Unpacking 5 of Atlassian’s Most Unconventional Company-Building Moves
Jay Simons was in the center of the action. He joined Atlassian back in 2008, and under his long tenure as president, the company grew from $20 million in AAR to about $2 billion today.
he gets incredibly tactical about each leg of Atlassian’s three-pronged stool: the self-service funnel, a global network of channel partners, and enterprise upselling.
UNCONVENTIONAL MOVE #1: BUILD ON THE BACKBONE OF PRODUCT-LED GROWTH.
‘We want to build a product that compels people to remark upon it,’
始终你都需要有非常优秀的产品。
“Even before I got there, the company’s earliest mission is characterized as building remarkable products. They were really intentional with the word ‘remarkable’ because they thought, ‘We want to build a product that compels people to remark upon it,’” he says. “Atlassian believed that we’d built a product that was easy to use and that people loved, and that was going to add to the megaphone of getting the word out about who we are and what we do.”
“The product and the business model are really married together, and that’s what we got right,” says Simons.
Thinking self-service first.
The team held a strong belief that customers wanted to help themselves, and architected everything around that self-service model. “First you have to build a great product that people can discover on their own, begin to use on their own, onboard effectively on their own. If you can’t do those things, it’s not going to work,” he says.
PLG 的另外一个标志是 self-service，如果一个产品不能够让用户自助使用和订阅，或者因为体验太差让用户难以进行自助，那么这个产品使用 PLG 的前提将不存在，也就不要谈什么 PLG 了。
Pricing that removes friction.
“We wanted to have the product guide the customer through in the same way that a human being would if they’re sitting right alongside the customer. That meant making it easy for them to transact online and buy the product. We needed a price point that didn’t require a lot of explaining or convincing,” says Simons.
Scaling up with a different kind of sales force.
Our product advocates were absolutely focused on the success of the customer and they were there to remove whatever potholes the customer might step into. They’d answer a question on product capability, or competitive alternatives, or pricing, but with a great answer, they would then send the customer back into the self-service path,” he says.
UNCONVENTIONAL MOVE #2: LAUNCH A SECOND PRODUCT INCREDIBLY EARLY AND LEARN WHEN TO LET GO.
“We began to build this muscle around how you think about cross-merchandising, cross-selling, and upselling. How do you think about pricing and packaging around multiple things? How do you do product planning and prioritization and budgeting and staffing?”
The sting of losing to a young upstart: HipChat vs. Slack.
UNCONVENTIONAL MOVE #3: HAND OVER THE REIGNS TO CHANNEL PARTNERS.
UNCONVENTIONAL MOVE #4: DEFER A PLAY FOR ENTERPRISE.
“Even if you’re a Fortune 10 company, you might start with Atlassian with a team of 10 or 20 or 50 or 100. And in that particular case, you could be spending less than $1000 a month, but as you begin to grow, we’ve got the advantage of having natural network effects in our products built in, because they’re collaboration software. You might start with 10 users of Jira on a team, and as your team adds an 11th or 12th person, we naturally benefit from that expansion.”
Rather than prioritize signing big-ticket contracts with thousands of seats, in the earlier days, Atlassian leaned on lower-lift tactics.
你很难说服让一个公司内部的所有人都是用你的产品，但你可以让其中的一部分人先是用起来，让他们成为你的产品的推广者在公司内部进行推广。正如 Notion 的 champaign 一样。
If you use Confluence or you use Jira, we want to point you at the other one, and often that’s as simple as a little pop-up or a little tip when you’ve pasted a Google Doc link into a Jira project I can start with Jira and expand to Confluence. I can start with Confluence and expand to Bitbucket.
让用户先进来，使用起来，并且有良好的用户体验，建立起信任关系。 然后在向用户推荐更多的产品和更高级的功能。
其实是长期主义，如果放眼 10 年去看这个产品应该是怎么样，它的客户应该是怎么，那么如今在做设计的时候就应该去思考这些。
Putting enterprise on the back burner.
With the company’s “land and expand” strategy firmly in place, the company deferred any true enterprise focus We really needed to rebuild that so that it will be the predominant platform for Atlassian for the next 10, 20 years,
Atlassian chose to trade off faster short-term growth and opportunity for the long-term durability of the company, which is a trade that we would make every single day.
所谓人马未动，粮草先行。预先知道产品将会有怎样的未来，将会面对怎样的挑战，在此之前就把基础打好。
Eventually, with the long-term cloud strategy in place, the company turned to a renewed focus in enterprise
面向企业的软件最终都不可避免的会拥抱大客户
Self-service from the smallest customers to the largest.
“We had advocates contact those customers and begin to talk to them about the capabilities that we were looking to add and what the price points were. It was effectively a traditional sales job,” says Simons.
企业定制化的需求必然是需要额外付费的，即便说这种需求在未来也有其他人需要，都可以额外收费。
With the introduction of premium, enterprise products, the company’s original single pricing structure has since evolved to a more traditional tiered system.
The KISS principle in action.
the ‘keep it simple’ strategy benefited a lot of other things we were investing around.
NCONVENTIONAL MOVE #5: PUT A PREMIUM ON FIRST-PRINCIPLES CULTURE.
I always remind people that there’s no business where you get 100% of the customers. You’re going to lose some for various reasons. We were comfortable early on losing customers that wanted different things than what we were going to offer.
But in the long run I think Atlassian was better off when you think about the efficiency and velocity of how the business operates now.