Unleashing the Power of Community: A $40B Success Story with Cameron Deatsch, Atlassian

Leverage community led growth to skyrocket your business. Hey, Traction fam. It's your host, Lloyd Lobo. I've just released a book that I've been working on for some time. It's called from grassroots to greatness, Master 13 Game changing rules from some of the world's most iconic brands like Apple, Atlassian, Crossfit, Harley Davidson, HubSpot, Red Bull, and a lot more. So you can attract super fans of your own that will propel you to new heights. Your support would mean the world to me. Please grab your copy at from grassroots.

To greatness.com we highlight our community leaders as champions in everything we do, from our marketing to ourselves. We try to make these individuals heroes within their organizations and their companies and that helps reinforce it. The scale that this gets us is our community hosted over 5,000 events in the last 12 months. 5,000 events that took us 20 years to get to that type of scale. It's that natural continuous care and feeding. What are the type of things that these people need? How do we get more people to show up to these type of things? How do we make it easier? How do we support it with brand? How do we support it with swag? You name those things that constant care and feeding allows it to continue to grow over time. I wouldn't say it was any. Just like one big lever we pulled. It was literally something we continued. Constant iteration and improvement over a long period of time gets us a massive result like this.

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Hey, what's up, innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself, on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more.

Hey, Traction fam. Today I'm super excited to have Cameron Dish CRO at Atlassian to share how Atlassian built a robust ecosystem and engage the community to not only help them drive exponential growth, but also to build a massive moat. Atlassian is a $40 billion behemoth building collaboration tools including Jira, Confluence and Trello. And today the company supports more than 250,000 businesses worldwide. But a massive market also attracts a lot of competition. Over the last few years, we've seen several competitors fighting for market share. So Cameron is going to tell us all about how they've built this ecosystem, this community and this competitive moat to keep the competitors at bay and continue to keep winning in this massive market. Cameron, thank you for joining us. My friends at Saster speak extremely highly of you. No pressure, no pressure, no pressure. But I am super stoked to finally do this. How you doing?

I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on this and I'm glad that people are saying nice things. Hopefully you'll be saying nice things after this little conversation we have today.

Definitely the benchmark is we're going to have to get to as high of a view count as Anu's attraction, which was like some obscene amount, but the tens of thousands.

Anu is the president of Atlassian, one of my peers on the exec team and I will not even begin to try and compete with her in anything that's a failed goal all the way up front. So I'll just do my best to try and keep up with her standard.

Fantastic. So, camera, you've had a very successful career en route to becoming Atlassian CRO. Give us your backstory. How did you get to this position today?

So as chief Revenue officer at Atlassian, I run all the go to market teams. So sales, marketing, customer success and support. Been in the role for about three years. I've been with the company for almost 11. So I was around the 500th employee, 150 million in revenue when I started back in 2012 and now we're close to 4 billion 10,000 plus employees worldwide. I'd love to say it's like it was my plan to go be the CRO at Atlassian when I started. Absolutely not. It was one of those. I kind of just joined a really cool company. The previous president of the business was a previous leader mentor of mine that brought me into the organization and with a company that scaled as much as we have, they just gave me more and more opportunities. So I've done six different roles here at Atlassian. Everything from R and D to corp dev to growth. It's been whirlwind. So I wouldn't say it was ever planned to get to this situation. It just largely happened as I said yes to any new opportunity they threw my way. Before that, I worked for two different enterprise software companies. A startup called Jive Software that went public in 2011, 2012 and before that a company called BEA, application servers and so on. That's where I started my career in enterprise software. And they got bought out by Oracle in 07 08.

Awesome. The path to CRO though, what did.

You study in University undergrad was electrical engineering. I was going to go design home theaters and stereos. That was like what I was really interested in. I was not a very good electrical engineer. So when I graduated I was like, I'm not going to go be a bench engineer. Got a couple sales jobs out of college doing sales. Didn't want to be just sales my entire career. So I went and got my MBA and my master's in business. I actually got really into high tech product marketing as a capability. So I really went into enterprise software with a marketing bent, but with a little bit of sales background. And I've been able to kind of jump across marketing and sales and customer success throughout my career.

Actually, I hate saying this, but engineers are probably the most disloyal to our profession. I studied computer engineering and I wanted to be an entrepreneur always. So I asked a couple of entrepreneurs what's the most important skill? And they said sales. And nobody would hire me coming out of college as an account executive. So I took a job cold calling for like $30,000. My parents are from India and you know, our culture is we pride, education and all of this. And all my peers are Microsoft and other places. And they were so embarrassed. And I never heard the end of it until I had a decent outcome in my last startup and then my parents finally understood. But I see like CROs and CMOs especially come from engineering background. But that background of almost going into designing home theaters to becoming a CRO. What were some key points in your journey that helped you get to where you are today, which serves as a lesson perhaps for aspiring business leaders?

