 Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon. Good evening for all the folks who are watching from different parts of the world It's great to be here back looking at the energy of folks, especially in the product community. I Still remember a few years ago When Carlos had reached out to me asking, you know, if I'd be interested in teaching the first cohort of product managers in Seattle and You know, I took that exciting opportunity and it's it's great to see how much You know the products school and community has grown over the years. So really fascinating to see So I'll start off with my journey and you know how how I got into product and You know and I'll also share some of my experiences from from Atlassian As well as, you know, some of the tips for today's product leaders On how they can leverage some of these things to really grow their career All right a quick introduction about myself I'm a VP of product here at Atlassian where I lead our product led growth org Monetization and customer acquisition teams. I have been in the tech industry for over 15 years now and that includes launching consumer products from zero to one at PayPal to leading growth at Microsoft Azure as well as building marketplace products at Zillow today I'm going to talk about something that I'm really passionate about Which is product led growth. I Witness first hand the the power of product led growth when I was leading a launch of Azure's free tier which is a freemium model and You know, we essentially took a core PLG concept and Transformed that into a powerful growth engine At Azure and it became and that really helped it become The fastest growing business in the in the history of Microsoft today The the three things that I I would love for you all to take away from this talk is really understand what product led growth is I'll share some of my my own experiences at Atlassian on how we do it And Atlassian is also one of the pioneers of product led growth along with companies like Slack And lastly, you know some tips and a toolkit that that you could use to scale your products as well as your company So here's the agenda for today You might be wondering what does a car has to do with the product led growth? I always like to start with analogies to explain, you know concepts that are not very straightforward when you When you go shopping for a car, you know, the first thing you do is you test drive it You want to see how it feels how it drives, you know, what's the experience like and then you make a purchase decision? You know product led growth is is is very similar It's sure rather than tell concept where companies try to show their customers the value They will get before they actually make the purchase decisions and in that way a customer can decide whether that's the right product or not Now let's dig a little bit deeper into, you know, what is the definition of product led growth? It's an end-user focused growth model that relies on product itself as a primary driver of customer acquisition activation and retention and You know some of the things that I've highlighted here are really key to product led growth one of them is it's an end-user focused, you know, traditionally You know the the decisions the buying decisions would come from top down, you know Maybe it would be the CTO of a company who would make a decision about buying a software But that model has changed, you know your end users are now empowered to make some of those decisions And that's why it's really important to solve their needs and create products that that give them value The second part of the definition is the growth model, you know That's where the the go-to-market motion comes into play, which is very different from, you know How your traditional sales led customer acquisition models were this is more about Product and you know product itself drives growth and acquisition activation retention and what that means is product is Driving all the way from discovery to activation To retention the features are the ones that really help users make these decisions Now let's look at the evolution of, you know sales led to product led growth, you know In previous days it used to be Sales led customer acquisitions, you know, your sales teams will go pitch You know your your products they they give a quote And then you know you're they close the pipeline and that's when the the revenue is is booked And you know companies like Oracle and SAP they started with that then it Transformed to more of a hybrid approach where you know sales and product They partnered more closely on a hybrid approach and it was more of a product assisted approach driven by customer expectations and Now you know it has Changed to a product led world where product itself is the growth engine and features are essentially The primary drivers of this growth and some companies such as Atlassian zoom slack They have pioneered Product led growth in their space and you when you go to their website you can see a lot of common Principles, you know whether it is the freemium self-services way to sign up Or you know how you get to value quickly Now before I go into how Atlassian does product led growth, I'm sure a lot of you May already be familiar with our products and and use it on a on a weekly or a daily basis as well You know, for example the Jira confluence Trello's Obs genie bid bucket These are some of our products for those who are not familiar with with Atlassian You know a quick background, you know Atlassian started in 2002 we are a global company headquartered in in Sydney with 73,000 7300 plus employees We are also a permanent remote company with over 20 products and we serve about 80 percent of the Fortune 500 customers and our products are used in over 190 countries and we also do Revenue north of two billion dollars So that's a quick background about Atlassian Now let me walk you through what a typical customer journey is for our customers from a Product led growth lens and I may be using PLG here and there so it's essentially just a acronym So if you look at our the journey it all starts with a with a potential customer going to Atlassian comm and browsing our products to to learn more about it now