How The Biggest Product-Led Enterprise Company In The World Did It | Atlassian CRO Cameron Deatsch

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the SaaStr CRO Confidential Podcast. I'm your host, Sam Blonde. Delighted to be back here today. And do we have a special guest for you all. Um, Cameron Deitch is the CRO at Atlassian. One of the largest enterprise software companies in the world. Cameron has been there for over a decade, just an incredible run. I'm thrilled to have you here, Cameron. Thank you for doing this and welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks a lot, Sam. Thanks for having me.

So, uh, when I think of Atlassian, there are a couple things that come to mind, uh, one of which we're not going to spend time on, but I have to acknowledge it. Atlassian, as I referenced earlier, one of the largest and most successful enterprise software companies in the world, trading at over $40 billion right now. That's in sort of rarefied air for an enterprise software company. And the second thing that comes to mind, which is where we are going to spend a bunch of time, it's— it has to be the largest product-led growth enterprise software company in the world and sort of famous for product-led growth. And when I talk to earlier stage companies, which is almost definitionally everyone, The, the, the conundrum today is, should we immediately build out a big sales team, or should we focus on product-led growth? I think that's the sort of like bifurcation that exists for earlier stage companies— build sales or focus on product-led growth. I'd love to learn more about what product-led growth means today at Atlassian as a far more mature company. But first, if you can describe Atlassian's model and what made it different, maybe that's good context in and would love to learn how you all think about product-led growth again, which is probably quite different than an earlier stage startup. Great.

Easy enough. Let's see where this goes. And as you can imagine, I talked to plenty of new founders or other CROs and about this exact conversation of how do you balance product-led with sales? Can they coexist? So on and so forth. But really quickly on Atlassian, I'm assuming most of your audience is aware of Atlassian. We have been in business 20 years. Headquartered in Sydney, Australia. Co-CEOs Mike and Scott, founders of the business. North of $3 billion in revenue. We've— our biggest products are Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Management, Bitbucket. We really focus on helping teams work better together across software, IT, and broader collaboration spaces. So that's what we do. Over 250,000 paying customers and hundreds of thousands of free customers over that 20 years. That we've been able to acquire. And largely 20 years ago when Mike and Scott created the business, they would love to take full strategic ownership of that. They were product-led. The reality is 2002, Sydney, Australia, couldn't raise capital largely selling to developer audiences. They didn't hire salespeople because they didn't believe in salespeople. They didn't hire salespeople because they couldn't afford salespeople. And honestly, the first decade of the business was really about enabling a self-serve product experience about the entire journey from awareness to long-term success and renewal. It wasn't until 2014 that we hired our first commission rep. So 12 years in business before we had to even think about a commission plan.

That is, is incredible. And I imagine the business got to quite a successful stage by then. I think y'all IPO'd sort of like 2015 timeframe, if my memory serves me correctly, correctly. And so just a few years pre-IPO and still no dedicated sales reps. That's incredible that you made it that far without any. And one layer deeper on the PLG, how do you all think about it today? Because now you do have sales reps, but I believe you still sort of consider yourselves in this product-led growth category. How do you balance those two things?

Yeah. So there's 3 ways to buy from Atlassian. You can buy off the website, go up, sign up, put in your credit card, off you go. You can buy through our channel partners. So another big part that made this work is we went heavy on third-party channel resellers that are also ISVs. They do consulting, implementation, you name it. And we do roughly a third of all of our bookings through these third-party channel partners. Or you can buy directly through our sales team. Or what largely happens is a combination of all those is that people will usually start with a self-serve experience, potentially get engaged with a partner. And we really only engage our sales team with existing customers of a certain size. So of those 250,000 customers, we really only cover, call it 5,000 to 6,000 of those with an account manager. And even with those account managers, it's purely an expansion conversation. It's about getting our customers to the cloud or getting them to the premium versions of our products or checking out new products. So what I would say is by the time we are actually engaging with humans, we're not there convincing them the value of Atlassian. What we're doing is convincing them of the value of standardizing on Atlassian. And that's what our sales conversations are all about.