I think in general I always liked technology. That's what got me in electrical engineering. So just like exciting and interest about cool new tech in general and just be able to communicate why this was so neat and interesting and fun to talk about was one of the big energetic things that got me kind of down the path in general, I'd say actually one of the biggest things was I had a sales career out of college starting just doing just pure sales and I liked it. But it was one of those where I was like, do I want to be just sales for the rest of my career? And I didn't really see the path of what a bigger sales world looked like. It wasn't clear. So I went and got my MBA largely of, hey, I just learned broad more about business. And I think one of the biggest things is that product marketing focus. Really good product marketing. Professor Jackie Moore at the University of Montana basically taught this. I think it was Product marketing where product marketing was this combination of product and technology strategy plus value proposition and sales. It really became this linkage in my mind of all things that required to take something to market. And what I loved is that it brought almost science as very much science and methodology and strategies and spreadsheets and math to a sales problem or a marketing problem versus hey, it's conversations and relationships. It's like no, it was more than that. That's what really was big transition for me and I'd say the next is actually getting a job. You might be surprised but there wasn't a ton of big technology companies recruiting out of the University of Montana's MBA program. Most people graduate out there going to like the Forest Service and stuff. So I spent a month submitting resumes online. Just like sat in a coffee shop for a month and I got an internship at BEA writing customer case studies. And I was like one of the luckiest things I ever did. I got that internship off of Craigslist of all things. So once again like got me in the door. And the VP of my department there was Jay Simons who became the president of Atlassian and brought me in hand. So it's one of those like I got very lucky along the way and that kind of rest writes itself. At that point I got in and just wanted to came down to I never said no to a new idea. I just kept going and here's where I'm at today. So I just feel exceedingly lucky to be here.

Diverse set of experiences leading up to becoming a CRO. And Jay also spoke at our in person traction a number of years ago. And the interesting thing was he drove from Seattle to Vancouver. He forgot his passport so he had to drive back. I felt so bad to make the morning opening keynote. And that was the time where Jay and Michael Pryor after the acquisition were doing something together that felt so bad. But great story here. I want to shift focus to Atlassian's ecosystem. Today you guys support 250,000 customers. Pretty much Atlassian is a household brand in the space it serves. How did you build this massive channel with hundreds upon hundreds of global solution partners and them supporting you, implementing you and raving about Atlassian. Give us the whole strategy or channel strategy, onboarding the partners. How does it all fit and come together?

Thank you for such grand recognition of Atlassian. It's one of those we're always constantly debating. It's like many companies know us for, you know as Jira Software and Confluence and Trello and BitBucket. A lot of our big brands and we're always having this internal debate about how much people know about Atlassian versus our core products. So I'm glad to hear the props around Atlassian and our ecosystem.

My company boast AI with R& D analytics. It started with already tax credits automating funding for businesses through government sources, then started lending against that and now are providing engineering analytics. Our biggest source of data was jira. We take JIRA data and map it to payroll and then figure out who's working on what and how much did it cost and then lend companies money similar to SaaS financing and the whole world of Salesforce and how that ties to financials is what we were doing with JIRA data. So I'm eternally grateful to Atlassian for existing.

I think that was actually a perfect example because that use case right there we would consider an extension of our ecosystem. So to tie it back into how this was created, I hesitate to say like we've been in business for 20 years, our two founders, co CEOs Mike and Scott, headquartered out of Australia in 2002, I would love to say like oh very early on they knew a giant ecosystem was going to be long term strategic success of the business. No, it was a set of needs that we had largely from our customers that had us respond to those needs in what I say is unique ways. And then when we saw things work we would double down on them. So it was very much an agile methodology, so to speak. We iterated our way into this very large ecosystem we have. And our ecosystem has many different pieces of it from our resellers and solution partners. These are people that are system integrators, boutique, systemic all the way to Accenture, to our marketplace partners, people who build and sell apps through our marketplace in the Atlassian ecosystem, to our strategic technology partners, partners that we've invested in and built direct one off integrations. And these are companies like Snyk and our Slack partnership and so on. So like it's a pretty broad world. The solution partner, we call it the channel reseller model really was out of the heart of as an Australian based software company with very little financing, very bootstrapped from the ground up, trying to primarily sell online via self service out of Australia. Well the reality is the demand like you can't just serve the Australian market and be a successful enterprise software company, you have to serve globally by nature. Mike and Scott realized that, so they went online. But customers around the world needed things like quoting, they needed local currency, they needed people in there to like translate to speak their native language and, and more importantly they needed on site training and services and Atlassian I'd say would love to do all that stuff. They simply didn't have the capital to invest in thinking supporting a global customer base like that. So we were actually able to very luckily have a few system very small boutique firms, people that largely just were small JIRA experts saying, you know what, I'd love to represent Atlassian in Germany, so to speak, in the U.S. can we set up like some sort of partner arrangement? And that's what we basically ended up doing is we just brought on these, we call them back in the day experts now we call them Atlassian solution partners really to help provide that direct close to customer interaction as we focused on our products and building an online distribution channel. So that's how this started on our solution partners. We have over 700 solution partners today, all the way from little 5 person shops all the way up to Accenture on the global system integrator side. And we do over 40% of our revenue through our channel partners today. They are an absolutely critical part of how we operate at a global level and how we actually serve some of the biggest organizations in the world. The biggest companies in the world use Atlassian. We wouldn't be able to serve all their needs if it wasn't for our solution partners who help with much of the handholding for those customers.

