 Quick correction. I'm not the head of product at Atlassian. I lead product management for our enterprise cloud team So we have way more people above me and way more people leading product for us. I just try to move the business in the same direction so Today I'd like to take some time and share an experience that I had over the past three months on how we tackle They brand new problem But before I get started I can introduce myself a little bit I'm a Bay Area native. I was born and raised in Fremont, California I went down to school at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for about four years, maybe four and a half I was having a little much fun College is great. I recommend going to school on the beach Then I went and made my way back to the Bay Area and since then I've been living in San Francisco for the past ten years I got married 2011 so that's six years ago. I had my first child three years ago And as of a month ago, I had my second daughter So I have a very supportive wife who's taken care of all the night duty Get me sleep tonight who gave me sleep last night because normally I'd probably want to curl up with a blanket and take a nap right now Because newborns love to do that to you, but a little bit of my history when I graduated from school I went to Lockheed Martin to work as a contracts negotiator their solar and astrophysics laboratory I shortly after that I worked in management consulting for a little bit for Accenture and Bering Point But I went back to Lockheed Martin in a different capacity as a project manager on hardware projects And then I went back into consulting but this time for a small boutique firm called originate here in San Francisco and then I went back in-house and I worked at Apple for a little bit and Recently landed at Atlassian and for the past two years. I've been leading product for Bitbucket cloud and sorcery but like I said I Now work on enterprise cloud, which is a brand new line of business that work and when I first joined we had this massive charter of making our larger customer successful in the cloud and Where do we go from this like your boss comes to you and says Rahul We've been mandated to make a lot to make our larger customers successful at lasting cloud products How do we turn this into priorities or a roadmap or even like a North Star? So I'm going to walk you through our journey over the past few months and how we got to our North Star So first we started with two main two main tactics We did tons of customer research and we literally brought the team together In a room for two days because many of us were new to the program or many of us knew their company And we all had great perspectives, but really didn't get a venue to share it So let's start with customer research. We tried two things surveys and customer interviews Now here is the actual email. We sent our customers for surveys And the reason why I highlight this is because I think many times we discount that this is the first time you engage with the customer And it's really important to communicate What you're who you're communicating like what you're trying to achieve Why are you emailing them and thank them for their time because someone taking time out of their day? means they're taking time that they weren't able to do take that coffee break or go for that dog walk or Get that critical critical thing done that they needed to get done because they spent time taking your survey So in this case you can see we talked about our mission We talked about how their thoughts and their opinions will help drive our product roadmap And we provide a little gift a t-shirt for their time Which is great because the survey came back with tons of results now While this slide doesn't do justice to the entire survey results that we got back It does point a few things out now There are seven signals that I need to go chase down now. I could look at this survey and be like cool to a faith I know how to implement that I'll just go put it in together put put it in today I know what two factor is but if I were to think about it it opens up a series of questions that I need to get answered our Six recovery code sufficient. Do you need SMS recovery? What authenticator apps do you use? Do you have an identity provider? Are they satisfying your to a favorite? So the admin need to enforce it So all these questions can't be answered by a survey which led me to customer interviews and I followed that same rubric of the email This time I made it a little more personal. I introduced who I was what my mission was What their input would help me with and what I did this time was a little bit different as I use a service called Calendly I don't know if you've ever tried to schedule a meeting with somebody It's just that here's my availability and then all of a sudden that changes like your boss puts a meeting on your calendar You got to email the customer again. It's like sorry that one time. I said I was free as no longer free Are you free this time eight emails get exchanged by the time we're done it's just like a huge ordeal trying on the phone and What it looks like is the customer thinks that you're trying to schedule a time that works best for you But what you really want them to do is schedule a time that works best for them and Calendly is a great tool to do That because it will connect to your Google Calendar It lets you black out any sort of dates It lets you put pretext in the invite and I put a link to my blue jeans to have a VC call And it's a static URL. So at the end of the call you let the customer know that this this this calendar link It's live forever and it's current on a rolling 30-day period. So something happens. You want to get my attention You can't get someone at the company. You have a support issue that