In this episode of McKinsey on Building Products, McKinsey partner Rikki Singh sits down with Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir, chief marketing officer at Atlassian. With her varied background, Ozdemir helps her marketing team apply innovative, data-driven insights to their product-led-growth (PLG) approach. During their conversation, Singh and Ozdemir discuss the role marketing plays in Atlassian’s PLG efforts; how product, marketing, and sales teams can collaborate to achieve big goals; and how data can help the company constantly improve its offerings. An edited version of their conversation follows.
The role of marketing in product-led growth
Rikki Singh: Zeynep, share a little bit about your background.
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir: In my early days, I had nothing to do with marketing or product-led growth. I am an engineer by training, and I went on to complete a PhD in speech synthesis, which centered on using machine learning to model emotions and human speech. The PhD had an impact on the way I approach my career now. When we were doing machine learning 20 years ago, specifically on speech, we were trying to do something nobody had done before. So I became comfortable with pushing the envelope, which is very important for marketers and people working in product-led growth. This experience also instilled experimental thinking in me—I became OK with 99 percent of my experiments failing and could keep going.
I learned everything about marketing at Google. I started with consumer marketing and then transitioned into B2B after a number of consumer marketing roles. My past decade has been spent at three companies: Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, and now Atlassian. I have seen the depths of both sales-led growth [SLG] and product-led growth, and that’s why I’m always intentional about using the right go-to-market motion with the right product in the right context.
Rikki Singh: How has your experience shaped your definition of product-led growth?
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir: First, product-led growth is not a binary option between sales-led growth and product-led growth. Product-led growth implies that you want your product to be easy to use and easy to get value from. In a sales-led motion, you want your customers to find your product quickly and have a joyful experience with it.
Take Atlassian, for example: It was one of the pioneers of product-led growth when 20 years ago, they took one product and made it available on the global market. They let customers find, try, and buy our product online. That was an end-to-end product-led growth approach. In a lot of instances, buying decisions involve multiple stakeholders or happen top-down. In those instances, product-led growth is still a thing in my view, but it’s more of a strong lead generator as opposed to an end-to-end buying experience.
Rikki Singh: So to you, PLG is not a dichotomy; it’s a spectrum. And based on who you’re targeting, you could flex between product-led and sales-led, and either approach enables the other. If we use that framing, what is the role of a marketer?
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir: The role of the marketer in a product-led-growth organization is threefold. First, marketing drives the top of the funnel and has a direct impact on the outcomes of a PLG motion. They engage their prospects—the people who intend to explore your product.
Second, once they’ve engaged those people, they can start a partnership with the product team to make sure customers are set up for success in their journey with the product. That’s where experimental thinking happens. There’s a product experience component to this journey, but there is also a nurture component to it. Are you providing the right information at the right time?
Finally, how do you grow your customers? How do you offer them the right next steps or next products within your ecosystem and portfolio? This step entails continuing to foster a joyful experience for your customers while being constructive and helpful in terms of how else you can help them. That’s the expansion piece.
In both a sales-led motion and a marketing-led motion, you’re trying to help a customer who is on their own journey. You’re not necessarily creating a journey for them, but you’re trying to intercept that journey in both motions. In a marketing-led-growth motion, you’re intercepting this journey in a digital way by providing them with more information on how your product can help them without having a salesperson intervene. In a sales-led motion, you’re providing information, but your goal is to get them to meet someone by getting their contact details as soon as possible.
Experimentation and expansion in PLG approaches
Rikki Singh: You talked about engaging, nurturing, and expanding. Across those three phases, what do marketing teams need to be successful?
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir: Know your customer persona well, and make sure you are providing them with the fastest path to value. Also, for marketing teams to succeed, they have to have alignment with product teams on the measurements, analytics, and data they’re sharing and the metrics they’re striving toward; be clear on what outcomes you are trying to achieve. Having a shared foundation for data for everyone who’s a stakeholder is important as well.
Finally, be agile so your experimentation and strategies can yield results quickly, especially when using a PLG approach. It takes longer to know if something is successful in a sales-led funnel. A lot of the marketers who are familiar with sales-led approaches struggle to adapt to PLG because PLG allows them to gain perspectives within days or weeks as opposed to over a couple of quarters, and they should be able to react to them.
Rikki Singh: You mentioned aligning on metrics. How do teams pick the right metrics?
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir: At Atlassian, we’ve experimented with several metrics. We decided sign-ups are a good leading indicator, but it’s not the metric we are aligning on as both a product and marketing organization. Instead, we picked something called day-one-to-six active instances: We look at users who sign up and do something meaningful with our product in the first six days. After that, marketing gets confirmation that they have brought in a new person.
We also have several metrics that are product-specific. And down the line, we have a metric we call functionally onboarded, which assesses what we expect a customer to do if they continue using the product. Then we track full purchases. Marketing has OKRs [objectives and key results] that we have to meet, and we check them on a monthly basis alongside the product teams. If we’re failing in our targets, we’re both failing, and we have to fix them together.
Rikki Singh: How do you think about being agile in terms of experimentation for both PLG and SLG contexts?
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir: The PLG side is very agile. We’re able to see the potential lifetime value of a prospect early on and then optimize our search engine bidding based on that. Often, we’re investing in and developing planning cycles that can help us look at our ROIs and quickly shift resources and dollars around, which happens on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on how we’re doing.