What are some tips to keep people motivated? I think Atlassian had a massive brand coming out, but sometimes it's very hard to predict what will come right in terms of revenue and sales. So how do you keep them excited, motivated and pumped to keep growing, bringing you clients and business and building on.

Top of the ecosystem in general almost to a T. Most of our solution partners have grown their businesses as a revenue growth year over year, faster than Atlassian as a whole. And Atlassian's been a very successful company. Like I said, we went from over 20 years getting up to 4 billion in revenue. We've had 30% kind of plus growth pretty consistently for many, many, many years. And our partners, because they resell our licenses, they are inherently tied to our license growth. So as long as we're good partners here and we do everything we can, I don't care if they buy direct from our website or through my sales team or through partners. We are agnostic. It's whatever the customer wants to do and we incentivize to make sure that actually if I talk to any enterprise customer I'm like, which partner are you Working with one of the first questions I always ask. So it's one as we continually incentivize that the partners are part of Atlassian's broader success and part of the value that we bring to our customers. So that's a big part. So our partners are tied to our license growth. On top of that they have value added services, they have their own custom training, they have all their consulting that they layer on top of that, which is growth on top of Atlassian license growth. So in general it's been that overall strategy which has reinforced the health and success of the broader ecosystem. And when I talk to partners, they always have a million requests that they have for Atlassian, rightfully so. Love them to death. And if I was in their seats I'd have all those requests too. But the reality is it's drive a ton of business for our partners. More importantly, we continually as a business land thousands of new customers every single quarter self serve online, which continues as those customers grow, they need more consulting, they need more services and they go into our partners. So we help feed into our overall partner health of their business long term. So that's largely what's been sustaining. And I'd say when I talk to partners, just like what's your number one limiting factor in growing your business to a T is hiring quality people. It's like the demand continually outpaces the supply of which they can deliver on services. And my view is as long as that's good, everyone's going to be like that's a good tension to have, is that we can continue to grow the overall organization.

You guys recently did a very successful conference to bring everyone together. I think you had summits or sessions focused on your partners as well.

Yeah, so we do four big events a year and then we have our big Halo event. We call it Team. It was Team 23 in Vegas. That is our Atlassian user conference. It's very much for our customers to come in and we have everything from small customers to big customers and then we have a whole dedicated day for our channel and our ecosystem. So like just for specifically for them, it's a critical part for one for a lot of Atlassians to get directly connected in FaceTime with our channel ecosystem. But more importantly for those partners to actually meet all of our customers as we bring thousands of customers into a local space. So I don't think there's anything particularly massively differentiated or innovative that approach. Many different enterprise software vendors have massive events where they bring in partners and their customers. It's one of those big elements that many of our partners spend a lot of time ensuring that it's one of their biggest accelerators for their businesses because it gives it a place where they can meet many of our customers at once. In addition to that big Halo event each quarter throughout the year, we do other regional events focused at different product lines. So we have like one focused on IT service management, we have one focused on Agile and DevOps, and we do those quarterly around the world. So we've done those in London, we've done those in Berlin. I think we're actually planning on doing one in Sydney, Australia next year.

I was following the social and I'm like, you guys have a lot of raving fans. I mean, Atlassian is an iconic brand today. A big part of that, though, is also this marketplace. You talked about people building and putting apps in the marketplace. Why did Atlassian feel it was the right time to invest in a marketplace?