needs to be chased up You forgot to mention something or there's feedback you missed click on this link and you can always book 30 minutes with me It's a great way to continue to maintain that relationship with your customer And it also leaves them with confidence to know that you'll always be there to help them that is unless you leave the company but Still it's it's a great way to build a relationship and lastly I can't stress this enough anymore Someone taking time out of their day to speak with you is much different than the survey like survey may take 10 to 15 minutes But 30 minutes of your undivided attention to answer a series of questions is actually a lot of work So please thank them for their time and make it We felt that an Amazon gift card is pretty universal and versatile. So it's probably something you could try Some best practices on handing handling customer interview Follow a script now. I started off small And I had these very loose conversations of customers around four subjects But then we started emailing a lot more customers and a lot more customer interviews and my marketing partner Kim Started joining on those interviews and then we had to divide and conquer so at that point She's like okay, Rahul we're gonna start interviewing customers like an adult And she put together a script and a structure for so every time that we weren't on the same call We were still having the same conversation with two different customers Which helped us come back at the end of the day and pull out insights from demographics of customers are like oh This customer is this size. These are their problems. This is the industry They work in so for us to build a larger report at the end of it to aggregate all of our feedback Next ask open-ended questions Don't replicate your survey if you could easily go on the phone to the customer and say hey Do you want to a fake? Yes, check the box and move on But frame it and say like does your company have any security policies that they that they look to when evaluating cloud software Which will eventually lead into a whole bigger conversation And in one case a customer sent me a 98 line item checklist for what they look at when they evaluate cloud software Which is fantastic because I was able to take that back to my team And we could we could benchmark our products and engage the customer again to let them know Proactively how we would meet that 98 line item checklist and maintain that relationship and lastly track everything So when I was starting off small, I used Trello I'm not sure if you just travel before but it's a fantastic task management versatile tool and I created a List for all the people I needed email and then I created a list for email So I dragged the card from emailed from need to email to email Then the scheduled and then to interviewed and I kept all my notes in the card So everyone could see the history that works great when you're small But if you need to interview hundreds of customers I recommend something more structured like Confluence and like I said my marketing partner Kim I was like we're gonna interview like adults so she created a template in Confluence Which with one click of a button We opened up a template and had a form that we filled out series of questions that we went through and at the end If you put data in the right cells, it would aggregate a report for you So we were able to look at 50 interviews that we had and immediately pull out bullet points that we needed to address Which is fantastic. So we did all this customer research We did the survey we spoke to 50 customers Next is we brought the team together. We held an off-site The reason why we did this is I was new to the program my boss who just started it our engineering partners had just joined the company And each one of us had in various capacities spoken to customers But we never really had an avenue to bring these thoughts together and guide us to what we thought enterprise cloud should be for Atlassian So the off-site consisted of three things we sent out individual homework a little brainstorming for everyone To take their thoughts and perspectives and put in a common framework Next we had some exercises shall walk through and then just hang out. Have a good time. It's a new team Like we had a team dinner with a team happy hour is awesome So the homework was four parts first part was opportunities now I know this may seem simple and probably not worthy of a slide But the simplicity is what's important here like when you hand this out to someone and you assign the homework for the Brainstorm on their own it's really important to keep it very concise because you're gonna end up having a conversation around it And if you have this long narrative about what the opportunities are you should invest in you'll likely lose the conversation in person So something this simple kept us on track. We had for example, we're like should we invest in regulated industries What does that mean and why and everyone completed this exercise for opportunities? Next up we had an audience the the audience section was like who are we building this for now? Each one of us had a different perspective from our customer interviews But one thing I would point out here is many times product managers We evaluate the job that a customer needs to do and we build a product for that But I think sometimes we we neglect the emotional part of it We don't identify the emotional goals that a person is how to get satisfied when using our products So we added a next or row for every time we thought of a customer and what they would want to do We identified the job they were gonna they get their intended job to do But also what would be that emotional goal at the end of the day because many customers we spoke to who admin our products