that once they Identify different types of product they want to deepen their knowledge to see whether this product solves their problem And that's where the research comes into play through our videos webinar once they Understand the you know how the products work and if it can solve the problem then they try using our products for free There are no credit cards to sign up so you can Everything is self-serve. You don't have to talk to any any Customer service rep Once you start trying our product The customers fall in love and this is the I would say the most important thing from a Customer journey standpoint like customers have to get value quickly and once they do they fall in love Then you know it becomes much easier for for them to make these purchase upgrade decisions and once they do that then We have other complimentary products that can solve even more use cases and that's when customers expand into more products Invite their team members be more productive and then you know if they continue to see the value then they Renew their subscription and and retain and stay longer for us to continue to be more productive So that's a typical Atlassian customer journey Now why do companies need PLG? There are a lot of Advantages that companies get by using PLG I Want to talk about three things that that are most important First is lower customer acquisition cost, you know because companies are now spending less on sales and marketing You know they their Cost to acquire customers goes down significantly And you know the product itself is good enough that it infiltrates the market So you don't have to spend a lot of money on sales and marketing The second benefit is better customer experience users find value You know as they start using products the onboarding is very straightforward and and customers Quickly see the value of the product before paying So it's a better customer experience and and third is you know company scales much faster Because you know now they're not constrained by labor intensive sales or marketing Employees you don't have to hire these people to actually scale, you know, so Because of that the companies can scale much faster. So those are some examples Benefits of PLG The next topic I want to talk about is how Atlassian does product led growth and this is where I'm going to be spending most of my time in There are a few PLG principles that are really important for any company to successfully adopt it and and you know the way I've Taken these examples is I've mapped to some some of these examples to these most important PLG principles to explain how we do it here The first one is designing for the end user This is really important You know for any company customers are our livelihood without happy customers a company is doomed So considering that perspective, it's really important to understand the the needs of these customers and you know That philosophy has really helped Atlassian design products for end users I Want to give you a couple of examples of how we do that here on the screenshot you can see is Is our voice of our customer program? This is a program that we you know we created at Atlassian where any any research team our customer success folks can add feedback from customers directly into this this tool and You know and what this tool does it then triages the the feedback to different teams So for example feature requests are triage directly to product teams if there are some churn insights about customers Or any other feedback, you know those are funneled into different monthly Meetings and then we also have you know customer teams wins that are part of the tool itself So product teams have all this available to them To really understand you know the voice of the customer and that really helps them in coming up with features and products to really Provide value to our customers Here is an example of a of a Jira ticket that got triaged through this program to one of our pms so as you can see this was a customer request asking for a dark mode and The way this this typically works is you know as pms automatically get these Feature request triage. They also look at how many customers are asking for it What does it really solve a customer need and that really helps them prioritize these requests in the in their backlog? So this is an example of how? You know feedback directly from our customers is triaged to different product and other teams at Atlassian The second PLG principle I want to talk about is deliver value fast and You know when when cuss when customers start using your products most of them, you know typically sign up with the freemium version It's really important for any successful PLG company to Deliver that value to our the customers within a few seconds or a few clicks Let me ask you a question Some of you may have used our product cello How many clicks do you think it takes a user to get value after they sign up for cello? Any any guesses? Okay, I heard five and nine So let's let's look at it The answer is two And you know what the way this works is when you sign up for for cello The first screenshot that you see is the one where we land our customers in and we have and from there you can you have most popular templates That are used and that's also based on some recommendation models And once you click on one of those templates for example, you know project management you land on the second screen Which has boards and different? swim lanes that you can already use and You can start collaborating with your with your teammates on So within two clicks you can use a board and get value from our product and you don't have to pay for this It's a part of their freemium plan So that's an example of how we we click quickly deliver value another great example is if you have used canva templates if you go to Google search and Type any specific template and then you know you'll Within a couple of clicks you land on their on their website with the template selected and you can start editing it So that's another example of how quickly you know customers can can get value from products The third PLG principle that's really important is transparent pricing You know pricing should be very clear and straightforward