I'd love to say it was like, oh, there was a strategy from the ground up of like, you know, what we can do is build a bunch of apps on top of our products and take a margin from those products and like, it's another revenue growth for a business. It's not how it was built originally. There's some Atlassian folklore here. It's one of those, was this true or not? But in general, the conversation broadly for the customer base was as our customer base grew, our backlog of requests from customers continued to outpace our ability to execute against those requests. Which is like a. Every single product of success, every single product team will always have this right. So your backlog of customer asks will always outpace your ability to deliver new features. Period. End of story for any successful product. And this became this tension point for us where it's like, well, if we can't solve all of our customers needs, everything that they, all their use cases and so on, but they have actually really relevant requests, why don't we allow them to help themselves? Why don't we basically make it so they can solve their own feature and capability requests? And on some mythical flight back from the US to Australia, this is the folklore piece. Mike Cannon Brooks, one of our CEOs, wrote the first code which became our plugin framework, which eventually became our basically our API framework for building apps on top of our products. You built it on the airplane ride home, shipped it, and it was largely for customers. It was for customers and some partners doing custom work to customize build bespoke capabilities for independent deployments of our products to get the value that they need and allowed us. So instead of us having to build every single feature every customer wanted, we can let customers build their own features. That evolved into, hey, we actually started talking to customers like, oh, they're actually really, really cool features they're actually building and so on. Wouldn't it be cool if we allowed them to share them with each other? So we built in like a plugin exchange. Weren't thinking about monetization. We like just built a website where these customers could go and post these plugins that they built for themselves and share them with other people in our community. We realized that from there, as that got more and more health, we're like, the Apple App Store became a real big thing in the late 2000s is when we start seeing the market like, oh, wait a minute, there potentially is a monetization opportunity here. Maybe we can help these really smart customers actually build some businesses. In 2012, we launched our marketplace, but when we launched our marketplace, we already had this huge customer base and huge supply of plugins that could eventually be monetized. And honestly, some people that were like, literally just like a JIRA admin that had built some cool plugins for their own work, working for a big company, actually started independent businesses and started doing millions of dollars in transactions through this marketplace because they're building these plugins and apps for Atlassian products. And that's largely how the marketplace grew. But I'd say that entire journey was over like a five or six year window before we saw $1 from our marketplace. Ten years later, we've done over $3 billion in sales of Marketplace apps. So it's become this massive part. It is just about every single one of our customers owns at least a couple apps. Many own up to like 50 or 60 apps. And we have over 5,000 apps available in our marketplace today.

10 billion. Wow, that is insane. So you're basically keeping a lot of companies alive at this point.

Yeah, sorry. And it was at $3 billion in lifetime. It'll be 10 soon enough. I can't tell you when, but it's one of those where once again, it's a key part of the value we deliver to our customers. Like when at last, when you buy a product from Atlassian, you get a really, really good product at a very, very good price. And that scales from a team of 10 to the team of 10,000. That's very much what Atlassian does. But you have this huge ecosystem of partners that we can help bring in to do any of your on site, handholding, consulting, implementation work. And then you have 5,000 apps on the marketplace. Which I'm generally is like if you have a feature or a requirement, if Atlassian hasn't built it in our products, I guarantee more often than not there's probably two or three ways to solve that feature requirement through our marketplace with a simple search. That kind of platform, fully holistic vision value proposal is really what allows us to stay competitive in the market.

You know, there is this common theory in SaaS which says you build this first product and route to 100 million. Definitely before 50 you come up with your second act or third act which is bigger than the first. And then to scale beyond 100, you need to have an ecosystem and marketplace. And what point should people think about introducing an ecosystem in a marketplace? And probably doesn't fit all businesses, right? What are the characteristics of a company that can have something like this?

To support a big ecosystem you need to have a big customer base. If you just only have a few thousand customers, it's hard to sustain an ecosystem across those few thousand customers because any ecosystem would need to basically have really large $ass like you wouldn't be like have a app business to go do that. So inherently one of Atlassian's models is that we were always trying to go, we call it serving the Global 500, not the Fortune 500. It was the Fortune 500,000 always part of that. So we always had this long tail huge customer base that we focused on first. And it was that customer base that allowed the ecosystem to be layered on. So that's first is like, are you serving thousands and thousands of customers or is it a very small subset? Because if you only have a few hundred customers or even a few thousand, very hard to get that broader ecosystem going and make it make business sense for those partners that you're trying to bring in. As far as when to bring in. I think you got to be clear on what role you want. We say ecosystem broadly here. So like Wesley, that we have different pieces of our ecosystem. But you have to be very clear of what role you feel you must as a company provide for your customers because it's critical to your strategy and your long term differentiation and which role you are happy to let others your ecosystem provide. And that's one where I think a lot of people get confused where it's like, okay, well we don't want to build a sales channel, so I'm happy to build a ecosystem to be my sales channel. Great, so are you happy to basically say in that the interaction, the relationship, the one to one conversations that happen between your customers and your products has been outsourced to a third party. You can do it, absolutely. But like that's one of those where it's like that's the different roles and I think that's the biggest thing that you should be clear on, not the when to do it. It's what are the capabilities that we want to be the best at and what are the things that we're more than happy to have other people be the best at? Once you're clear on that, what are we really, really good at and what are the things we're happy to have other people that are really good at? Things like services, professional services that we bring in. So I don't think there's any right answer to that question, but that's the way I would frame it for any new startups and so on is great. What are the things that regardless, we can't hand off to anyone else. We must continue to own this as a company because our long term success depends on it.