We're saying, you know, I just want to be I just want to unblock my teams I want anyone to be able to create a confluence page or a juror project at the end of the day I just want to get out of their way and that that is an emotional goal and no clicks can help you get there Next landscape who are you competing against try and keep this concise another table, but I thought this graphic was cooler but Just it's as simple as Who's your competitor? Use three words to describe them and use one word to come one word to note your differentiator because that will tell you what your competitive advantages and Trust me it makes sense after you do the exercises But if you keep that concise, it'll be really easy to have that conversation in person and lastly measure, you know, you know You know where you want to invest, you know who you're building for you know who you're competing against But how do you measure any of this and it's very easy to result it's very easy to note like all the metrics you want to you want to meet but What I think is really important on this exercise Especially with the new team is one of the internal goals to like I definitely want to build a product that everyone uses But I also want to have a team that people want to work on because if I can't retain talent If I can't be that recognized team in the company, then I likely won't maintain my success So what are your emotional goals your internal goals as a team as well? Got all the homework done Everyone came to the mind of customer customer researcher everyone came to the meeting with customer research in mind So now exercises and our last team would call them plays. We did three of them. The first one is an ad lib I know I don't know if many of you remember but you could go to 7-eleven and for a dollar by a mad lib And fill that out with a bunch of funny words and you have a story at the end of it It's very similar to that concept But what this helps you do is narrow down who you're building for What the problem you're solving and how are you different and? If you notice the homework the homework that we discussed had an audience section and in person This turns into a series of posted notes all over here for you to have a discussion on who the end user becomes and how you're How you are different from the competition So at the end of this you'll have a tight message on what you are trying to do Next after you fill that out you've identified who you all agreed on who your persona is Which gives you ability to identify this person right in the middle and a strategizer value prop canvas is fantastic Because now you have customer information customer data anecdotes the person who you're trying to solve problems for and you can clearly identify their pains and their gains Which gives you a set of problems to go investigate and solve and features that you can build and prioritize and Lastly design a box. I know this sounds crazy like many of you are like why would I design a box? Back in the day you would go to go to Micro Center or you go to comp you serve and you pick up a box You look at the front and look at the back and you go to your mom or your dad like can I buy this? That's what I did and now it's all websites which you can serve like a wall of text to anybody and Your message might get lost and the beautiful thing about a box is its constraint So think of all the details you want to put on a box No more than four value props not features but value and this is a great example because it says Create beautiful documents and enjoy the read like that is benefit that I get from Microsoft Word So think of what your four values are because I hope to find your north star What the hero is and what is that one tagline you want to put on your box? And everyone will read and understand exactly what your product is so We've done customer research. We've done homework. We've done these exercises. What does that leave you? You should leave with the customer profile clear idea of pains and gains and a work breakdown structure Which is based on the foundation of your design a box and for us it turned into this so We came in with this idea of making our larger customer success from the cloud And we ultimately realized that we're going to build a solution for them because they want to use cloud products Where they can put their data and trust that their data is secure They want a product that scales with their business and its performant We know that admins have pain about managing their end users So we want to build a tool that gives them industry standard authentication and control and when you're operating in the cloud You need the comfort and the understanding and security that your cloud vendor will be there with support around the clock so we left we came in with this charter of Larger customers successful and ended up with this north star that we can now build a series of backlog behind and Before I take any questions. I just want to note that this is a massive team effort For example, my boss who runs the line of business sent the email for the surveys My design partner looked at the homework we assigned and picked out design plays That would build off of that homework so there wasn't any disconnect work a disconnect My marketing partner added structure to our interviews the program manager My program manager built a two-day agenda that makes sure we left with the north star and our design partners provided technical guardrails Insanity checks and actually the solutions and the pains that we want to solve for but our role as a product managers you need to bring this all together and That's no easy feat But if you align yourself with the proper team you invest really hard and become the voice of the customer people will rally behind you She can end up with a north star