Josh Devenny, Principal Product Manager at Atlassian

From our hosts here at Atlassian, and we have Josh who is a Principal Product Manager at Atlassian. He's been at Atlassian for six years and he's going to talk about some of the work that they do on the growth team here. Please welcome Josh. Josh Lassinger- All right, can everyone hear me? Sweet. So I'd like to thank John for organizing and Alex for helping set up. It's really good to have a meetup like this where we can all share different stories. Today, as John said, I'm a Product Manager here at Atlassian. I've worked in product in Jira and HipChat and I also currently work in the core growth team which sits separately from product. Today I'm going to be talking to you about becoming a growth car salesman. It'll become clear in a couple of minutes. And some of the things I'm going to be talking about today are about product expansion. As a lot of you probably know Atlassian, we have Moe. We have multiple products and expanding users from one product to the next product is very important to us. I'm going to walk you through a specific Jira to Confluence journey that we have been experimenting with a lot and some of the results as well as some of the lessons that we've learned while we've been doing that. And we're going to have a special appearance by this guy throughout the talk. So at Atlassian, if you're not familiar with us, our mission is to unleash the potential in every team. And really we're all about enabling team collaboration. We have a whole set of products that solve a lot of different problems. And we recognize that teams don't just have one problem that needs to be solved. They have many, many different problems. And not just in tech, teams exist in lots of different industries. And having that approach and being able to have a whole bunch of different products gives us a special ability to be able to solve many different problems that teams have. So product expansion. And we're using this as when we have people who are using one product and we're able to get them to start using a second product. We really want to do this to help teams solve the problems that they have. We do not want to be the car salesman. We do not want to basically be pushing things on you that you do not need. We really, truly want to be able to help you in all of the problems that you're trying to solve. Again, I mentioned before Jira software to Confluence is an example here. If you're using Jira, Confluence is a good product. It's a good product that sits beside it that solves similar and related problems and they integrate well together. But it's not just product expansion. A lot of you probably work at companies that only have one product. But it also applies to ecosystem. If you're trying to get people to use integrations that you've built with other companies or if you have paywalls in your app and you need people to go from one stage to the next, you need to be able to communicate the value. And it's kind of an expansion. So what we do not want to do is be this guy and really be sleazy and salesy and just keep pushing things at you when we know you don't want them. So we try to do a lot with targeting and segmentation and things like that to make sure that we're doing it in the best way possible. But we know that from our customers, people use our products together. An example is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. They use it to put software on the Mars rover. The NASA I uses it as their internal service desk. And they use Jira's service desk and Confluence together. And Cochlear, which is an Australian company that helps deaf people be able to hear with cochlear implants, they actually develop their software for these implants using Jira's software, Confluence, and Bitbucket. So we already know that there's a natural baseline here. And our goal is to increase that baseline. We don't want to, again, just keep throwing things at you. But there is a lot of customers out there. We probably use one of our products that don't know about other products. So they don't know what the other products solve and what jobs they have to be done. And in a graph, this is kind of what we're trying to do here. So if we have products one and two at the top, so we can see that the mouth of these products is growing. And then the blue line represents the users that have both products. And really, we want to be able to inflect the blue line. We want to have more people using both products. And instead of just it growing at a linear rate, we basically want to be able to help more teams solve their problems, as well as it's obviously a good business effect for us as well, to have more people using multiple products because it makes our products stickier. Jira software and Confluence is the example that I'm going to walk through now. I'm going to give you a couple of examples of experiments that we've run and some learnings. I'm pretty sure most people here probably know what Jira is, but it's an agile project management tool. It allows you to do backlog planning, etc. A whole bunch of you probably use it. Confluence is a wiki. It allows you to do product specs and things like that. So this is the first experiment that we ran. It's basically in Jira. If you put a longer description in, we actually have a system. We call it the engagement platform. And it's a segmentation system and notification delivery system that we have in our applications that allows us to do very targeted delivery. We use a third party system, a segmentation system called Lytics. And we basically pump using Kinesis and Lambda, we pump a whole bunch of events into Lytics and they're able to use those segments that we create in that from behavioral events to target these different notifications to people. So this one is specifically targeting people, I think, who had created five issues in the past week. So we can see that you're actually doing something. And we're basically saying, hey, you put a whole bunch of stuff in. Would you like to try Confluence? Because it might be better for what you're trying to do. The second thing we did here was we know that Confluence is a good replacement from our research for people who are using Word docs. I know it doesn't necessarily apply. I don't know if anyone here uses Word docs anymore. But in a lot of other industries, people do. And it's a good way of telling people that, hey, instead of uploading Word docs, do you know that there's another product? The first problem we ran into wasn't an external