Leverage community led growth to skyrocket your business. Hey, Traction fam, It's your host, Lloyd Lobo. I've just released a book that I've been working on for some time. It's called from grassroots to greatness, Master 13 Game changing rules from some of the world's most iconic brands like Apple, Atlassian, Crossfit, Harley Davidson, HubSpot, Red Bull and a lot more. So you can attract super fans of your own that will propel you to new heights. Your support would mean the world to me. Please grab your copy at from grassroots to greatness.com as a function of building.

This big ecosystem and a product led company with hundreds of thousands of customers and millions of users, you also have a massive community. But building and harnessing a community is very difficult. It's a long term play. It's probably the hardest things. But some of the most iconic brands like Harley Davidson to Atlassian have massive communities. Like Harley Davidson in the 80s almost went bankrupt and then rebuilt the ethos of the company around community. And now there are Harley Rider clubs and you can recognize a Harley fanboy just by the gear they wear. I'd like to say Atlassian is an iconic brand in that realm. With this massive community, how did Atlassian build and scale the community and see it in the beginning? Because when people are using your products you have an audience, not really a community. When that community starts coming together to solve problems, to create impact, you go from like audience to community, to then movement. And eventually if the community has an unwavering faith in its purpose, then you become like a CrossFit or a Harley Davidson. Maybe at last thing's not quite there yet, but definitely a movement.

Oh, I'm going to take it. You're giving the Atlassian brand lot of props in this conversation. You're the one who put us up next to Harley Davidson. I'll take it. So first off, the Atlassian community is I think truly one of the most magical, and I use the word magical things of our business. And I'd love to say I meet with many community leaders around the world. Attending community events is like one of the best things you can possibly do. And it's really funny. The other part of Atlassian is Alassian didn't have really direct sales for many, many years. So we really didn't like all of our interfaces with customers like kind of through our website and online and digital. And it's really hilarious as we did direct sales things, we'd come in and like we jump on a call with a customer and they actually like our community. They're wearing an Atlassian T shirt. They could be like the angriest customer in the world and they're wearing an Atlassian T shirt. I'm like, oh, this is like we're all in the same family here. So that's the biggest thing I would love to say was like once again this was something we strategically built from the ground up to go off and build this massive network of community leaders. It's not what happened effectively what happened is our customers themselves through their own networking, whether attending an Atlassian event or they're talking to Atlassian one way or another or they simply have jumped from in their own little communities of working across in different departments in IT or in software development, started to naturally network with one another where they started to self form. They'd create their own like little LinkedIn network groups or you know, you start seeing these self formation in communities. And of course these people were also the most passionate Atlassian customers. So we knew of them, they would reach out to us, they'd have conversations with their product managers and so on. And we realized that actually as they were self forming there was an opportunity for us to just make it easier for them if nothing else. Like we had a community in Austin where it was like this individual would come at, at the end of work, host 10 other people who were like JIRA admins at their office. So they'd stay. It was a Tuesday after Work was done, they'd invite other people to come and talk about their tools and their use of Atlassian products. At a minimum, what we can do is pay for their pizza and their beer, send them some swag and their T shirts and help them actually just kind of do the scheduling of all that. So that's where we started layering on just at a minimum, make it easier for them to self form if they're going to do this work. Since then we scaled up that program significantly. We have awards for them. We have a whole separate community event as part of our big team event. We highlight our community leaders as champions in everything we do from our marketing to our site. We try to make these individuals heroes within their organizations and their companies and that helps reinforce it. The scale that this gets us is our community hosted over 5,000 events in the last 12 months. 5,000 events that took us 20 years to get to that type of scale. It's that natural continuous care and feeding. What are the type of things that these people need? How do we get more people to show up to these type of things? How do we make it easier? How do we support it with brand? How do we support it with swag? You name those things that constant care and feeding allows it to continue to grow over time. I wouldn't say it was any. Just like one big lever we pulled. It was literally something we continued. Constant iteration and improvement over a long period of time gets us a massive result like this.