Makes a lot of sense. And we'll spend— man, so many questions. But it's such a unique success story. And so that's why I'm so, so glad to be talking with you about it. Let's spend some time talking about the evolution here because, as I mentioned, almost definitionally, folks that are listening are gonna be at companies that are smaller than Atlassian, just given your scale. And so something like 10 years before you introduced your first sales rep, but you did mention like a reseller or partnership BD type organization. When did that start compared to the self-service? Just talk to me a little bit about how that evolved over the last 20 years.

Yeah, good point. So the, you know, we were completely self-served, buy off the website. It was on-premises software in 2002. Like we ship you bits, you installed on your hardware. We've since transitioned into primarily a cloud SaaS business. But I think we brought on our first solution partner 3 or 4 years after we were founded, formed. And it's not like we had a structured program. Largely what was happening is we had good early adoption, we had some real power users out there in the industry that just happened to be consultants, like, you know, they would basically, they were doing IT consulting in general as their business. They started using Jira to manage their projects with their own clients and then realized that, hey, they could probably sell this Jira thing, you know, to help solve a lot of their customers' problems. So it was much more organic where they came to us and said, hey, do you guys have a partnership program? I think we have a bunch of customers I could introduce you to. And we started really lightweight. Now, that was a little before my time when we started those things, but it was like just, okay, we'll have a little reseller agreement, we'll put you on the website. Most importantly, for a self-serve business, you know, we get hundreds of inbounds a day with people who kind of expect a sales engagement. You know, they were like, hey, I want pricing, I want a demo. And we started kind of going down there like, hey, let's do all this one-to-one conversation between our teams and customers. And we're like, how are we going to scale this? And the reality is the way we made a decision very early on is, you know, we're going to try and optimize for one-to-many everything Atlassian does. So instead of doing a demo for just one client, let's do a demo, record it, post it on YouTube so everyone can see the demo. And if people want 1-to-1 handholding, we'll introduce them to our partners. So this allowed us to have that balance of just immediate scale. But also we weren't completely just telling customers, go pound sand if you want to talk to someone. There were people out there that represented Atlassian and that really helped us grow in that first, first decade. It was like that partnership plus direct was a huge piece of it.

Amazing. And so a couple things come to mind. One was, uh, this happened a bit organically. Your resellers were also your customers, um, and so because of that, there's a little bit of like a viral component, although traditional viral, uh, is you're actually interacting with the customers. I remember back at EchoSign, um, we had a very viral product. We would send, or our customers would send a contract to be electronically signed. The, uh, signer would use the product and be like, wow, this is a lot easier than printing, signing, and faxing back. Uh, what happened at Atlassian sounds like a different variant of that, but the end result was relatively similar, which was you were able to acquire customers through your customers, which is an incredible dynamic to have.

Which is, uh, for— to be perfectly honest, unless you are saying we are going to be pure enterprise, like, you know, we're— I would say, I always ask when I'm talking to founders, because it's one, like, customer— most new companies actually haven't made this decision where it's like, is your goal to have a few thousand customers but make millions from each of them? Or is your goal to have hundreds of thousands of customers but make tens of thousands from each of them? Right. And most— and it's a very— because that question alone will guide you down very, very different paths in your business. And I've worked for both in this organization, you know, and it's like, well, we don't know. It's like, well, you know, the product-led approach is, is very much get the hundreds of thousands. But how you think about your pricing strategy, your packaging strategy, your, your online experience, your everything comes from that fundamental discussion upfront.

Makes a lot of sense. And I'm gonna backtrack a little bit. And I'm curious, you, you mentioned something that sort of stood out, and it was that the founders of the business didn't hire salespeople in part because they couldn't afford them. This is 2000, 2000, 2002, I can't remember the exact year. Yeah, maybe hadn't raised a lot of money. If you had raised money and could afford them, or if you were starting a startup today, if you were starting Atlassian today knowing everything that you know, would you do it differently? Would you hire salespeople or would you stick to the sort of like play script that got you here?

Good question. You know, it's always 20/20 hindsight what we would have done differently. I always look at this model, the Atlassian or the product-led growth model, you know, at least how we define it, how we've operated, is it's good for giving good growth consistently for many, many, many years. Like, so Atlassian never had triple-digit growth except for maybe like year one where it's like, you know, from $300K to $1 million.