to reduce friction and the buying experience You don't want customers to think about whether they're getting the right price or not and So that you know they they build trust and then they can start using your products to get value Now let's look at the example of how Atlassian does this. This is our our pricing page As you can see, you know, we have different plans free standard premium enterprise each plan has a Specific dollar amount associated with it and then you can also change the number of users You know if you and the price automatically Changes based on the number of users you select per user per month pricing. You could also see monthly and you can also see annual pricing and One of the advantages of this compared to you know, the previous version was previously, you know, our sales teams would give quotes to customers and while You know it benefited businesses It really didn't benefit customers because not all customers were getting the same price So in subways, you know your customers are the ones who are getting screwed with with this transparent pricing That has shifted now, you know all customers get the same price And the best price we can offer them The fourth PLG principle That I want to talk about is is freemium model and there are different flavors of freemium. You know, there are some free trials which are limited By number of days and they have you know, there are different goals for that. It's It's more sometimes it's more focused on, you know Growing revenue quickly whereas some of the other freemium models that you see are not time bound Which means, you know customers can use your products for free On an ongoing basis and then if they if there are certain premium features for which they have to pay to upgrade Zoom is a great example like you know the 45 minute calls like you can use those calls on an ongoing basis without having to pay Atlassian also has adopted freemium model Where our customers can use our products without having to pay and unless you know There are certain premium features or if you want to collaborate with more team members And and the goal of this is to really acquire customers quickly by opening up the top of the funnel and really Gain market share quickly and this is really helpful if companies are looking to scale quickly Now let's look at you know the freemium launch that we did and and how it went You know when When we launched our freemium, you know the hype our hypothesis was we can acquire a lot of customers quickly by opening up the funnel To more and more users and reduce friction For our customers because they don't really have to pay and they can start using our products And the the thinking was that you know if we can actually retain these customers if they fall in love with our Products we will have more monthly active users using our products and over time These monthly active users will will see more and more value and convert to purchase this And you know despite taking a short-term hit on on cost because when you are giving free products These instances actually have a cost associated with this. So this was a long-term strategy for us to see You know if if this would work The the chart that you see on the right side is is the graph from the from the launch And on the x-axis you could see number of days and on the y-axis the monthly active users the the black Line that you see that is a pre free freemium launch So these are cohorts of customers who were not part of the the experiment and and and the three lines that you see above The black line are the customers who were included in the freemium experiment. So they actually saw the the freemium trial version and then they signed up for that and the three the three different colors are Just different cohorts based on when they actually started using it and because we also wanted to see if there was any seasonality impact to it and and what we saw was you know the That we saw significant increase in our monthly active users After we launched and that trend Continued it didn't go down and and one of the key reasons why it didn't go down was we It we didn't stop after we just launched it We kept optimizing the experience further Because we knew we would be getting a lot of these lower quality users into the funnel So we kept improving the experience to help them understand the value of our products editions And help them upgrade So that's so that's really important when you launch a free plan is you're gonna get a lot of these Customers at the same time you also have to keep improving the experience for them You know as you think about the These the quality of these these customers when you launch programs like freemium It's there are a few dimensions that are really important and you know, there is another terminology which is You know plq it just like you have marketing qualified leads your product qualified leads And the the difference in in product qualified leads is It's it's just not a lead, but you know These are customers who are more likely to convert and use your products So there are some guardrail metrics that are really important To to keep in mind and I've listed a four of four of the most important metrics when you look at Product qualified leads the first one is any Any customer that signs up for your freemium version you want to track if they are taking core actions So for example, you know for one of our product confluence Some of the core actions we look at is number of doc, you know documents created or edited Comments added etc because that really tells us if they if our customers are interacting with our product and getting value The second dimension is solving for a use case while You know core actions, you know, these are leading indicators You also want to see whether we are actually solving problems for our customers And that's where use cases come to mind come to mind So what kind of metrics can you track to know that our customers are solving their problem? Maybe they created a document collaborated with their teammates and published it, you know That that's a lot more valuable than just adding a comment or they connected their confluence with slack and now they're able to actually, you know Edit or change