosystem, channel, et cetera, to make sure that you're not leaving anybody out. So yeah, next step, once you've decided on those pillars is, um, to kind of go, to go through and do the roadshow to make sure that you've got the right criteria, um, and that you haven't missed any significant impact or change levers that, you know, again, it wouldn't occur to someone of like, oh, I need to go talk to the pricing team or the CFO or like, the strategy and BizOps team about changing our tiers.
[00:16:25] And it's like, well, you, you kind of should, because pricing might have a significant impact.
[00:16:31] Elle: Yeah. I'm gonna ask a captain obvious question. why do you have to create the pillars? Like for something like creating a product launch tiers? Like where does that help in the, um, establishment of the tiering structure?
[00:16:47] Ashley: Yeah, so it basically keeps everybody honest. Um, there is a different. Between the amount of work something takes to make happen internally in terms of building the product and the impact it will have [00:17:00] externally. So tech debt is a perfect example. Um, on the product and engineering side, this, they are always wrestling with where to put tech debt in the backlog, and they never wanna put tech debt at the top of the backlog because it, it doesn't have an impact, right?
[00:17:13] And it's not sexy and you don't get to talk about it, like you don't get rewarded for reducing tech debt. But the reality is, if you don't reduce the tech debt, things are gonna go very badly for you in the future. You have to deal with tech debt. So tech debt is like the perfect example for why you need these pillars, because just because something takes a high effort to do or build doesn't actually mean that it needs to have high effort in terms of public announcements.
[00:17:40] And so having these pillars helps everyone understand like, is this a marketing moment or is this. A business foundation moment, is this a set yourself up for migrations or platform or integration or reduced incidents in the future? Those are actually very different [00:18:00] things and I think that having these pillars in terms of like that shared language and shared definition of what a marketing moment is, helps reduce the feeling that just because it took a lot of effort and you didn't get recognized for it externally, doesn't mean that the work was not valuable.
[00:18:16] Elle: Right, right. I wanted to call that out because I feel like so often that egg that happens and it's really frustrating when I feel like, oh, great, I have all this work to do and it's not even gonna get all the attention I wanted to get.
[00:18:30] Um, okay. That's helpful. Okay, so then moving on, what is step three then?
[00:18:36] Ashley: Yeah. So step three is go do the roadshow. Uh, you have to have to get the feedback, you know, roll it out. and I think. You know, once you've incorporated that feedback, it's not like go around for six months and everyone and their mother gets to tweak it. It's like, no, make sure that everyone understands what's happening. so yeah, do the roadshow and then looking through the tactics, um, and starting to assign the tactics to the different [00:19:00] tiers. and then, you know, making your playbooks in terms of here's the different tactics, here's how we use them, which teams are involved. that doesn't necessarily have to all fit inside your neat little table of like
[00:19:11] your launch tiers and all of that, but having, in our case, obviously we use Confluence, so we'll have pages with, um, you know, the different playbooks for the different tiers
[00:19:19] and kind
[00:19:20] of who owns what, how to get support, what you can self-serve.
[00:19:23] Um, and so those were
[00:19:24] all linked in the, in the tiered framework.
[00:19:27] Elle: I love that each tier has a playbook and it's really helpful for larger enterprise sized companies. It just, it helps to make sure that everybody's approaching it the same way. Um, so I can feel how that would be so helpful. Do you have, as part of the playbook, examples of some of the tactics?
[00:19:46] Um, and when I say examples like, Hey, when we launched Product X, this is what it looked like. This is what the tactic thing looked like. Just to kind of give an, set an expectation on like standard of quality,
[00:19:59] Ashley: [00:20:00] Yeah, so the good news is we also have a really strong internal blogging culture, um, and a really strong internal loom recording culture. So it's very common after a launch, uh, for somebody to do a writeup, they'll show the creative assets they'll link to if it had a blog, if there's press coverage, it'll link to, you know, the press coverage page.
[00:20:18] There's usually a little loom that's like, we're super excited about this, how this campaign came to life. Huge shout out to like everyone on the team that that did it. So there's like a nice little round of praise. Um, but yeah, being able to show that, and I think the, the underlying question, right? The problem is not the tier ones, it is the tier fours is always the struggle.
[00:20:37] So, um, spoil I'll, I'll preview a little bit. I know we're gonna talk through like more nitty gritty details, but
[00:20:43] I'll spoil it a little bit. Um, yeah. So one of the things that we have done is to empower, um, our PMs in particular to share more on social media about why they're proud of this feature or why they're excited to release this to customers or [00:21:00] what they contributed and how they thought that this problem, was relevant or interesting or whatever.
[00:21:04] Right? And so we, you know, in a lot of cases we've got visual libraries or related icons or something like that, for each of our product collections. And so if it's a smaller feature that maybe is getting a tier four launch, one of those tactics is. The team that worked on it, share it on their social media, and then we'll do a little swarm. and, or we'll give them, you know, it could be a selfie with them and their screen being like, it's live, right? Or the, you know, when you move the ticket to done in Jira and it's the gif, right? And you get a little, uh,
[00:21:34] you get a
[00:21:35] little kid ready, right? So we give them some ideas. Obviously the quality from a creative perspective is much more variable, but it's more authentic.
[00:21:45] And it feels authentic because they're, they're sharing it on their own and they're saying, I built this and I'm proud of it, and here's what I built. Right? And we do give them some key messages usually to say like, you know, make sure that you call out. Here's the problem. Uh, make sure you call out [00:22:00] whatever it is that you built, whether it's a feature or performance enhancement, whatever. and then, you know, from a CTA perspective, we tell them, if you wanna say like, yeah, go check it out. Let me know what you think. If it's in Jira or conference, whatever. and then we say, you know, if you want. Do a selfie or do a gif or something like that to kind of pull this together. So, that I think has helped a lot, um, and, and gives that sense of like, we're not gonna do a whole net new visual library and a whole set of like curated, you know, screenshots and gifs and demo videos for, for tier four.
[00:22:33] And that's okay. But here's some ideas of what your peers have done in the past to share on their own LinkedIn or to share in the community. our community members love to have PMs come into the community and so, um, giving them a little bit of a like prompt of, hey, put this in the
[00:22:47] community, um, you know, that is really helpful for them as well.