Definitely 5,000 events. If you had one or two tips to just motivate that self organization, what would that be? Because that is incredibly hard. Getting five people to self organize is hard when they're not on your payroll.

Easy enough. Dedicate someone in your organization. It does require someone who wakes up every day and thinks about this problem or this opportunity they need to have budget. Believe me, I think my community leader would always ask for more. There'll never be enough budget, enough people. But you do need to have real investment as this is a dedicated part of our go to market strategy or our company strategy. Once again, this is something that we want to do it great. Make sure you invest in it. Also realize that that investment from an ROI perspective is in nearly impossible to measure. Now we can basically measure the value of our community online as community members solve each other's problems and questions. There's like support, deflection, value, an ROI you can measure, but it's very hard to say this person is a champion for Atlassian and is going to invite 20 other people to talk about best practices of Atlassian do I put $10,000 investment into that? It's very hard to have that direct causation return as a go to market investment. So it's one of those where in your mind, much like even like brand spend and so on, you have to say it's like, no, this is part of our comprehensive go to market strategy and thus we are going to dedicate x percent of our overall go to market investment towards making this happen with honestly just belief that this is going to be a long term differentiator for us. And that's a hard thing for companies, especially when budgets are tight. It's a lot easier to go, you know, instead of putting half a million bucks in the community, I can actually hire two more sales reps and do another marketing campaign that's easier for me to directly link that to sales and pipeline. So that's one I was like, you have to have that conscious decision whether you want to do that. The next is make those people heroes. It's the best you can do. And I think a lot of that one is actually just CEO connections. The fact that our community leaders know Mike and Scott by name, can reach out to them via email, feel like they have a voice in the Atlassian world and then we turn that around and make them look like heroes in their organizations and their communities and this is like badging on LinkedIn and all those type of things is if we can help them become heroes, that gets them even more excited to spend more time in our ecosystem. So that would be my two very pragmatic things that you would need to do if you're thinking about doing a community.

The belief is a huge one, especially in these times.

Right?

Like you said, 500,000 I could hire two AES. And I know the ROI community ROI is hard to quantify, especially with the attribution of offline events and these self organized events and webinars and all these things happening. I don't even know if multi touch attribution solves this.

You can't. So that's it. Our online community is big enough I can justify just because all these community members also go to our online community, share best practices and tips and tricks and there's a ton of SEO benefits of that. And I can effectively with some pretty simple math go okay, our online version of our community deflects X amount of support cases and I can justify the ROI that way, but I don't think that's the core value prop of the community helping other people in the world be successful with our products so that they use more of our products. That is the real value. But I would never hold my community leader to a strict causation ROI statement.

Because then that makes it contrived and then they get turned off that you're turning them into salespeople when they're actually trying to bring people together to use the product.

I think you would kill the community because if I held them to that, they'd be like, great, how do I turn these community events into lead gen? And if you're like, oh. And if all of a sudden you're a community leader and all of a sudden it's like, wait a minute, I'm pipeline now, like I'm running into a sale, that's not why I'm doing this. If you think about it too much and that I must have direct revenue out of this community, you're going to kill your community before it starts. But you should still have metrics. So one we have is champions. We actually know like what is a champion? Something we've defined in our world. We grow a number of champions and we believe in our hearts the more champions that are out there in the world, the more, the more our business is going to do well. And if we can grow our champions faster than we're growing our overall business, then we'll have long term growth because that's more and more people out there being champions for Atlassian products.

Raving fans. What is the definition of champion for Atlassian?

So we have four different types and I could actually bring it all up but in general we do it as a connection of how people show up on our online community, how much they post, comment and create content, how much they show up to these Atlassian community events as they post public comment. We also can understand if they are sharing la. We understand who are the power users inside of our products, the people that are doing the hardcore administration, setting up projects, setting up like capabilities. And then there's people who do training badges and certifications. So we look across all those different things and we use basically have an algorithm around all that says if we have minimum thresholds in each one of those, you are now a champion. And then we basically run programs to try and get them to do all those things. So it's not about hey, sell more. It's like, hey, have you done your certification? Have you put your badge on LinkedIn, right? Or hey, actually we saw you're a power user and JIRA software sent all these projects and capabilities. Have you checked out this new thing called JIRA Proc Discovery for better road mapping, those type of capabilities. So that's how we use the Champion program. Something that I'm really excited about, because once you have a system for measuring it, then you can have tactics to improve it. That was something we didn't actually have for a long time. It really was up until very recently. We're like, actually, you know what, let's put some structure around this thing from a measurement perspective. Then great. Allows us to be very targeted in the programs that we invest in to grow it.