problem, though. It was the product teams themselves basically saying, hey, I don't know if anyone else has been in this position, but they're like, hey, this is mine. Don't touch my shit. My product is my product. Don't come in and put stuff in it and annoy our users, et cetera. And at the same time, they're basically like, ah, we're not sure about this experiment. Are they really going to work, et cetera? So the first problem we actually had to solve was an internal one. And we solved this by using a SWOT team. And a SWOT team is basically the growth team, the marketing team, and the product team who come together. We have daily stand-ups. And we're able to do that. We're able to basically stay on the same page. We have a biweekly planning meeting that allows us to plan, use iScoring, that type of stuff to plan what experiments we want to run. The biggest thing this does is gives all three teams a sense of ownership. And there's nothing better than having people feel like they own these experiments and feel like that they're involved in what growth is doing. So the first lesson is to work closely with products. A bit of an obvious one, but we really found it to be helpful. And we really found that once we started using SWOT teams across the company, especially if you're at a bigger company, it to work really well for communication and ownership. So we got the results back from those first two experiments. And we saw that there was actually a lot of clicks. So the green is the control, but because there was no dialogue in the control group, there's no clicks. So we got a whole bunch of clicks. Our evaluations stayed flat. And really what we were trying to look for is like, hey, if all of these people are clicking on this message, why aren't they converting? And so we were really puzzled by this. We didn't know why. And we kind of did a whole bunch of studies. We did a bit of research. And we looked into the analytics. And it turns out that it comes down to different permissions. So in our products, we have people who are end users who create issues and use edit issues, use the backlog, et cetera, and then admins who configure Jira, configure user management, et cetera. And it turns out that... These end users are the people who actually want the software and who want the second product. But they have to convince the admin. And then the admin has to turn it on. And then they have to tell the user. And when you get to bigger companies, and when you're like a 10 or 15, 20-person company, it's okay because you can walk across the hall. When you're a 500-person company, it doesn't work as well. And when you actually think about this, it's a funnel. And the biggest problem in this funnel is this part because I know when I evaluate things, if I look at a product and I have to go and talk to IT, I'm like, ah, I'm done. There's no point. It's not worth it. And this is what actually was happening. So that was our hypothesis and we went after it. And we said, okay, using this engagement platform that we have because we have the ability to send notifications in product, let's target the admins with some messages. So when the user requests Confluence, the user is like, hey, I actually want this thing. It sounds kind of cool. We actually started to send the admin some messages. And we said, hey, in product, hey, your user would like this. And we started to send them. We sent them emails as well. And so we were able to actually change. We saw a 22% increase in the number of evaluations that we had over the control, which was really good. The team was quite happy that our hypothesis was correct and we were going after the right thing. But the trouble is that activation still really didn't change. So we had to start thinking about what the next step was. The second takeaway here is really to understand the microfunnels. We all talk about the AA, RRR funnel and high-level funnels. We all model in our products. But really, funnels lead on to funnels, lead on to funnels. And there's even micro ones in this scenario where users can't do something because they're blocked by the product. And trying to unblock it in specific ways really helped. But this isn't all we want to do. We've talked up to now about getting people from Jira into Confluence. But we don't just want people to go to Confluence and then leave. We want them to kind of hang around and actually solve their problems. We really want to do a proper Confluence activation. And then cross-product integration. So the next iteration, there's a lot of iterations in here as well that I'm not necessarily talking about. But the next iteration that worked for us, this is in Jira. And what we did was we actually started to show some of the value of Confluence in Jira in like a powered by Confluence style thing. And you can see on the right there's a couple of different things. So you can do a Jira report or a decision or a sprint plan and things like that. Things that Confluence is really strong at. And when the user came in here, and clicked this, we'd tell them, hey, like, there's some information about Confluence, but actually you don't have it. Would you like to have it? And this iteration, we actually, down the bottom here, I don't know if you can see it, but we actually allowed people, the end users, to put a message to their administrator in. To make it more personal. And we started to use things like avatars to basically say, hey, I'd really like this. Hey, Will, you're an admin. I'd really like if I could have this product. But we didn't stop there. On the administrator side, we presented a dialogue that essentially tells the admin a bit more about Confluence. And it says, hey, you're about to enter a trial. Would you like to do this? We found out that 52% of people did this. And this was the second screen that we presented. It's a bit small, so I'll read it. It says, would you like to give access to the users that you already have to Confluence? And if you're going to give them access, would you like to notify them? So this was like a little growth step that we did. That basically not only allowed us to acquire the Confluence product, but helped us to cross-acquire all of the users. In this case, there were 64 users in the Jira instance. And we really wanted to get them into the Confluence side. So the results came back, and we were blown away. We had a 145% increase in trials. And it was astonishing. Unfortunately, I can't share the real numbers, the raw numbers. But this was the increase. I can tell you that it was