[00:22:51] Elle: And it's really cool that after a launch, certainly a big launch, um, to do a loom video to kinda give the shout outs. That's such a good, like, you [00:23:00] know, team comradery feel. Good thing. Um, I would totally steal that if I were listening right now. so anyway, back to this list. Let me summarize real quick what I think I've heard the steps so far are, so, so far I heard we step one is do an audit of the existing, processes and, and how, what that impact looks like across business, customer, et cetera. And then step two was, remind me what step two was.
[00:23:30] Was it The the
[00:23:31] Ashley: categories of impact. Yeah.
[00:23:33] Elle: Yeah. Oh, categories of impact. Yes. Step two is the categories of impact. Step three was the. Cross-functional inputs across your stakeholders. and then is there, is, is there a step
[00:23:46] Ashley: And then the step four was mapping the t, the
[00:23:48] tactics to
[00:23:49] Elle: Ah, yes. Mapping the tactics.
[00:23:51] That's right. Mapping. And, uh, and then we're gonna get in a little bit more to the, the playbook too, for
[00:23:57] the smaller roadshows. But then [00:24:00] what about step five?
[00:24:02] Ashley: Yeah. So step five, uh, per usual in, in cess, we are never done. We have to, you know, iterate on this one thing that I will say that's a pitfall. It is not uncommon for after a, after a big launch or you know, any series of launches. Then if there's one new tactic or if something didn't go quite right, everybody's like, we need to overhaul the entire framework.
[00:24:24] It's like, no, no, no, no, let's pause. Right? There's always a hiccup in a launch 'cause
[00:24:29] Elle: always,
[00:24:29] Ashley: that's how life works. so I would recommend, uh, looking at your launch tiers and tactics annually and giving it a refresh so it's not to overhaul it. And in general, you probably should not. Significantly change what the categories are.
[00:24:46] You might change the definition of those categories. So the example of like if, let's say a business explodes, um, in terms of like, it just rockets to the moon and all of a sudden this, this product line is making a lot of money. Maybe it shifts [00:25:00] into, again, in our parlance it would be a land versus an expand product because it's growing so fast.
[00:25:05] Or maybe we see that this customer segment is particularly sticky. And so it does make sense for us to go ahead and treat something as maybe a tier two launch when normally it might be a tier three or four because the customers are so sticky. Maybe we move this product or this, this style. Um, again, AI is a perfect example, right?
[00:25:24] Like
[00:25:25] it's so crazy right now in the market that we tend to treat anything related to AI at a higher tier than it might normally be just because of the market conditions right now. Right? Once AI becomes more ubiquitous, it might settle out into a lower tier or. You know, the range of tiers
[00:25:42] depending on what
[00:25:43] Elle: yeah, totally. So the tiering is flexible
[00:25:46] based on what the anticipated overall impact to
[00:25:50] the business could be. Even if you don't have the hard numbers to prove it, there's still conviction there.
[00:25:56] So things may get bubbled up to higher tiers
[00:25:59] or, or [00:26:00] lower
[00:26:00] Ashley: Yeah. And then same thing with the tactics. If we find that a certain tactic is just not working at all, even if we throw tier one level resources at it, if it's like this tact is tactic's just not doing great, cool. Take it off or deprioritize it or say, Hey, we're only gonna do it. You know, maybe there's a certain tactic that really only works if you invest tier one level.
[00:26:20] And so instead of also doing it at tier three and tier two. We're just gonna only put it in tier one, right? Or new tactics come online that we wanna test. Cool. It's perfect to test those for tier four launches. Uh, because it gives, gives you something, it gives you enough data. Um, obviously PM is very excited because they're like, you're telling me there's 10 tactics in my, you know, that I can do great.
[00:26:41] Right? They get very excited. And so, um, but looking at it more holistically across, you know, the tactics and those kinds of things in the market conditions to make sure that the same way you would do with your competitive research, your market research, your personas, you shouldn't be changing your personas every month, right?
[00:26:56] Um, you shouldn't be changing your competitive set every month. you shouldn't be [00:27:00] changing your launch tiers and tactics every single month. Look at it annually and just make sure that like, this is still working. Look at the data, see how the launches have gone across different tiers, and then that will help you adjust as needed.
[00:27:12] Elle: Got it. So reevaluate. I like that a lot. I wanna dig in. You mentioned, you've mentioned blogs a
[00:27:17] couple times. maybe I have, I dunno, blogs have come up. So I wanna ask you a question about blogs. So if you were, again, like, let's just making up a new scenario and you can give an example from Atlassian if it makes sense to do so.
[00:27:29] But if you were in a new role again, like rebuilding, um, and your team was rebuilding the tiering, at what tier would you give a blog to a product release? or are blogs dead? do you think?
[00:27:44] Ashley: man. Poor
[00:27:46] blogs.
[00:27:48] Elle: I know, well I had a PM team that was like obsessed with blogs and everything needed to have a blog. And I was like, guys, no, not everything
[00:27:55] needs a blog, but I don't, I wanna hear your
[00:27:58] Ashley: yeah, so [00:28:00] my bigger issue is less about a blog and more about a written asset. Right. Some, some things It is just really hard to explain them in writing. You have to have screenshots, and by the time every other line is a screenshot, make it a freaking carousel, make it a gif, make it a make it a one minute video.
[00:28:18] Like, good Lord, quit trying to quit trying to make fetch happen. So I, blogs are not dead. There's actually a lot of use in a blog, um, now with LLMs and traditional SEO right? Having something to reference. If that blog actually contains helpful information, then like, cool. So that's the first thing is like, step one, the, the underlying question is, does this need, what, what kind of asset, like the format does this need?
[00:28:45] Does it need a written long form written content or does it need a more visual. Asset, it might need a demo, video, whatever. Step two, where does the audience spend time and who will actually be referencing this thing? So for [00:29:00] us, our community is well trafficked. And so actually community posts for some of these tier four and tier three launches are really useful from a community perspective because it's hitting a very specific subset of the audience.
[00:29:12] We have community groups for those people. So go talk to the people who are gonna nerd out with you about this feature. So even if you are doing a written asset, it might be better to have it be, you know, short form or long form in the community. And so. Like a, a blog is kind of a specific format in a specific place.