So they not only show up and invest with their time, but they're also inviting their friends, they're bringing their friends, they're organizing events, they're showcasing the brand. You've effectively given them a home. And when people, community members, associate with the home, it increases that sense of belonging. What is the greater purpose of Atlassian as the community aligns with? Right, because it's very easy to say, you know, we have a purpose that they align with, but if there is no alignment to that greater purpose, it all falls apart.

This is beyond the purpose of the community. It comes down to the purpose of Atlassian and why we're here. And like, we're a teamwork company. Our goal is to unleash the potential of all teams. Now many people know us for, like we have with Jira as kind of one of our flagship products is we really help software teams, software and technical teams collaborate well together. But we've expanded well of software into it, into hr, into legal. Our goal, our general view of the world, is that teamwork is hard, that all big accomplishments in the world and especially in business, require teams. It's not the individuals, it's the teams working together. And that the set of tools that we've all come to use, the Office Suite, the Google Suite, and things like Zoom and Slack, are still not comprehensive enough to truly empower teamwork. They're great and they're required and we use. But teamwork is so much more complex than what we use via email and calendar and video conferencing. That's where we try and come in, is really help teams evolve, become more productive, not just with technology, but also come in there with practices. How do you show up as a team? I have simple questions. How does your team make a decision? Like in business, how do you make a decision? You're like, well, we have a meeting, we sit around, or we're on Zoom and the highest paid person in the room makes a decision. I'm like, is that the best process for making a decision, or do you think there actually could be a better way to make sure you get a better outcome on those decisions? And that's where we have things like our playbooks and our practices that we communicate or like, hey, you mess something up, how do you do a retro? How do we learn from our mistakes? Oh, we all get in a room, have a conversation. Well, wouldn't it be nice to have like a process or to practice around that? By the way, our products reinforce all of that, all those practices. But it's one of those where it's actually teamwork, when you take an objective view of it, is exceedingly complex. That's what we're trying to solve, and that's where our community comes in. To join each other is like their goal. Where I think they get excited is they can go back from our community events, from Atlassian, go to their teams, go to other teams in their organizations and ask those simple questions of, hey, are we doing this in the best way possible? Hey, let's try these new little things. And they look like they're magicians. Like, oh, wow, we never even thought about that. We could have the meeting be 10 minutes instead of an hour and get the same type of outcome. It's those type of successes that I think really drives our community champions out there. Our next big waves get to over to a half million customers. I think we'll absolutely get there. And we'll do that by continuing to invest and grow our champions via our community. So we're increasing our overall investments in the community. We're trying to add thousands and thousands of more events throughout the year and also make our community leaders really see that we driven that investment overall and help them make more successful.

I like that focus on community, more events, more champions. That warms my heart because I truly believe brands of yesterday were built on what they told the world about themselves. And brands of the future will be built on what the community says about them. Always, yesterday's innovation is today's commodity. But if you have this massive community that's giving you feedback, that's championing you, you'll never become a commodity. And that's seen in the evolution of brands like Atlassian. Now, as you look back, what was the most challenging aspect of your journey and how did you navigate it?

I'd say compound growth is a real thing. We went from 500 employees. I started my first team here. I think there was 15 or 20 people in the organization of the 500 at the company. And now I think we have 11 or 12,000 total employees, over 3,000 and go to market, including our support teams. It's one of those where that growth comes so quickly. You went from 500 total company to hiring 500 a quarter fully remotely. That type of scale requires massive transformation in how you show up as a leader. From the language you use to the body language you use, to how you communicate to the blog posts you have versus the town hall conversations on video conferences, to how much you need to get the support of the other leaders in your organization and how much you need to repeat your communications before it actually gets heard by the rest of your organization. And that's a massive learning stylistically. Like yeah, in like you're a rapid startup, you kind of know everyone, you kind of go around when you're smaller. There's this, I call it, there's inherent trust in the system because you're small enough where everyone sort of knows that they're like maybe one step or two step away from you at every connection in that network that is your business. When you get to 12,000 people, that network gets way more distributed and it's much harder to get that what it says, inherent trust. Not everyone, just when he comes in, they trusted they brand new organization. They're one person out of 11,000. And that's something that I've consciously tried to change stylistically. Much as crisp as possible in our goals, why we're doing the things we're doing, why we're saying no to the things we've done, what are the historic learnings that we've had that got us to where we're at in this situation. And also be very open, try and listen as much as possible to these teams which are very, very big. That's what I've done. I'd say I am far from perfect on it. You know, it's one of those like I hired an executive coach to help me with those things. It's one of those where like it is a real transition and you can't just assume you'll learn it by yourself. It actually requires real hard work and thinking that as you scale an organization how you're going to change as a leader.