widely talked about at Atlassian. And we've refocused a whole bunch of teams on projects similar to this because of it. So it was really, really valuable. And even better, we saw an increase in activations. It wasn't as high, so it didn't follow the whole way through, which means there's more blockers down the funnel. But because we focused on value to the user, we were really able to get this flow working much better. So that's the third takeaway. As a product manager, I tell my engineering teams that all the time. But it really shows through when you do something like that and show how the value works. We're still iterating. We have things to do like activation on the Confluence side of things. Maybe we can use some of the data from Jira and actually personalize the onboarding and that type of stuff. There's a whole bunch of experiments that we can try. The three takeaways, work with product, think about SWOT teams, think about people, communication and ownership of product, from all three teams, product marketing and growth. Think about your micro funnels. Really think about how everything can be modeled as a funnel because I bet you most things can. And finally, focus on value to the user and really communicate that in the experiments that you're doing. And hopefully, we can come across not like this and a little bit more like this. Thank you. Any questions? Should we take the mic? Right. So the question is about how do the SWOT teams work in practice. Do we get one representative or does just like everyone pile in? Generally, what we do is we'll get the growth team. So you'll generally have like three or four or five engineers, maybe a product manager, maybe a designer. And they will all go. And then you'll get one person from product or two people from product and one person from marketing. And then marketing can give you the content, the copy, that type of stuff. And product can give you the subject matter expertise, etc. And we do like daily stand-ups is very valuable. I don't know how many of you work in companies that have different locations, but as you can tell, I'm Australian. We have a Sydney office. We have an office here. We have an office in Mountain View. We have an office in Austin and New York. How do you manage that? A lot more FaceTime, a lot more meetings. We use chat a lot. We have a lot of VC calls. And like really being diligent about the time zone thing. Like Sydney doesn't come on until 3 o'clock San Francisco time. So you kind of have to make sure that they know that you have a question. They have to answer it overnight. It doesn't always work. We haven't solved it. Yeah. I like your slide about like territorialism being a challenge. But do you ever think that like for your users, they're barely even aware that JIRA and Confluence aren't the same thing. And so you're bringing into this an assumption that your users care that these are separate products. Like can you imagine just thinking of it as just a single product with a totally new fixing structure? Yeah, right. So we haven't – we've talked about doing experiments. So the question was about like instead of it being two separate products, why not just make them features of the same product? I think Atlassian's mission has always been to allow you to use whatever pieces you need. And that's why we've always kept separate products. I think most of you probably know that we were behind the firewall software company for a long time. And we're transitioning to the cloud. And a lot of our services are now deployed in the cloud. As we do that, I think that things like this start to change, right? You don't need to just – you don't need to actually buy something and download something. You just get features. So like do the products matter as much anymore? And I think that that – no one has an answer for that at the moment. But they're big questions that we're thinking about. And we might even try some experiments where we do that. We take the product names away. I heard from your story about getting the admins to give permission for the users to use the app and then the options to inform the user that they had in their wisdom given permission. I had heard from that that letting the admins take credit for turning on the feature was actually part of it. So is that a correct assumption on my part or am I getting too psychological? I definitely think there's a bit of psychology here. I don't know if – I think in a lot of companies, people actually don't know the admin, right? Like a lot of the time – last thing, we got 2,500 people. I don't know who the – there's a bunch of IT admins. There's a whole team. I don't know who they are. So maybe in smaller companies where the admin can be like, hey, I turned this on for you all and I'm helping you solve a problem, we definitely see that with champions. We call them champions and we see that all the time where someone goes in and they're like, right, this company doesn't know how to collaborate well because they've got products all over the place. Let's standardize on a bunch of stuff and that really works. So maybe in this case. We got one more question. Have you done any trial duration tests? I noticed you had 30 days to look it up. Yes, we have. I don't know how much I can talk about it actually. But we have trialed seven days, 14 days, 30 days, and – I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing. All right. Seven days, 14 days, and 30 days. Currently, it depends because when you buy one of our products to start with, it's actually a seven-day trial. But when you already have one of our products and you add another one, you get 30 days because you're already a customer. We found that actually there's no real significant difference between 30 and 7. So we were like, okay, well, let's just do 7 because it's better for the company from a revenue standpoint. Like you get it earlier. And like there was no difference in the activation rates or anything. Cool. Thanks, everyone. All right. So I wanted to first thank all our speakers today, Josh, Nick, and Bo, for coming and sharing a little bit about what each of their teams are working on. I also wanted to thank Josh for offering to host the event here on the show. And I wanted to thank Atlassian's workplace team for helping set everything up. That's all we had tonight. So thank you all for coming. You can hang out and grab any pizza or drinks that are left over. We just have to be out of here by 9. But feel free to hang out for the next hour. Thank you, everyone. Thanks. Bye-bye.