Low base.

Yeah, but instead we've been doing, you know, low to mid 30% growth every year for 20 years. Right. And one, we didn't take— there was no funding, so there was no pressure from on high beyond Mike and Scott. And it was core to our model was let's be very patient for growth. That was one, like one of our key elements of we can be patient. Let's think about things that help us grow for the next 30 years, not just grow this year to hit our number. Or to appease our board that we didn't have a board. So Mike, it's kind of like it's one— they were just— so that was very much in their DNA of let's be patient, let's think systemic and think long term across the board. In general, I'll also say, as I've been here for the last 10 years, I was kind of employee 500-ish and now we're at 11,000. I think you can look back and go, could we have done things faster? And I'm saying not, not just add more salespeople, but just in general, as you grow and as you get bigger and as you become successful, it's— it becomes easier to take a little more time to do things. And I think in general, as a DNA, I think, I think we would have done the same approach, but maybe we would have consolidated the years to make it happen. An example of that, not just adding sales, everyone, but we went from a trial-based model to a free model, right? Yeah, we did that in 2020. It's like, actually, Matt, actually, we believe this has been a massive success for us. We probably, knowing what we know now, we probably would have done that in like 2017, you know, but, but we don't make those decisions unless we've tested and take a long time and we're a public company. So it's in general, I think urgency is something that any company should continue to have in their DNA. I'm not saying we would have changed our strategic decisions, we just would have probably done it a little faster.

Totally resonates, man. You guys are the definition of successfully playing the long game. In just this consistent, really high and exciting growth, but not sort of inorganic or inauthentic growth at any point in the business. I've talked on this podcast before about the other end of the spectrum, which was my experience at Zenefits, when relatively early we scaled the sales team far too quickly and did have, you know, a couple years of this sort of like crazy percentage growth, even on a decent-sized base, but the inefficiencies within the business became too big, just too much. We grew too quickly. And that was certainly true within the headcount side. And there are all sorts of consequences of doing that. And Brex, my experience after Zenefits was, was far more measured, at least in growing headcount because of that experience. And I think a lot of people and companies get sort of like gratification out of scaling headcount really quickly. And really what folks should be focusing— focused on is scaling revenue We want to grow revenue efficiently and not sort of like, you know, badge of honor for how many people we've hired. That's not necessarily a good thing.

Yeah, like it's the— it's interesting. And you see that today, like it's something to fight against. Like headcount becomes the currency of the organization, you know, and it's like— and you have people that people build fiefdoms. And listen, I have thousands of people in my organization today. So if any of my team is listening to me, you're all wonderful. I love you all, each and every one of you. But I'd say the core piece on the sales thing specifically, and I think the one thing we had to break our model from is you want to get away from a business model where every incremental dollar requires incremental hiring. Right. And if you— and I say it's like if 100— and this I think is actually start with finance, which is interesting. Like this is if every— if your operating model, like you build your next year fiscal plan and if your next year fiscal plan starts with Here's our sales target, thus here's how many salespeople we need and here's their quota. And then you work and like, that's how you're— 95% of companies I work with have like that. I talk to have that business model. You've inevitably immediately tied like the first thing you do is tie your sales, your overall revenue number to how many salespeople you can hire, not how much innovation you can deliver, not how many engineers you can go hire. Right. And you basically like it becomes that first line item in every financial calculation and it just self-perpetuates. And that's— so that's the biggest thing I always ask, like, hey, that's— if that's how you're doing operational planning, you kind of have to flip it on its head and say, how can we actually bring more customers in? What's our average dollar per customer? Then is there ability to actually bring in more customers without tying it to every sale, to us, every single deal to a salesperson? And that, if you don't have that built in your DNA early in a company, it's very hard to add later.

It's a smart takeaway. And I think something that Atlassian has done that helps solve for that a bit is the multi-product offering. Um, and you have multiple different revenue streams. And today it seems a common consideration within startups, which is, should we launch another product? Can we generate more revenue from within our existing base and even more revenue per customer as we acquire them? Um, not to, to jump around too much, we could spend an entire session just on that, but I'd love to revisit something that you said earlier, which is a small portion, and I don't remember the exact percentage, but a small portion of your customers receive either like a sales or account manager, like human-based support, like a traditional enterprise salesperson. Is that defined by employee size? How do you segment the business and assign people based off of who they are serving?