[00:29:33] It's basically a long form piece of content on the company website is, is effectively what it's, but a short form written asset in the community might actually be perfect for the audience that you're trying to reach. Um, the other thing that tends to happen, like maybe, maybe it's kind of hard to understand or hard to implement this feature.
[00:29:50] And so, uh, the community allows people to ask questions. Blogs, generally, yes, they can have comments, but blogs are usually a one-way communication. So like,
[00:29:58] that's another question. Do you [00:30:00] need a two-way communication in this?
[00:30:01] Okay. Maybe it makes more sense to do a LinkedIn post or an ask me anything on Reddit or a community post than it does to do basically a one-way broadcast blog.
[00:30:10] The Atlassian blog doesn't have comments, so if you want feedback, maybe this is actually an alpha or a beta. Release and you are looking for feedback. The Atlassian blog is like not the right place to get feedback because there's no comments, like put it in the community and, and ask for the community feedback.
[00:30:28] Right? So it's, I think the question is less to your point of like, these PMs were insistent that everything needs to be a blog. I, I think it, it sounds like they're falling prey to a pitfall of conflating a channel, a format
[00:30:43] Elle: Yes.
[00:30:44] Ashley: and a, a checklist of like activity instead of understanding, again, what is the goal, who is the audience, what are you, what is the, how is, how is the information best served?
[00:30:57] Um, so yeah, blogs are not dead. I think there's, [00:31:00] but the question of like, which tier deserves a blog, I'm like, well,
[00:31:02] Elle: yeah,
[00:31:03] Ashley: I actually can't answer that because, um, I think, I think in general, we do include blogs for tier one and tier two, and then tiers three and tier four. We basically depend, like, it kind of
[00:31:14] depends.
[00:31:15] The other thing too, it might be that, and this is something again, spoiler alert for the
[00:31:19] playbook, but like bundling
[00:31:21] a couple of the tier four launches, um, if you, if you wait and you bundle them together into a single marketing moment, that could uplevel them into a tier three launch. So we might do a feature roundup from the last quarter or like 20 things you didn't know you could do in the product and that might get a blog versus if we had just done each individual thing.
[00:31:44] It's like, well, one thing you can do in Confluence like that, that's not impressive. Even, even three things you didn't know you could do, like why would that be a blog versus 10 things, 20 things or like everything that shipped last quarter might have enough [00:32:00] substance for a longer form written asset.
[00:32:02] Elle: Yeah, I just wanna validate some things you've been saying with examples that I'm aware of. So my own example is that I've done the clustering around clustering of small releases around, um, a theme. We've done that at Cisco a lot, so that we can, we do end up having a blog, but it's around a specific like thought leadership theme that we're trying to reinforce for the company. And then, um, it's funny that you mention Reddit and the use of communities because my very first episode of this podcast that I ever released was with a product marketing leader from Reddit,
[00:32:36] and that's exactly what she talked about. And she talked about how she leveraged it was for like a small-ish, like not a tier one, but like, you know, a very, a meaningful, but like, it wasn't a tier one or two, but it was still like a meaningful, um, update.
[00:32:53] And they launched of course, through the Reddit community. And Reddit itself as the entity didn't, [00:33:00] wasn't the voice of the release. The customers were. So they actually picked like, quote unquote influencers
[00:33:08] in, in the Reddit community to give the update. And
[00:33:12] then they had like Reddit PMs go in and being kind of like the commenters, you know, for not necessarily an MA but, um, anyway, engagement to kind of ask or point to, more technical info as needed.
[00:33:25] But
[00:33:26] I just wanted to reinforce a lot of what you're saying, like, yeah. Other like rockstar pmms are doing that.
[00:33:31] Ashley: Yeah. Oh, that's very cool. With a, and I mean, and we do talk about that in terms of does something get potentially, you know, influencers or a customer story or customer reference or like, you know, UGC content and how do we think about doing that and our community champions, so we do talk through that as well.
[00:33:49] Elle: Yeah. Okay. And one other thing you mentioned, you mentioned, so you talked about ai, but because you mentioned it, it reminded me, um, if you were going to like, [00:34:00] recreate, like a tiering structure or, or if you were trying to figure out like, you know, building a, a product launch or something, you know, where does, how does AI play a role in your planning, shaping strategy and all of that
[00:34:16] Ashley: Yeah.
[00:34:16] Elle: a PM's perspective?
[00:34:18] Ashley: So there's a couple ways you can do this. Um, one, if you don't have the tiers right, you can basically get it to help you with a draft. So, um, show it past launches, show it past tactics, show it, um, past data and say, given all of this, I think we need, and, and four tiers tends to feel good. Most of the people that I've talked to, they're like, yeah, four,
[00:34:41] right?
[00:34:42] Like, one reason four seems to be like. The right about to anyone listening, they're gonna be like, I heard that Atlassian, you must use four tiers. I'm like, I'm not saying you must,
[00:34:51] I'm just
[00:34:51] saying four seems to be a good amount. So maybe tell it, right? Like, I think it should be four tiers, you know, given all of this data about past [00:35:00] launches, help me build a framework.
[00:35:01] And so it can actually help you build out kind of that criteria. Or if you say, I, I already, here's the criteria I have, given all of this past stuff that we've done, what tactics would you map into each of these tiers? And it can help you map those tactics. so that's one way it can help you build the framework.
[00:35:17] The other way it can help you, um, build it. And this is something that like, I want to start testing more, and I don't, I no longer sit directly in PMM, so I'm, I'm less, less influential in choosing which tier something goes into. But now I sit on the demand gen side and kind of lifecycle side. So I'm like pairing with product marketing in terms of, okay, you're doing a tier one launch.
[00:35:40] Here's all the tactics or we're doing a tier four launch, right? But, one thing that I think would be super interesting, um, and I'm biased, I would use like basically build a robo agent that you tell it, here's what I'm doing, here's all the details of like what this launch is. Tell me which tier it is, and then [00:36:00] generate the associated work back plan, right?
[00:36:03] So
[00:36:03] we
[00:36:04] also have in each tier basically like the minimum number of advance notice. Is it months? Is it weeks? Is it days, whatever. So, um, getting it to basically build out a page that's a work back to say, work back to say, okay, we wanna, um, we have our big conference, it's called team Team 26 is happening in May.
[00:36:22] Um, it is often common for us to ga or make big announcements at team. And so now is kind of the time where we're starting to look through the roadmap and saying Like
[00:36:32] Elle: Yep.