On the experimentation side, one of the recent experiments we’re excited about is called anchor journeys. Today, a lot of product-led growth is driven by capturing intent through search. For example, if someone searches for agile project management, we can give them some guidance on how they should think about that. Ultimately, you land them into a product experience that is not necessarily personalized, but with that interaction and similar experiments, we can develop anchor journeys that map the search intent from the landing-page experience they receive to when they land in the product. We can personalize what they see first or the first email they get from us as part of their onboarding journey. This has been a successful experiment we’ve conducted in the last year. We’ve seen double the number of successful trials that we’re receiving. In the future, we could scale this with AI by using thousands of keywords instead of a few.
How sales, product, and marketing teams collaborate for maximum impact
Rikki Singh: When you think about discovering, engaging, and expanding, which PLG use case does marketing add the most value or impact to?
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir: There are a few. Creating awareness and landing new customers is one area where marketing has outsize impact, especially when we combine search with social media or other destinations they spend time in.
Also, if you want to create a new brand or change perceptions by introducing a new feature to your brand, the brand marketing element is important, which is true for PLG and sales-led growth. For example, Jira is a well-known product among technical audiences, such as engineers, IT professionals, and developers. Organically, we’re seeing more nontechnical audiences express an interest in Jira. When we saw that, we decided to double down on it. But at that point, you need to rearticulate your brand to reach a much bigger audience so your top of the funnel is filling with these new personas. That’s where brand marketing can make a big impact.
Rikki Singh: What are some frameworks or tactics that marketers use to expand demand generation across multiple personas?
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir: It starts with the product. Is it ready for those new personas? We made a commitment to make Jira look useful for an entire organization because we believe all teams should be able to collaborate on a single platform. Once we understood that goal, we had to build the product for many different personas. The product team has to be innovative to make sure we can meet this conviction, and the marketing team has to make sure it knows when the new expanded audience is exploring different options.
The trial is important because during anchor journeys, a nonengineering customer should not be landing in an engineering collaboration framework in Jira. From a marketing perspective, we’re running a new campaign that shows how Jira can make organization-wide big ideas turn into reality.
Rikki Singh: What are some PLG tactics that help you move toward enterprise sales? What are some you’ve had to adapt?
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir: At Atlassian, a lot of our enterprise SLG motion is focused more on growing our existing customer base rather than landing new customers. We expand when our existing customers want to trial new products that they find on their own or through a sales rep. We try to ensure that trials of a product feature can be a source of reliable, qualified leads. Some companies call this a product-qualified lead as opposed to a marketing-qualified lead.
Something that does not happen through a product-led growth motion is top-down conversation. Sales-led growth is about bringing together multiple stakeholders and having conversations around a vision. That’s the step you need to take to make bigger leaps as a company.
Rikki Singh: These functions work in parallel, correct? Even though the sales team is involved in the top-down conversations, marketing and product help sales understand usage.
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir: Absolutely. Understanding product usage patterns is important. Do we know enough about what customers are testing for? How does that inform the next sales conversation? The next pop-up on a customer’s screen should interpret how the customer uses the product to recommend what they should do next. This next-best play is top of mind for marketers, and it has legs in both PLG and sales-led growth. In PLG, you want your customers to expand to other products in constructive ways. Your understanding of how they use the product can help you automate some of that guidance to offer new products at the right time, and that can help sales have the right conversation.
Using innovation in PLG to your advantage
Rikki Singh: What advice would you give organizations that are starting this journey?
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir: If you want to consider a product-led-growth motion, determine whether your product, buyers, and users lend themselves to that motion. For example, cybersecurity is hard to approach with product-led growth. You could go a certain distance, but then you would have to have multiple sales conversations. Does it lend itself better to that end-to-end motion? If not, what can you provide in a self-service experience that gets you as close as possible to that sales-led conversation?
If you decide to go for the PLG approach, get full commitment from the product team so it is dedicated to building that experience. Having a good product experience is different from having a good onboarding experience, and it needs its own dedicated attention from the product team. Think of it as an end-to-end experience, from landing to onboarding, and determine what actions you want the users to take at each step; start crafting your measurements based on those. Make sure your metrics are aligned to what success means for those users and then give yourself some small targets. When you achieve them, try to incrementally surprise yourself with your successes. That’s the best way to grow.
Rikki Singh: Looking ahead, where do you foresee PLG trends heading?
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir: Marketing organizations and tech organizations are going to start using AI in so many ways. We’ll be creating and optimizing content quickly. AI will set a bar for marketers so we don’t have to start from scratch every time we build a campaign or long-form content. We’ll be able to start from somewhere reasonable and add our creativity to it to make it better. The personalization piece I mentioned earlier is still quite a manual task. I would expect AI to improve that personalization journey.
Rikki Singh: What other gen AI experiments are you running right now?
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir: We are experimenting with email and in-product messaging, trying to understand how we can use some signals to write more engaging emails to our customers and how we can measure the engagements.
Our marketing team is using gen AI to research and experiment with content. We have a product called Rovo that we’ve been testing for the last year that is our Atlassian knowledge base. We can ask it complex questions about our customers or products, and it can answer questions faster than if we had to ask three different people to answer three different questions. We also use Rovo for a lot of on-the-fly content generation because it has access to a lot of our tools. If we want to create a press release, for example, it knows what a good press release looks like, so it can whip up content based on that product documentation.
Rikki Singh: What is one thought you would leave our audience with?
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir: There is no one-size-fits-all PLG approach—it’s more like a patchwork designed for each company, depending on how big your company is, how many products it has, and the right motion for each product. So be open to multiple creative ways of going to market.
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