Yeah, so we call that account management team our Enterprise Advocates. So that's the name. And effectively it's based on— and yeah, we have tiers, we have our platinum accounts, our gold accounts, our silver accounts and different coverage models across each of those. Basically to get in those, it's potential and largely potential share wallet. So basically, which just comes out largely with our products, how many employees you have and existing spend. So what I don't— what I want to make sure is by the time we engage an expensive sales resource, that one, there's lots of opportunity in the account, but the customer's effectively bought into Atlassian, right? Because we know if we can get that, I can engage a sales rep to a customer that's already pretty standard, already like sees the value in us, might, but has multiple expansion vectors. And we also know those expansion vectors are very large. Then I know I can hold largely very large quotas for those teams. So when I do engage in a 1-to-1 conversation, the return is huge compared to most inside sales or even field sales organizations.

That makes a lot of sense. Again, could sort of like go, go much deeper there and spend— actually, let's do go one layer deeper. What is this sort of like mechanism that you use to define that? You meant— you mentioned potential. And so do you have historical data that suggests certain employee types or segments grow at specific rates? Or like, for the folks that are listening, how how should they apply what has been so successful at Atlassian to their business?

Oh, that's care— and this comes in multiple. So first off is once again, exceedingly patient. So before anyone gets an enterprise rep, an enterprise advocate, we probably have 5, maybe even 10 years of historic sales data with that customer. We know what they've bought, we know how they've grown, we know if they— like, we basically understand that historic trend line. You know, and something we always say is, okay, maybe that customer's organically grown 30% year on year by adding users and adding products. Well, if I'm going to add an expensive sales rep, I need to ensure that there's an opportunity to grow that account 50% year over year for the next 5 years. Like, that's how we think about that, because otherwise I'm going to eat into operating margin or I'm going to eat into R&D expense like that. That costs. So, but we've basically calculated where I know my certain quote I need to maintain on my rep to ensure we preserve our operating model as a business. You know, basically sales and marketing spend, profit, and R&D spend. So I know that constraint that I work within. And once I work with that constraint, we can apply that math to potential within our existing customer accounts. So we look at— it takes a lot of work, but it's one of those where you largely have to understand, like, that customer has 10,000 employees and they're using 2,000 employees licensed and they have 3 products and we have 15. It's not that hard of math to understand what that potential is in each one of those accounts. As long as it's big enough, we can apply an enterprise advocate to it.

Super helpful. What's going through my mind as you're talking is, I imagine there's, there's some evolution that takes place here. I've done segmentation at every company that I've been at, whether it was Echosign, Zenefits, Brex. And it initially starts like many things as a bit of an art where you sort of define like, here are the types of companies we think should be a segment line, regardless of of whether it's like, you know, sales rep, you're assigned to this segment, or customer, we think you could grow into this, this, uh, larger business. Starts as an art form. As the business matures— and, uh, thank God for revenue operations, a function that, uh, has just been instrumental in, in my personal success and the success of the businesses that I've been at— they will take a lot of the data and be more strategic with how resources are deployed as you receive more and more information about the types of customers that do grow and the segment lines and maybe where there should be based off of data insights versus again, this sort of like, this seems like an interesting round number.

Yeah. Like when we first added sales reps, it was largely we had just created a scale version of our product, like we call it the data center edition. So we basically finally had a product that was built for large customers. And what I say is had an ASP high enough where it made sense to call customers back. So we didn't talk about pricing, but our prices would be so low it didn't make sense to pick up the phone. Right. So with the data center offering, we largely— and it started like, but we didn't really have a proactive account model. What we basically realized is, hey, what customers are having scale challenges? Yeah. And let's market to those customers. We know who they are because we see their support tickets. Let's email them, hey, we have something for you, you know, and see who signs up, right? Who raises their hand. And yeah, we applied sales to those. So it was purely almost reactive in those early days. Of course, as we got smarter, we were able to go, okay, what are the customers that look, smell, and taste like this? And then we could build richer and richer segmentation as we've grown. But like that first part is like just where's the organic demand coming from? Can we scale that?