[00:36:33] Ashley: be announced at team?
[00:36:34] Like what are we doing? Right? So putting all of that in, like now we're in January and saying, gimme a work back plan for an announcement basically by, you know, team is like the second week of May.
[00:36:45] So we say, you know, last week of April, give us a little bit of buffer, right? But to get it to build out the project plan of like, okay, this is when you need to start talking to press, if it's a tier one launch, because they have to get the story in, you have to pitch them and blah, blah, blah. Right? Like, this is when creative needs to [00:37:00] start working on if it's gonna require a whole new visual library or, okay, we need screenshots because this is going in the keynote.
[00:37:08] For team, you gotta do the work back plan. Well, when are you gonna have product ready to get your screens to feed into the keynote? That has to go to design, right? Like, so this idea that, oh, it's totally fine, we could hit go live on the product on April 15th or April 30th and like it's done in time. No, no.
[00:37:29] We need screens, you know, and like if we need a demo, okay, what level of dummy information needs to be in the demo environment for it to actually populate? This is particularly true for like data analytics things. Anything that's doing anything with data, you
[00:37:43] have to have
[00:37:44] Elle: You need to
[00:37:44] Ashley: in there
[00:37:45] Elle: the data. Yeah.
[00:37:46] Ashley: to populate the data environment, right?
[00:37:48] So like, or the demo environment. So getting it to pull together that work back plan and then. Someone more capable than me can probably do this. I need, I need to go, I'm talking to our program [00:38:00] managers about it because I'm like, guys, I have this vision. But the vision is basically now with ro o get it to write the initial announcement blog because you know, they all tend to have a format, right?
[00:38:12] Like there's maybe a couple of templates for these
[00:38:14] things. So
[00:38:15] tell it the right template for the tier draft. The
[00:38:18] Elle: Yes.
[00:38:18] Ashley: for me, based
[00:38:19] on the message house, we had key announcements. Yeah.
[00:38:22] And like draft. And then once you have that, then you can use that and you could say, okay, pull out some social posts for our execs or for PMs
[00:38:29] or for product markers, whoever.
[00:38:31] Right. So that's the big thing that I'm like, I don't know if it if it's really a full on like orchestrate it where the agents basically, you feed it once and the agents orchestrate it. Or if you do it at each step and then you use the combination of agents and like chat and generative AI to pull it together.
[00:38:52] But I'm like. There's a master plan in here and obviously we're doing some of this
[00:38:56] already, but the master like [00:39:00] end-to-end plan of it,
[00:39:01] Elle: Yeah.
[00:39:01] Ashley: I, that to me is like the grand vision, but I haven't have, I haven't yet executed, I should ask around Atlassian to see if somebody else has, but yeah.
[00:39:10] Elle: I'm really excited 'cause I have an episode coming out that's on this very similar topic,
[00:39:16] like very, very similar. It's not like launch related, but
[00:39:20] it's super similar
[00:39:21] topic. I'm really excited about
[00:39:23] Ashley: yeah. But basically going both ways of like,
[00:39:26] what tier should this be or it is this tier, therefore make me a workback plan or, or help me start generating, you know, assets or templates.
[00:39:35] Elle: I love it. I love it. Uh, okay. And I know you've, you've spoiled a little bit, but in a good way. All of the,
[00:39:42] of, or given some sneak previews of your tier four. Playbook,
[00:39:46] uh, launch Playbook. But tell us more about it. I like what are the tactics and how do I make sure my tier four launch is successful? My PMs are happy and the product is, you know, getting [00:40:00] the attention it deserves.
[00:40:00] Ashley: Yeah. like I mentioned earlier, empowering the employees to share themselves. So, um, making sure that we do have kind of, you know, the features aligned to that standard message house, and aligned to the bigger product messaging that's huge. That way they feel confident when they go create their own copy or create their own creative assets in terms of, you know, videos, demos, et cetera.
[00:40:23] Um, and then we do curate some key assets. So if we know we need, like, let's say we're gonna update the product tour with, um, some product screenshots, great. Make sure that those are obviously available to anyone who wants to share those on social and that they've got, you know. Basically they're in a demo environment so that it's got dummy data.
[00:40:41] Um, so that, that's shareable. So that's the first thing kind of, and then drafting off of that, um, we swarm on personal posts. So basically on the launch day when the person shares, so let's say I'm the pm when I share on my LinkedIn, we've got you and all of my peers and all of my PM PMN [00:41:00] peers, um, on deck to basically go comment, engage, to help kind of juice that from an algorithm standpoint.
[00:41:06] And then we also give a heads up to our organic social team to engage from the Atlassian handle. So, um, you came from Cisco, you
[00:41:13] Elle: That's really
[00:41:14] Ashley: probably
[00:41:14] Elle: Yep,
[00:41:15] Ashley: however many
[00:41:15] millions of followers,
[00:41:16] right? Atlassian I think has like 2 million followers. So if the Atlassian handling engages on your post, it
[00:41:21] skyrockets the reach, right? and that's an easy thing for the organic social team. They're like, cool. You want us to just like leave a comment to say, congrats on the launch. Like, we can do that, you know, leave. You want us to just like the post, happy to do that. Right. And that's a much lighter lift and a much lower ask than saying we need a post every day about this new feature on the
[00:41:40] Elle: gosh. Right,
[00:41:41] Ashley: I'm sorry,
[00:41:41] they
[00:41:42] do not have to. when they're getting those requests from like 20 other teams.
[00:41:45] Exactly. And they've got their own whole social first or social only strategy that they have to deal with. Like, and they have to serve, you know, talent needs and stakeholder needs and investor needs and all the things. Right. Um, so that, that's a [00:42:00] much easier entry point, particularly for, um, we call them.
[00:42:03] I, I, I've called it a micro launch. Um, that's the other nice thing, like don't, don't call it. A tier four, you know, like, call it a micro launch, and it's like, oh yeah, like, you know, um, it has launch in the, in the, in the name, right. Um, so that's another tactic that has helped really boost those things. then the other thing that we've done is, um, kind of across the business is created ongoing engagement, um, for places where people can plug in.