A lot of people don't make that self reflection though. They don't recognize that. And the way to fix things or get better is to recognize that hey, you are not there yet and you hire an executive coach. What are some key learnings from that experience of hiring an executive coach? Because a lot of people don't make that decision, right? And now you have somebody Else telling you, go left, go right. What does that look like?

It was something I always had been skeptical of. I mean, you said you can hire an executive coach, but it really comes down to is, are you going out and asking and soliciting feedback for how you need to change as a leader, and are you actually making incremental changes? You know, I'll tell you, like, biggest areas is one of those where it's like you realize you kind of screw things up. It's one of those, like the first step is realizing you have a problem. Where it's one of those where, like, first time as a coach, it's like, great. You know, the concept of unforced errors. And I'm like, oh, yeah, absolutely. Everyone messes up. And you realize you're like, I don't want to mess up anymore. How do I learn from those unforced errors? And there's simple tactics and trips to realize that, oh, actually, if I'm conscious about this area, that is a weakness for me, that I can minimize my unforced errors. I won't be perfect, but at least I'm actually having a retro thinking about it and putting in tactics to improve. So that was a big part for me. The next step is okay, once you have stopped having unforced errors, how are we planning going forward? What is my step? Knowing that we're going to have a thousand more people join the company in the next six months. How am I thinking about showing up to those people? And I have to show up way different to those people than I did the people that joined the company five years ago. Like, it's a much different dynamic. So that, that's largely the evolution I've had. I've been having very lucky to have a very good executive coach as well.

What are the key traits of finding an executive coach? Top two or three that you look for.

One part on this one that's actually really helped is actually my boss, one CEO of Atlassian, went through his extensive network and got a great recommendation simply because he knew my personality and so on. So I would love to say, yeah, here's exactly what you go do. I would say is interview plenty of them, talk to other people that they've coached, and also try and recognize that stylistically it's one of those where, for me personally, where I historically had an aversion to, is the Socratic method when it came to these things, where it was like they coached through just constant questioning. So how do you think you should have showed up differently in that meeting? Cameron you're like, well if I knew how, I wouldn't messed up, right? So stylistically I really liked having a coach of like, well, you know, if I was in that situation, here's how I would do it. They give you like an example and you have a conversation around the example versus trying to self reflect upon. That was a personal thing for me. Different people have different styles and I think it really comes down to understanding that stylistic match is a big piece for me.

One piece of unconventional advice as you talk to founders.

To grow a number of customers, I need to grow the number of salespeople I have to grow the number of salespeople I haven't need to grow number of leads, I have to grow the number of leads I have. I need to spend more money on marketing and it becomes this reinforcing system, right? And that's largely how just about every enterprise software company of success, you name them out there, was built. So it's one of those where it's like, that's just the way you do it. And I think the reality is you can challenge that. That is not just the way to do it. With product led growth, with cloud products, with all these incredible marketplaces and ecosystems, with the ability to stand up and run sophisticated software applications in a matter of minutes through a simple Google search, you can invest in salespeople like I have salespeople. Salespeople are exceedingly important in the enterprise motion, but they're one way to deliver value to customers. There is more than one way. And you should always constantly challenge yourself as the strategic leader of the business where anyone's coming and say, well, this is the right way to do it, this is the best practice. That's probably my best piece of advice here is there's no such thing as best practice. There's just least worst way of doing stuff. Anyone says this is the best practice, trust me, you should always have a healthy questioning of that statement.

Find the least worst way of doing things that's best for your business. I love it. Where can we follow you, Cameron? Are you active on socials?

LinkedIn is where I have decided to build my community. So I'm actively posting to LinkedIn on a regular basis. You see my last name, Cameron Dietsch. Or if you type in Cameron Atlassian, I think you'll find me on LinkedIn. That's the best. If you want to see, I'm posting a couple times a week and doing my best to try and actually reply to people who comment on my LinkedIn profile.

We're getting great engagement on your LinkedIn post, so I'm going to add you right now. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing all this wonderful wisdom. I'm going to follow you on LinkedIn, comment on your posts, and wishing you great success in your role and your journey ahead. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. I need some Traction.

Leverage community led.

Growth to skyrocket your business. Hey Traction fam, It's your host, Lloyd Lobo. I've just released a book that I've been working on for some time. It's called from grassroots to greatness Master 13 Game changing rules from some of the world's most iconic brands like Apple, Atlassian CrossFit, Harley Davidson, HubSpot, Red Bull and a lot more. So you can attract super fans of your own that will propel you to new heights. Your support would mean the world to me. Please grab your copy at from grassroots to greatness.com thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Truth Traction podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find more information and all the resources mentioned in today's episode at. Boast AI that's B O a S.

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