All really interesting takeaways. As we're talking through a lot of these things, the thing that's going through my mind is I've been a user of Atlassian products at every company, and I joined companies at around the same size, like 10 to 20 employees. I've been with companies— I remember, you know, Adobe acquired EchoSign. Adobe is tens of thousands of employees as an enterprise. And so based off of my personal experience and also reputationally, Atlassian seems unique in that you serve some of this, the, the smallest companies in the world, um, you know, just a few folks, uh, at the company, all the way to the largest companies in the world. And I think about enterprise software, and that is, um, uncommon. You think about the Workdays of the world, and it's sort of like a specific, uh, size range for the types of companies that they serve. You think about Intuit, and again, it's sort of like a very specific segment of the market that they are going after. And so from sort of like a product strategy, uh, standpoint, how have you been so successful at developing and acquiring customers of all different sizes?

So the first off, as we said, what is our customer? What are we building software for? And we've started as our customer is a team, you know, or a set of teams within a large organization. So our goal is to not land Adobe, Our goal is to land a small team within Adobe, largely to use our products for free until they hit 11 users. That's where our fee— where our pay gate is. So the first 10 years of our business was all about landing teams. We never did a top-down, never talked to a CIO. We didn't do Gartner or Forrester or any of that stuff. It was, let's just go get a bunch of teams. We priced our products and made our self-serve flywheel so easy that any team that needed to work better together, we could enable those teams. And for all intents and purposes, you know, getting a team of 10 people at largest bank in the world kind of have the same set of needs as a 10-person startup. They have like, hey, we have a set of work we need to get done. How do we track and manage that? Granted, and just so you know, like when I started in 2012, just to show our pricing support of this, in 2012, the most expensive thing you could buy from Atlassian was $8,000. An unlimited license, unlimited users on Jira. Was $8,000 a year with a $4,000 renewal, right? Which shows like that's 10 years in the business that we had that model. It was only once we actually realized that these big enterprise customers were like, we need scale, we need administration, we need, we need all the enterprise-ilities. That's what we've been building over the last 10 years and monetizing appropriately.

And so then is the takeaway there that 10 years ago, most of the customers were— and I don't know what the definition would be like, but like under a certain employee threshold? Because you talked about what you found at this price point of, I think you said, $8,000 for unlimited users, and you found that like enterprise needs were maybe more sophisticated or something like that than that offering provided. And so is, is Atlassian a bit of the traditional story of start downmarket, push, continue pushing upmarket, and then before you know it, you're serving, in your case, the largest banks in the world?

Yeah, and in 2012 we had the largest banks in the world. They'd call us, but they'd, we'd have, they'd almost be like 30 different customers. Like, like eventually someone calls up like, hey, we're using like 10 different licenses of Jira, we need to have an enterprise agreement. And I'd look them up like, actually you own 35 licenses of Jira. Like they wouldn't, we were so bottoms up that we proliferate, but we never treated that as like one account that needed to be consolidated and managed. We treat that largely as like a bunch of independent teams within these big businesses. Granted, for the last 10 years, it's all been about building a strategic partnership, consolidating that both on a technology perspective, building the capabilities they need, but also from a licensing perspective, you know, ensuring that they can actually have a longer-term strategy. And we still have that today. Like many of our biggest customers will literally have dozens of our products deployed and actually not even know who's using all of it.

That all, that all makes sense. What's going through my mind is sort of a version of something that we talked about earlier. Um, which was, you know, you mentioned there's this demand and potentially willingness to pay so much more than the $8,000 for the unlimited license. Um, and, and what is going through my mind is like a bit of a missed opportunity there, or like maybe could have acquired more revenue had we had this offering earlier, something like that. Nice. The pointed question earlier, which was like, if you could go back, or if you started a company today knowing what you know, would you start the same way with this product-led sales versus building a sales team if you could afford it. More broadly, just sort of like a variation of that. Is there anything that you have learned throughout the evolution that you would do differently as it relates to sales-first versus product-led growth?