[00:42:28] So, um, one of my colleagues actually pioneered this Demo Den series, and then, I kinda helped scale it across a couple of other teams. But the demo Den, it's basically, uh, usually happens at a monthly cadence. And it's a short video that a pm product designer or you know, engineer, basically somebody who is in kind of the ICP records, the video, um, and the, they're only usually about five minutes long.
[00:42:51] But that's a really easy way if you get something that would be in that tier four to be like, oh, perfect, you can, we'll, we'll add you to the, the demo then calendar. And it's [00:43:00] close enough in most cases that, you know. It's not like, okay, in six months you get to talk about this. It's like, oh, next month we'd love to have you.
[00:43:08] And because that happens so frequently, we constantly need content. And so it's like perfect to be
[00:43:14] able to slot in. Um, we do a number of like community roundups or community series and so being able to show that and be like, oh my gosh, this would be perfect for community. We pair those demos with an ask me anything.
[00:43:25] And then
[00:43:25] basically the PMs will come back for like 24 hours to answer questions. So that level of like constant engagement is a nice like, oh, your PM might actually have a whole community series planned. And because they're constantly wanting to post something in community like roughly once a month, they're constantly looking for contributors.
[00:43:46] And so having those ongoing touch points, if you've got a newsletter and there's always a spot for like the demo of the month or like feature of the month, that's an easy way to be like, oh, we need something for this [00:44:00] slot. And then obviously. If we're not getting an inbound request from pm, we can then put it out there to be like, Hey guys, we have a lot of opportunities.
[00:44:08] What are you interested in featuring? And then somebody is
[00:44:10] like, I have this thing coming out. And so it's also a way to proactively see the roadmap of what's coming
[00:44:16] for some of those things that might be
[00:44:18] more
[00:44:18] Elle: know. And some of those PMs who hold the roadmap so close to their chest
[00:44:23] and it's hard to like get access to
[00:44:25] Ashley: Uhhuh. But then you tell em, we have this opportunity to promote. And they're like, oh, wow. I gotta raise my hand for that. And you're like,
[00:44:31] well,
[00:44:31] we need the copy and the screenshot of the CTA, right?
[00:44:34] Elle: Yes. So pmms in your next one-on-one or like monthly, weekly, whatever, pm PMM, check-in, like tell them what opportunities are coming up so you can get access to the roadmap.
[00:44:45] A question about Demo Den for
[00:44:47] you is that, um, it sounds like I'm just confirming that concept. Is the audience, like existing customers who are in the community? Is it external? Can anyone, like, I'm not a community member, can I go and like [00:45:00] look up Demo Den? Or like, is it internal? Like who's the audience?
[00:45:03] Ashley: Yeah, it's, uh, generally for a broad audience, you don't have to be an existing, uh, user. One fascinating thing, and this is like a whole conversation from a strategy perspective about our community. You can read in the community without joining, but if you wanna participate
[00:45:18] in the community, then you have to join.
[00:45:19] So that's the other
[00:45:20] nice
[00:45:21] thing is we, we, um, we put the demo dens on YouTube and then we also embed those videos directly in the community with. you know, frequently asked questions or whatever. So like you could still read all of the questions and answers and watch the video. Um, and then we cross link those.
[00:45:36] So if you wanna see more demo dance, cool. Pop over to YouTube, here's the playlist, or from the YouTube playlist, if you have questions, pop over to the community. We'd love to hear from you. And then obviously we've got product
[00:45:48] tour
[00:45:48] links as relevant in both of those places.
[00:45:51] Elle: I feel like both of these tactics, right, like the demo den, the comm plus the community, and well, all of the tactics with the, like, the social swarming. [00:46:00] I feel like PMs who are doing, tend to be more junior PMs who have the smaller releases, I feel like those are tactics that would really bring them a sense of pride and feel like they're getting a good amount of support from PMM.
[00:46:16] So curious, uh, now Ashley, if you had, um, you know, if A PMM came to you and said like, I'm so inspired by the micro launch strategy and the tiering, um, structure. I'm working on it now. I'm building this out in my role. Like what advice do you have to that PMM Yeah. Yeah. Biggest pitfall I see when people are like, could you review this thing? Like, I've built it and I, can you review it? Do you have any feedback? Biggest pitfall that I see is that it's often too focused on tactics. It's like this huge checklist of tactics and frequently each [00:47:00] tier just gets more of the tactics.
[00:47:02] Ashley: And so like all the tiers get all the tactics, they just get more of them. So a tier one gets ten blogs, a tier two gets five blogs, a tier three gets two blogs, and a tier one gets, you know, or a tier four gets one blog.
[00:47:12] And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. not all tiers get all tactics, like. Be strategic about the tactics mapping to the tiers.
[00:47:21] So that's, that's the biggest thing I see is that a lot of the times the way they're basically scaling the tiers is they're just adding more of all the activities instead of being strategic about the activities. So, it's not to say that we don't do the individual posts and the swarming and all of that stuff in a tier one stance, but for tier one, we're likely gonna have someone from the C-suite or, you know, a, a VP or above being the person making the announcement.
[00:47:52] We're likely going to do a thought leader ad or boost their post from a paid perspective. So, like, we [00:48:00] don't actually need all the employees to go like that post. I mean, it's great if they do, and obviously we share and all that, but like, we're gonna make sure that post gets seen, like we're gonna put some
[00:48:10] money behind it already.
[00:48:11] Right. Versus the reason that you need. All the free promotion and free engagement at the tier four is because it doesn't have any paid behind it. Right. and even for some of the tier one launches, right? We might not actually put that in community because it's so broad and we have so many other touch points.
[00:48:29] We've got a webinar, we've got a keynote, we've got a breakout session, we've got five press articles. We might have three blogs, you know, at different depths for this thing. So we might not actually put that in community for like. Months until all the tier four stuff starts coming in that relates to the tier one.
[00:48:46] And then we can cross link back to, if you remember, we announced this huge thing back at team 25, and we're super excited to share. We've got 20 other awesome things for you. Or we've released five
[00:48:59] additional [00:49:00] things that then goes in the community and references the tier one, right? So the relationship, a tier one launch tends to kick off a tier two at a tier three and multiple tier four over the next six months, right?
[00:49:13] So you should necessarily have different tactics, not just different
[00:49:19] Elle: Right, in your tiers.