permissions through slack without having to go to confluence The third dimension is Expansions or invites, you know if a if a customer Or a you know in this case user really Likes using your product. They're more likely to invite their team members to use it And to be more more productive. So we look at metrics like average team size and then lastly retention You know, it's it's great that we have these customers Using some of the core actions solving their problems, but we also want to retain these customers So we look at certain metrics around day 7 day 4 day 28 Monthly active users as well. And you know if you have all of these The likelihood of this user converting into a Long-term customer goes up significantly. So it's really important for for any product-led growth company to Keep in mind and track these these other dimensions of signups as well very closely Now I want to share some of the key takeaways From from my experience here at Atlassian the first one is reducing friction in the In the signup process to try your product and I can't stress the importance of of this enough, but really The most important thing is to create an experience a self serve experience where your customers can Discover your products sign up and use it any customer interaction with sales or chat treat it as a bug Really look at what kind of questions your customers are asking, you know share that with your product managers And and then use that to improve this onboarding experience further And and also track how much time are your customers spending at each step of the of the funnel, you know is it Are your customers taking two days to sign up? Is it like two hours? So really having that deep understanding of your your signup funnel is really important and You know you can look at the entire customer life cycle through that even extending beyond to emails The second key takeaways investing in R&D, you know, you might ask how are we able to keep the flywheel going? one key element, you know From Atlassian model that makes us unique is we spend more on our R&D as a percentage of revenue And and less on sales and marketing than any of Our peers largely in the software enterprise space and the reason is really simple, you know We want to build best products at lower cost and thus progress the flywheel If you if you look at the chart here on the right side, you can see that the bottom graph Atlassian It's about 35 percent Offer revenue going into R&D and whereas, you know companies like zoom slack Have a lower percentage compared to that and and that is what really drives, you know Our acquisition conversion expansion, you know, this a lot of this goes into investing in in products growth teams to to really Build build out the and continue to optimize the funnel further We have growth teams at each stage of the the customer journey, you know all the way from acquisition We have teams that that look at activation We have teams that look at retention you we have teams that look at upgrades purchases So you're up, you know, you're optimizing as well as coming up with these step-changing bets throughout the customer journey to to make sure that you know, we can Grow the product seamlessly So those are some of my key to key takeaways from my experience at Atlassian and I want to Share one more thing here Which which ties well with this slide, you know, you might ask, you know sales and marketing Well, you know, you're not spending that much like is are they not really that important? So I want so the third key takeaway here is that, you know Sales and marketing and in customer success all these teams play a very critical role in Successful product-led mindset Even though the number of teams are smaller But the impact is pretty significant and you know for any successful PLG all these teams have to come together And and let product drive growth and and how do our teams do that? So marketing creates content-led experiences For demand generation, you know, we have webinars we have blogs we have videos all these resources, you know Start with product at the center of it and and how some of the features Benefit our customers the second is sales, you know our sales teams they use product usage signals to generate leads and assistance One example That I want to share is They look at, you know, what kind of Interactions the customers are having with our products. Maybe our customers are using a lot of like manual features and we have You know automated features in a let's say a different edition like a premium edition We have automated roadmaps and if our customers are not using it that data is very useful for our sales teams to then, you know Send communication or or notifications or or emails to customers to show value of some of these automated Features and that can help our customers get more value because it helps them more productive and then the the teams can also use some of that to upsell our customers the third Third team is customer success and you know, if you look at the funnel the first comes the marketing Then we have the sales teams and then you know as customers start using our products then our customer success teams comes into play and they They also use these signals to ensure that customers gaining value over time and using more and more features that benefit them and some of the ways they do this is Through these customer usage patterns, they can identify, you know, if this customer is doing Using features that our power users use And if so, you know, how can we get them more value or if they're not using it? You know, maybe they have a higher likelihood of churn. So how how can we help them become our long-term customers and not churn? So so that that way all these teams have to come together and and communicate effectively and and then drive growth even in experimentation that we do a lot, you know We were talking to all these teams and then we are coming up with ideas on how we can improve the products further So those are some key takeaways from my experience at Atlassian I I hope You know some of these models and examples you can take back to your products and companies and experiment And really scale growth for your products and company Thank you