Listen, every model is going to be different. So first off, I would look— that's a big question. And it all says depends. Like the reality is, you can't sell an HR work management solution, you can't go sell Workday bottoms up. No one in like one day is like, you know what, I'm going to go build my own. Like there are certain technology categories that require centralized top-down decision-making for the entire business, you know, ERP systems work, you know. Now that said, so, but our applications which are around team collaboration, you can use bottoms up. So like the first is, is my product strategy something where we can drive bottoms up organic adoption with a small set of users within an account? Like that's the, that you just have to ask yourself that question. Up front. Then I'd basically say is, would you say, would I do, would I hire sales or go focus on self-serve? I would always, I'll tell you, it's a lot easier to build a self-service business first and add sales later than build a sales-driven business first and add self-serve later. And that's the problem I run into a lot of startups today is they built this sales pipeline, they, their entire financial forecast is based off of sales, hiring, quote, and attainment. And then they're like, great, we need to add product-led. I'm like, great, you're going to slow down. You got to take 20% of that funnel that you're driving into your sales team today and tell your sales team they can't touch that. And on top of that, build all the muscles that you haven't built around a self-serve onboarding product experience, self-serve demos. You have to put pricing on the website and actually stand by it, blah, blah, all that stuff. And people like don't actually understand how complex complex a self-serve enterprise software journey is. It's a hell of a lot more complex than just adding a Shopify to your website and clicking buy. There's a— yeah. So, and unless you have that DNA in your business from the start, really hard to add later.

A lot of what you said is so smart. You said something that was, you know, it's a lot— and I'm paraphrasing— it's a lot easier to start with self-serve and then add sales later than sort of like the inverse than that. The inverse of that. I remember when I joined Brex, uh, we haven't launched yet, we were still in beta. We had a number of customers, they were relatively like friends and family customers, a lot of the YC classmates of Pedro and Enrique. And I remember talking with Enrique about some of the risks of me joining and building out a sales team, because that's what a CRO does, uh, and What he flagged, and I'm not sure if this was Enrique's flag or maybe an investor's flag or something like that, but it was, it was something along the lines of, you know, if you put in successful sales, one downside or potential downside of that is it can mask product-market fit-related issues that you can be acquiring customers because the salespeople are really good at doing just that. And in a way, like not having sales at Atlassian, it was a forcing function for the product to be so good that it almost acquired customers on its own. And so, you know, it seems at least in this case to have paid long-term, long-term dividends. To your point earlier, like this isn't one size fits all. There are certain buyers, there are certain product types that will require a seller. A person to sell. Um, and, uh, uh, you have to sort of like be reactive to that. Um, but hopefully lots of data that comes out of this conversation that's helpful in determining what is best for your business. Um, that, that's sort of the goal. Um, we, we talked a little bit earlier about Atlassian being one of the most successful companies that has launched so many different sort of like household name-like products. Um, has anything related to being a product-led business allowed you to grow your product suite faster?

Well, first off is we, because our model, just that one, back to the operational model, we spend 15%, 1-5% of revenue on sales and marketing, roughly mid-teens, which is a fraction of any company that's in enterprise software of our size. And we spend, call it 35 to 40% on R&D. So one advantage immediately of that is One, for a customer, every dollar they spend with us, they get more engineering, you know, like that's just like core to the value. But also on top of that, we have more engineers so we can build more products. And if we can build more products, then our land and expand flywheel model only gets enhanced. We have more and more things to offer our customers. It's a nice little self-perpetuating loop. That's at least okay. We get to build more products because we can financially afford to do that. Selling multiple products is a completely different exercise, you know, but it's something that very early on, Mike and Scott that just made the decision. And I think it's like you could say it was forethought or just, hey, they thought some cool tech, we should go build some stuff. But if you look at every big software company today, the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft, SAP, they're all multi-product company, organic or inorganic. You know, like you have to like if you're going to be one of the biggest companies, software companies in the world, which we want to be, you have to be a multi-product company. And we built that DNA in our business really, really early. I'll tell you, as I run sales, marketing, customer success and support, the hardest part of my job is actually balancing go-to-market across multiple products because everyone wants everything right. And you actually do have to stack rank and prioritize what my expansion paths are based off different products and different customer segments.