[00:49:21] right, right. I love that you mentioned that because it has, there's something to say about. When you kick off a tier one, and then as you said, it kind of sets off this cascade of like tier two, tier 3, 3, 4, et cetera. All of that is a, is um, should be mirroring the narrative that you're trying to tell
[00:49:43] for the company's vision, the impact, et cetera. and so when you're being strategic about building out those tiers, and thinking through the tactics, um, and I think you said this earlier, but it's worth saying again, like you should be thinking about [00:50:00] impact over, like volume for what those tactics look like for each of the tiers.
[00:50:06] Ashley: And matching each of those metrics and impact with the intent. So if something, and this is like another perfect example, right? Like the launch of a premium version of your product or an enterprise version of your product, it's quite common now to have different tiers. You have the free tier, standard premium, and then like enterprise, um, super premium, whatever.
[00:50:28] It's right.
[00:50:29] Elle: yeah,
[00:50:30] Ashley: In a lot of cases, you, you wouldn't go to the enterprise tier unless you are already a premium user, right? Like enterprise tends to include the feature set of premium at scale. So it's got the user gates and the feature gates at scale. So like it doesn't make sense for you to measure net new logos of the announcement of enterprise [00:51:00] when realistically most people are probably gonna be premium users
[00:51:06] first, or,
[00:51:07] or even standard users
[00:51:08] first.
[00:51:08] Like
[00:51:09] very few companies,
[00:51:11] especially if it's like kind of the first launch of this are gonna land in an enterprise version of the product versus a standard or premium version. So looking at expansion, looking at existing customers is likely gonna be. The more relevant metric, not net, net new logos. And same thing for like a tier four launch. if you can only use these features if you are an existing customer or if, if it's, if, if it's a paid feature, you shouldn't necessarily be looking at like net new m as the key indicator if they have to
[00:51:44] pay you first to get access to it, right?
[00:51:46] So like, if you wanna look at increase in mao, you're, but you have to be a paying customer to get access to the feature, then you're naturally constrained into the MAO number, right?
[00:51:59] So, like, you [00:52:00] shouldn't, you shouldn't use the MAO benchmark for a product at the free tier if you have to be a paying customer to get access to this feature. Right? And again. When I say it, everyone's like, well, duh. But the, again, when you get
[00:52:13] into these conversations and you have both, and I, and I think this is a, a struggle for both PM and pmms, everybody wants to show whatever the biggest possible impact could be.
[00:52:23] So of course you wanna set that benchmark is like whatever the new
[00:52:28] free feature is, you know, for free users. Like of course the MAO is gonna skyrocket and you of course you wanna say, this is like MAO potential.
[00:52:38] Elle: I
[00:52:39] Ashley: Well, is it now? Right? Like, let's, let's make sure. So, um, you know, again, when I say these things in this context and in theory and how it should be, of course everyone's like, oh, a hundred percent.
[00:52:52] I know how these conversations go when you actually get in a room and like. And, and obviously on either sales or leadership side, they're like, are you [00:53:00] sure it couldn't be this much pipeline? Are you sure it couldn't be this much Now? Are you sure it couldn't be this many seats? Right. And you, you start to be like, yeah, this, this is an amazing thing.
[00:53:11] Elle: I know.
[00:53:11] Ashley: be. And you're like,
[00:53:12] okay,
[00:53:13] Elle: Right. Yeah. Well we got a, we got carried away with ourselves there. Like,
[00:53:16] Ashley: yeah,
[00:53:16] Elle: uh, okay. Well this was so helpful. I love the micro launch playbook for our tier four smaller releases and just the way that you set up and the team at Atlassian set up the, um, the tiering with the tactics and the categories and getting feedback and, and your, um, tips to always be reevaluating is so helpful.
[00:53:40] So thank you so much for
[00:53:41] guiding us through your case study.
[00:53:43] Um, so now I wanna switch gears and get into the next segment of our show, the messaging critique. This is where we as product marketing experts get to analyze real world messaging. And the fun part is, Ashley, as my guest, you get to pick the company that we are [00:54:00] looking at today. Um, so before we get started, just to share some ground rules for anyone who may be new to this podcast and new to the segment of the show. we are picking a company that we are somewhat familiar with the, um, the context and the customers for. Wouldn't be fair to critique messaging on a company that we didn't understand the audience. Um, and Ashley, you're gonna walk through what you're loving about the messaging, um, what you think the PMM m should have done differently and maybe iterate and come up with some creative ideas for, um, how they can take their story to the next level.
[00:54:30] So without further ado, tell us the company that you would like to critique today.
[00:54:38] Ashley: Yeah, so I am doing a little bit of a different play on this segment. Um,
[00:54:44] so I actually kind of criticized, uh, some messaging from a company. The company is Content Stack. They are a content management system. Um, we'll actually need to pop over to their website to see what they're saying about themselves now, I, a couple months ago, they had a huge [00:55:00] billboard on 1 0 1.
[00:55:01] I live in the Bay Area, so I was driving. Tons of tech, billboards. and I would ha I, I would have to go back and look at my post, but I was, it basically said something about like, what if AI could do this for you? And I was like, how would AI do this for me? Right? And so I went to the website and it was completely disconnected.
[00:55:16] And so I posted about that on LinkedIn and said, you know, the billboard and the website were very disconnected and I, I struggled to connect it. And, um, their CMO actually reached out to me and was like, I'm pretty sure you're talking about us. And actually, we've been struggling with the messaging, so your feedback is super helpful.
[00:55:36] Um, with like eight hours, they got new messaging that was much better up on their website. He actually publicly came into the comments and said, Hey guys, it's me. Um, and like, you know, I, I appreciate the anonymous call out, but like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna publicly say like. Thanks for the feedback. Here's what we have put together.
[00:55:59] Um, we [00:56:00] would love for you guys to take a look at what we've got and that response time, the openness to feedback. Listen, I, I mean I am the ICP, my audience is the ICP. And so he looked through those comments. It was like, oh no, we did not do good. Right? And then the fact that they were able to get it swapped within like a day, so yeah, I,
[00:56:19] Elle: Um, response rate,
[00:56:21] especially for A CMO. I feel like CMOs are just usually. You know, they think they're too busy to do anything, like engage on a LinkedIn comment, so
[00:56:32] Ashley: So that, that change went from gain your experience edge, and I was like, I don't know what that means. And then they
[00:56:43] shifted it to be the first AI powered CMS platform. So CMS stands for, um, content Management System. Basically your, the back end of your
[00:56:50] website.
