Ok I think it's time to get spicy and talk about competitors 🌶️

How did you get away with pricing Jira Product Discovery (“JPD”) at roughly 1/6th of competitors?

10:02 AM ✓

Ha! Yeah this is where things get interesting.

When we looked at the market, there was some competition in specialized tooling for product managers (”PMs”) - companies angling for the "product management platform" space.

But that's not how I was hearing customers talk about what they needed.

Customers were talking about the SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) and the challenges with the earlier lifecycle stages before you build something - deciding what to build.

→ That's where we play.

Looking at what people actually used for this, there's a small cohort using dedicated tools like ProductBoard (which I think had ~6,000 customers when we started). They're very much going niche and focusing upmarket.

We didn’t want to play the same game.

We're targeting the PMs - and folks who work with PMs - who are living in spreadsheets all day. Slides. Miro and other whiteboards. General purpose collaboration tools.

That was when we knew we should also be disruptive with our pricing.

Our first mental model was ‘anchoring’ to other tool categories.

If we're competing with free tools like spreadsheets, we can't go straight to $50 or $100 per month. To charge that much we'd need to pitch a completely different category, like our competitors, and that market just felt way too small.

The second factor was that 30% of our customers were trying to do this exact work in Jira already. They were adding custom-built JPD-like workflows on top of Jira, so there’s anchoring to Jira’s disruptive price too.

Initially, we were debating between $15 and $10 per user per month - a huge contrast to the competition’s $50+ price point.

What landed us at $10 was the massive appetite we saw across our Jira customers - we found that more than 60% had needs for this type of product, which meant potential for 80,000+ customers.

For such high volume, we decided it was best to start at the lower end with $10, as well as Atlassian’s typical volume discounts as customers buy more seats, to maximise adoption. Then we could add a Premium tier with more specialized features for fast-scaling teams, product execs, AI use cases etc.

10:07 AM ✓

You also have an interesting pricing model that I’ve seen other next-gen collaboration tools like Figma adopt: a Creator/Contributor structure.

I.e. Charge power-users, and let non-core stakeholders view/comment for free.

The Creators distribute the product organically, and many Contributor end up upgrading to become paid users.

What was the thinking behind how this PLG motion could be exploited in Atlassian’s context?

10:17 AM ✓

There are really four aspects that work together to explain our growth: experiments to recommend JPD from Jira to existing customers, the creator/contributor model, the low price, and how incredibly flexible JPD is.

First, we land new JPD customers by introducing JPD to existing Jira customers via in-app contextual prompts. That’s our distribution super-power. E.g. if you’re creating a detailed delivery plan in Jira we might nudge you to try JPD to create a roadmap you can share with your stakeholders.

Most of the revenue growth comes from the second aspect: expanding usage within those customers. The Creator/Contributor model was an absolutely incredible growth tactic to do this. The way we architected it: if you add JPD to Jira, everyone already paying for Jira automatically gets access to JPD for free as a Contributor.

That means that if one team is paying for and using JPD on the customer’s Jira, everyone in that Jira can see their roadmap in JPD at no extra cost - and contribute via commenting, voting, or adding insights. Engineers can see the “why” behind the features they’re working on by just clicking on a link. It’s all in Jira, the tool they already use.

If they want to participate more actively (rating items, editing, new roadmaps etc) they can ask for a seat. After one team starts using the app, because of our super high user satisfaction (CSAT of 85+ since launch!) it spreads like wildfire within the company.

That’s really thanks to the third aspect: the low price. Teams often think "it's just $10. People on my team should just have access too. And so should this other team we work with."

And finally the fourth one: the flexibility. We’ve built JPD with opinions on how to do product management, but the core value of the app is the flexibility to configure it to match how you work, even if you disagree with these opinions. What we’re trying to solve for is not only product management - it’s the age old jobs like prioritization and roadmapping, with a focus on collaboration rituals.

Over time we found that more teams started using JPD beyond product management, e.g. program/project management or operations teams, who also need roadmaps!

Boom. One more team. One more team. One more team.

This is really how we're growing so fast.

10:23 AM ✓

I want to double-click on that ability to “introduce JPD to existing Jira customers” - that’s really the ultimate unfair advantage. I bet many folks reading this who have the opportunity to execute something similar (even if a smaller scale) would love to know:

How does that ‘introduction’ work exactly?

10:25 AM ✓

The “X-flow” (we say “cross-flow”) is how we grow, and that's a unique part of our exam question - building a startup *inside* Atlassian.

We have an entire growth team in Atlassian specialized in recommending products to active users in other products.

It's a delicate balancing act - we create collaboration apps, so when people go into Jira to be productive, they're there to perform specific tasks. Not to be bombarded with ads.

We have amazing high-traffic, high-engagement real estate in the Jira board view, list view, notifications panel etc, but we have to use it in a way that feels helpful, not like we're forcing products onto users.

That's why we have this growth team specialized in finding spots in the interface that don’t interrupt core workflows (ideally the recommendations are so contextual that they actually add value).

It's like having an internal advertising team that figures out the right message → to the right user → at the right time.

We typically start with admins, who are a high-leverage cohort of users who naturally recommend apps inside their company. We tell them about products like JPD firstly to educate them, then to help them recommend it to their team.

For most other users, its more of an ad → self-service funnel. Someone who sees value in the recommendation needs to be able to click-through, try JPD, receive the expected value as fast as possible, and eventually upgrade, all on their own.

That's where we get about 80% of our sign-ups.

10:29 AM ✓

So what percentage of your effort goes into landing customers who are net new to Atlassian, versus existing Jira customers?

10:32 AM ✓

0%. Haha

We do get a stream of organic signups (readers can try JPD free here!) because we have such a strong brand, story, and product, but the ability to run in-product ads in Jira is our 1000x multiplier unfair advantage.

So we decided to focus all our growth energy there, rather than try to land new customers on our own.

We've also decided not to ‘advertise’ beyond product use cases, which might seem counterintuitive but it actually helps with discovery.

We could go directly after other folks who use our product like marketing, customer support etc, but our messaging would get confused.

Instead, what ends up happening is: you make contextual value-add recommendations to PMs inside Jira, you nail their use case, they get so much value from JPD that they bring in those other teams as Contributors, then everyone ends up upgrading to Creator licenses.

We win those teams via the PMs.

What’s interesting is we actually invest heavily into features for close PM-adjacent roles like product leaders, product ops, and program managers - we just don’t try to go out and win new customers or personas directly.

We have a motion (ads → PMs → Contributors → expansion) that’s working incredibly well and compounding fast, so we just focus on making that better, rather than splitting our energy across plays that will never be as effective.

10:37 AM ✓

Speaking of figuring out what works, you’ve just reminded me of something.

I’m not sure if I can actually share this, but I have this secret folder with screenshots of…

TA is typing …