I remember recently, I think Jason M. Lemkin had a tweet about earlier stage companies that had sort of hit an inflection point or something in their growth where they reached a bit of a plateau. And then a couple of his portfolio companies, and I'm paraphrasing here and I hope I'm getting it right, a couple of his portfolio companies had launched second, third, maybe even fourth products, and that created some accelerated revenue growth, better net dollar retention, just that focus on launching a new successful product. And so for the folks out there, which it seems to be such a common thing to do today, is launching additional product lines because of what I just described. What has worked really well for Atlassian? You've launched, I think, 20+ at this point. Um, anything that comes to mind? Let's start sort of like big picture at the company level, like what are some things that are just lessons learned on, uh, what has worked in launching a new product? And then maybe more tactically or specifically as it relates to go-to-market, anything that your organization has done as new product launches come out that have been really effective?

Um, couple things worth considering. And I'll say land and expand model. Our flywheel self-serve business is land and expand. We land customers for free in one product, we expand them into paid editions, and to multiple products. So one of the first things you got to realize with any new product you introduce, is it a land product? Like, are we going after a new buyer, a new cohort, or a new segment? Or are we going after an expand product, which is I have a Jira Software customer and I can sell them Confluence because that's where you do tech documentation. Like, it's— I'll tell you is we confused ourselves a lot over multiple years on that one where we'd actually have an expand product. I wish we should be cross-selling this into the base, but we think it's a land product that's going to acquire tens of thousands And I'll tell you, from a go-to-market tactics perspective, you simply do way different things to build a land product than you do an expand product, period. Just as far as how you think about paid channels versus owned channels, how you think about branding, how you think about naming, how you think about pricing, you name it. So that's the first thing I'd be very clear on is this is an expansion opportunity, or is this a land opportunity for us? I'll tell you, expand in general is always easier for immediate revenue because it's always easier to sell existing customers something. And to go commit to a new one. But if you're going to do expansion, think about what I always call it is you've already trained your customer how to buy from you. Like we've trained this, but someone bought Jira software from us, they've been trained, they know where to go, they know where their information is, their account information, that entire purchasing workflow, and they know what the rough price is. So if we come up with something new that we want to sell that person, it better look, smell, and taste a whole lot like like the first product they bought from us, which can be super constrained because we could build a product. They're like, actually, because of competitors, we should be charging 5x for this product than we are for Jira. But like, but all of a sudden, if I'm coming in and customers paying $5 a user for Jira and we come with a new product that's $30 a user, they're going to be like, what the hell? You know, like, this makes no sense. So what I always say is when you think about pricing and packaging for your expand products, realize you've already trained them how to buy. So try and keep it as simple as possible, you know, from a repeat purchase perspective that it's as similar to their first purchase. Then you don't have to reeducate them on these new things and just that makes your flywheel go. That's one big part I've learned on all this. If you're going to have a land product, I go completely the other way. With a land product, you almost kind of want to treat it as a separate business, right? From a brand, like you actually want infinite flexibility on how you take that product to market because you're trying to get a new set of cohort and who knows what that new buyer audience wants to buy and you can actually train them accordingly. Trello is a big product like that for us.

That's awesome. I am thoroughly enjoying this and could go for many hours on end, as I'm sure our audience would probably prefer as well. I know that you have a very important job to tend to, so let's, let's end on a high note and just what's next for Atlassian?

I always love that one. I think you have to say artificial intelligence, right? Isn't that what everyone's saying nowadays?

Everyone's in AI, every deck. I'm now a VC and I see a lot of AI pitches these days.

There's a— it seems to be— now our big user conference, TEAM23, is in the third week of April. That's where all the big new announcements come from. That's where we show all the shiny new stuff. So I'd say Tune in in April if you can make it to Team '23 in Vegas. If you're interested in Atlassian, please come join us. We'll be streaming it online as well.

Cameron, thank you for doing this. You're a legend. There are very few, if any, folks who have been in a CRO seat at a company where you have now been for a decade. I know your, your personal experience evolved a bit, but now, now CRO, been with the business over a decade. One of the most successful enterprise software companies in the world. I really appreciate you taking the time, as I'm sure the audience does as well. Um, this was awesome, and we'll see you folks that are listening back here next time. Thank you. Thanks, Sam.