[00:56:51] Elle: That is way better
[00:56:53] Ashley: So like I know the other one was gain your experience edge.
[00:56:58] Elle: Gain your [00:57:00] experience edge and
[00:57:01] what, sorry, I, I know you mentioned this already. What did the billboard say?
[00:57:04] Ashley: the billboard said, want to publish content 90% faster. Yeah, you can do that. And then when I went to the website, it said Gain your experience edge as like the, the top
[00:57:14] headline.
[00:57:15] Elle: that's disappointing.
[00:57:18] Ashley: disconnected.
[00:57:18] Right. But now if you see, wanna publish content 90% faster. Yeah. You can do that. And then you land on the website and it says the first AI powered CMS platform that's connected. So now I'm curious to see what they currently have. Let's go over
[00:57:32] Elle: okay. So I just went there, so, um, hopefully I didn't click on an ad. It's so frustrating when you click on the ad and then it gives
[00:57:41] you like a, you get a landing page, not the actual homepage.
[00:57:45] And with a caveat that like pmms sometimes don't have input on what goes on the homepage.
[00:57:51] They should, but sometimes they don't. okay, so I'm at content stack.com.
[00:57:57] And what I see is a carousel as the hero [00:58:00] image, or as kinda like the hero section.
[00:58:02] And there are huge letters and it says the world's best digital experiences. Start here.
[00:58:07] Ashley: the thing that I also pulls my eye is the animation directly above where it says content data, and then adaptive DXP. So I don't actually know what adaptive DXP is. I think I assume it's basically like dynamic digital experience. Um, I have
[00:58:22] enough.
[00:58:23] Knowledge of this space that I can make that leap.
[00:58:26] Um, so I, I actually think this is great, and I think that like, where it talks about, it's like the adaptive digital experience era, and I'm like, oh, okay, cool. As soon as I scroll down, it basically tells me what that top layer is. Um, and then as I scroll down, seeing it's a headless CMS, which I know what that is, I'm, I'm, you know, adjacent to the ICP, so I know with real time customer analytics, okay, that's cool to improve the way you understand your audiences and deliver content to them.
[00:58:57] So it's branded, its best, faster, smarter, and always [00:59:00] personal. So this basically to me, says I can do like dynamic personalized journeys on my website for people, for the audience. That's what I'm interpreting from this. And then obviously as I scroll down, I'm like, all right, let's see. Right. And it's, it's giving me, um, you know, some, some highly personalized data and automation delivering the right message in the right place, right?
[00:59:22] Like that all. Dovetails like it should. So I think this actually looks really good. I should send a note, uh, to the CMO to be
[00:59:29] like,
[00:59:29] Hey, I just gave you another shout out and now I'm like, I think that this is super cool. Right? The other interesting thing for them, as I mentioned, I, on one hand, I'm a, I'm an ICP in the sense that I am a, like a stakeholder into these, I have to use this once it gets chosen.
[00:59:47] I am not the ICP, I'm not actually the economic buyer for this decision, right? But I work very closely with the person who is,
[00:59:54] and
[00:59:54] so I, I know enough and then I have to use it. Basically, if she [01:00:00] goes and looks at this, she'll know exactly what all this is, and she'll go and vet if it works. The way she's gonna vet if it's gonna work is she's gonna come talk to me and be like, here's the mockup, here's the requirements.
[01:00:12] Here's what we would want you to do to populate this. Can you do it? Are you willing to do it? Does this make sense to your team? Right. So it's super interesting 'cause I'm kind of an adjacent ICP for them. Um, I'm, I'm more of a deal breaker than a deal maker, but I'm highly connected to the deal
[01:00:29] maker.
[01:00:30] Elle: pretty important,
[01:00:32] being a deal breaker.
[01:00:34] Ashley: yeah, yeah, exactly. So the fact that I, the fact that I'm like, oh, I know what this is, or like, oh, this catches my eye. Or like, oh, these are connected in contrast to kind of the initial billboard and messaging that they had where it was so disconnected. Like, I'm very pleased to see that it is quite connected and that they are using the right jargon to signal to their ICP that they are actually selling to someone who is quite sophisticated.
[01:00:59] [01:01:00] This is not, they're not, it's not Wix, it's not Squarespace. Right. Where it's like, DIY, you have no idea what you're doing. No worries for you like. They're, they're actually using jargon in a strategic way to show that they are attracting a sophisticated buyer. And again, my colleague, if I showed her this, she'd be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:01:18] I know exactly what all this is. Right? So, um, I actually think it's, it's, it's really good.
[01:01:23] Elle: I really like their storytelling. I really like their storytelling. I think they've done a really good job, even with their, like their CTAs are really good. They're not
[01:01:30] generic. They feel like it feels, I have, I can sense like, like the attitude and like to your point, like that they're talking to a sophisticated buyer.
[01:01:40] Ashley: Yeah.
[01:01:41] Elle: So, and I can feel that. I like that they put, like, and I know again, this is less PMM, but, uh, focused, but I like that they have the, some product, you know, little gifs and animations in there. I think that's really helpful. Like they have the little chat function gif that pops up, or animation, pop up.
[01:01:57] That's really helpful in providing context, which is so funny [01:02:00] because their, their whole point is that they're providing context.
[01:02:03] Um,
[01:02:03] Ashley: So meta.
[01:02:06] Elle: right. Yeah. One thing my, one little like critique, and this is less on the PMM and more for the, the copy itself is leaving something to be desired, but that's being really nitpicky.
[01:02:20] Like, for example, like unlock your future, like seamlessly integrate blah la da da da da. Like again, this is really, really, really nitpicky. I just prefer to avoid those types of, that type of copy. but that's less of a PM's job.
[01:02:36] Ashley: Well, and funny enough, because then I, I agree with you. I don't think that one's as strong, but if you, the third one in the series that says if you can't see them, you can't serve
[01:02:45] them.
[01:02:45] Elle: I
[01:02:46] Ashley: the real time adaptive personalization like that, that's like spot on. Right. So it's,
[01:02:52] it is, it
[01:02:53] is interesting.
[01:02:54] Elle: really like, I'm glad you called that one out because I specifically really liked that one. I felt
[01:02:58] like that was a [01:03:00] powerful statement. I almost wish I get why they have to have the, the one that they have at the top. I get why they have to have it at the top. But that one, that's buried on the third, third image of the, of the carousel here. I wish it was more front and center
[01:03:14] 'cause I, it did feel there's some power in that statement,
[01:03:19] Ashley: Yeah. I
[01:03:20] do wonder though, if the concern is that if that was first, you might think that their competitive set is like six sense or like demand base or like Bombora,
[01:03:32] like that class of
[01:03:33] Elle: like yes.
[01:03:34] Ashley: Or like a ZoomInfo or something. Right. And
[01:03:37] so making sure that they are in the right competitive set. So like, again, these are all the questions, and to your point that it's not fair to critique messaging when you are not the ICP or you are
[01:03:47] not in the industry.
[01:03:48] Like
[01:03:49] Elle: yes. Yeah,
[01:03:50] Ashley: now that I sit on the demand gen side. I know that that whole see them serve them could accidentally put them in [01:04:00] the wrong
[01:04:00] category. Right.
[01:04:01] But you from a PMM perspective don't
[01:04:03] generally deal with those tools, so you wouldn't, you wouldn't see that as potentially putting them in the wrong
[01:04:10] product category. Right. Competitive set. So it's, it's super interesting in terms of like, depending on which lens you're taking, if I take a PMM lens to it from a, a messaging, copywriting or, you know, flow standpoint versus if I'm taking, sitting in my current role on a demand gen Right. You're right. lens, right?
[01:04:28] Elle: I stand corrected and I like, I reiterate then or reaffirm my like strong storytelling.
[01:04:35] Like I think it's pretty solid.
[01:04:36] Okay. Any like last maybe just like creative ideas or thoughts that you have for the content stack. Pmms, like how can they take this storytelling? It's super powerful.
[01:04:47] They've obviously done a really great job. Like how can they take it to the next level?
[01:04:50] Ashley: Yeah. So one of the things they have on here, which is super cool in terms of like the digital experiences, they have an example from Elements [01:05:00] athletics. And like the imagery is really powerful. It looks like it's an athletic brand. Yeah. They sell clothes. Um, and they are doing a lot to show like how this shows up on mobile or how this kind of shows up in a dashboard and like what all of this does.
[01:05:15] Um, it feels like there could be some really interesting, like basically taking some of that imagery and turning it into, um, Instagram reels or TikTok videos or like LinkedIn lives, right? Like the imagery is really cool. The GIF are really cool, and so it feels like there's, and, and maybe they are. I haven't.
[01:05:33] gone and looked at their social right,
[01:05:34] but
[01:05:35] there feels like there could be some really interesting things, um, where they do those as like standalone social posts. The other thing that they could do that's interesting, um, if they were to do some like creator collabs, they already have really good animations and screenshots.
[01:05:48] And so, there could be some really interesting like creator brand collabs, um, internal influencers also, like having some of their PMs or having the, the product designer, um, share kind of like [01:06:00] the process, how they paired with like a motion graphics artist or an animator to pull those things together, right?
[01:06:05] Like there's some, they have some really cool elements on the site that I think how they get those to show up properly is actually indicative of how I assume their platform, you know, they're using content stack for their website. So
[01:06:18] like that level of um, you know. Animations, gif, et cetera, could actually be a really great use case for almost like a content stack on content stack, on social media. So that's, that's, that's, uh, one thought for them. And again, maybe they're doing that. I
[01:06:33] Elle: I love that they could be, if not, it's a, it's a fun, you know, story that they could run,
[01:06:40] um, across different channels.
[01:06:42] So fun. Okay, what a great critique. Shout out to content Stack, PMM team. Really strong storytelling. We like what we see.
[01:06:52] Um, okay, so one thing that I like to make space for on this podcast is a moment of [01:07:00] gratitude because in product marketing, none of us ever get to where we are alone.
[01:07:04] We're always learning from each other and stealing each other's playbooks and growing, and we're all better for it. So I wanted to wrap up and say a genuine thank you, Ashley, to you for being so generous with your time and your insights and coming on and walking us through your both. Um. Guidance on how to create product hearing, and then also how to do the micro launches for our like, smaller tier four releases.
[01:07:28] Thank you so much. That was really, really helpful to the PMM community.
[01:07:31] Ashley: Well thanks for having me and asking all the hard questions and diving deep and, um, yeah, super fun.
[01:07:37] Elle: It's so fun. Um, and would love to turn it around to you. Are there any pmms that you wanna give a shout out to who have brought you to where you are today? You're obviously super accomplished, um, marketing leader, but how'd you get here? Who are the pmms or, or marketers who've, um, helped you get here?
[01:07:55] Ashley: Yeah, I will shout out to awesome pmms. They are both quite prolific [01:08:00] on LinkedIn, so I'm sure they get shout outs all the time. But, um, Mary Shehan and Hattie, the pm m both of them, I learned a ton from them in terms of, um, again, if you want more like the, the goat of product launches. Um, Mary Shehan had wrote the Pocket Guide to Product Launches, like she's got a whole book on this.
[01:08:16] So tons of great tactics there. And then obviously Hattie runs a great community of PMNs and shares a lot about, um, dealing with some of the kind of friction that we deal with when we're, when we're working through things from a cross team perspective.
[01:08:29] Elle: Totally. Yeah. I'm so honored to say that Hattie's been a guest on the show and she's just, her insights are also just invaluable to the PMM community. And Mary, I think I need to, maybe this is my shadow, like we gotta get Mary on Yeah. Oh, Mary's great. You definitely need to talk to Mary.
[01:08:45] Amazing. Well, thank you so much Ashley. This was a lot of fun and we're so lucky to have you. One last question for you. where can my guests reach out to, or my listeners reach out to you if they wanna learn more? Is it best to just find you on LinkedIn?
[01:08:59] Ashley: Yep. LinkedIn [01:09:00] is the place I tend to be quite prolific and, uh, engaging frequently there.
[01:09:04] Elle: Oh, because you're so generous with all your insights, so we can keep learning more by following Ashley. I love it. Alright. Thank you again, Ashley, and thank you PMM listeners for coming on this adventure with us today. I hope this episode leaves you with inspiration to take in the next step of your own journey.
[01:09:22]
