From developer to CMO — Archana Agrawal’s marketing lessons from Airtable & Atlassian

 Treat every time a customer gets in touch with you as a bug. And they say that in the best way possible. When a customer has to get in touch with you, when they're trying out your product or trying to buy it or figuring it out, how to make it work for their team and they get stuck, it's questioning yourself.

And what part of that process has it required someone to speak with you? What is it they're not hear about it and then. It becomes the marketing team's responsibility to be able to design a better journey for them so that these areas of friction can be removed.

 Welcome to in depth, a new show that surfaces tactical advice, bounders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies, and themselves. I'm Brett Berson, a partner at first. And we're a venture capital firm that helps startups, like notion, roadblocks, Uber, and square tackle company building firsts through over 400 interviews on the review.

We've shared standout company building. The kind that comes from those willing to skip the talking points and go deeper into not just what to do, but how to do it with our new podcast. In-depth you can listen into these deeper conversations every single week. Learn more and subscribe today@firstround.com

for today's episode of in-depth. I'm really excited to be joined by Archana Agrawal. Archana is the CMO of Airtable, a low-code platform for building collaborative apps. Archana joined Aiable last year, after seven years at Atlassian, where she eventually became the company's head of enterprise and cloud. She also sits on the board of MongoDB and Zendesk.

We started today's conversation by dissecting some of the messaging challenges facing horizontal products, like both Airtable and Atlassian and her tips for narrowing in on the right persona. She also dives into the close interplay between product and marketing teams, particularly for product led growth company.

Throughout our conversation. We talk a lot about organizational design and how to set up your teams to break down silos and foster experimentation. She explains how she oversees all the different marketing functions that report up to her as CMO and the rituals she's established for keeping the pulse on, uh, what deserves the most.

She also makes the case that your most critical metric as a marketer is product use and why you should treat every customer touchpoint as a bug today's conversation is of course a must listen to for marketers, but folks all over the org chart at product led companies will appreciate the insights, both from Atlassian and air.

As a former engineer turned marketer Archna has an incredibly unique data-driven perspective as a CMO that I found really fascinating to dig into. I hope you enjoy this episode. And now my conversation with Archna. Thanks for joining us. 

 So I thought one place we could start might be if you were to create a course for aspiring marketers and they're interested in having a super successful career and at the pinnacle, they want to be a CMO like you and have a career like yours.

I'm interested. What are the different parts of the classes that you would design or the sessions or topics that you think would be important for folks to learn along the way? 

 Well, that's a good one. Some part, because when I look at the makeup of a modern marketing team today, it's super hard to describe what traditional is.

Even starting from my own background. I've heard it sort of being called as the non-traditional way to get into marketing. When I think about it broadly marketing today, it's equal parts, creative messaging, building data, informed touchpoints, crafting customer centric journey. And so I would think about putting those together and saying, Hey, you got to be great at communication, creative skills.

Being really able to demonstrate in more than just the written word, customer empathy, and obviously a very strong data background as well, always helps. It's sort of a medley of many, many different skills today.

 So, if we were to just take a few of those intern, let's sort of start with what you first shared, which is the idea of creativity or maybe creative messaging.

What are the big ideas that surround that for you? Or what are the most important things you've learned around that area of messaging and maybe how that fits into marketing more broadly? 

 A few different things. I think the way businesses themselves have moved, it is almost remarkably easy to get lost in the noise that we find around us today.

Very hard to understand when you look at so many different companies, their websites, their material. On how they differentiate or you have to dig sometimes pretty deep to understand truly the value props. Sometimes you get hit by way many gates in terms of getting to the messages that you want to do.

So that's at least one part to Creative messaging to me is really thinking about how do you get the core and the sense of what your product is your offering is what your company stands for in a more creative way out to the audience, to be able to stand out, to be able to help them more easily get to the essence of what you're trying to get to.

And frankly, when we look at our own lives today, we consume information in so many different formats. There's so many different channels. And so meeting customers where they are, and maybe that leans a little bit more into the data informed touch points that I talked about, but there's a good balance between the two of them.

 What I find really interesting about the airtable challenge, similar to some of the other products that you've worked on. It's very hard to differentiate in a very short and pithy way. And it's a product that can basically be used for an infinite number of different use cases. And so it seems like it has a very particular.

Type of messaging and differentiation challenges. 

 When you think surely sort of like the explosion of applications in our modern lives, our work communication, we're chatting with each other, all of this through software it's really. Weird. That's such a large part of our world is made by a very small group of specialists, right?

It's developers that have been able to build all of these applications. I think software is entering a new phase with its own version of creators. People don't want to buy one size fits all solutions that are made by others. They'll want to make it themselves. I think that's the space airtable fills for me, which is sort of this no-code application platform.

And that's a very horizontal message as you pointed out. And some parts, quite frankly, the inspiration for me as well to join airtable is really to even widen that reach, to inspire more and more knowledge workers, more and more people, regardless of their use case, regardless of their skill level, to want to build their own software.

And so. A lot of the creative messaging I talked about comes in the form of even education in disregard. And that's a very core part of the marketing team, but why didn't I think about, Hey, I love the horizontal message and I want so many people to be inspired by it. It's very important. Then when you get down to it, to be able to give.

Blueprints and inspiration for very specific personas. These persona might be very close to the problem that we have, where they're trying to create almost the glue between the different systems they're using. So think about people in an ops role marketing ops sales. BizOps it ops one way to deal with that is take a persona, their world, their problems, broad ones that they're resonate with and talk about the product in that context.

The other way to do it is then also prioritize how air table works for the jobs to be done. When you think about a particular use case content operations, campaign management, product roadmapping. And mentoree management, many different use cases here that you can also craft the narrative of your product based on the use case.

So these are far from the only people that can be influenced by the product, or it can make good use of the product, but at the core of it, you start thinking about how do I put myself in the customer's shoes and start describing my product in their world and whether it's persona, whether it's use case.

Whether it's a particular part of their own journey. You start crafting narratives around that when I look back, um, and I think about sort of the benefit of having worked at Atlassian, that was just an incredible learning ground. When you think about Atlassian has got such a huge product portfolio, so many different types of audiences, all of those in sort of different levels of product growth and mature.

That was, that was perhaps learning ground in being able to take the idea of collaboration or agile project management, or being able to have much stronger teamwork and create narratives for many different audiences. 

 Maybe we could take both of these in turn, kind of the idea of the horizontal message that maybe hangs all of these personas are use cases that those use cases then can hang off and then the specific use cases or personas.

What is your process look like per landing on whatever that messaging in. 

 First would be deeper. I'd say qualitative research, even more data-driven research around as an example. What are the current use cases that people are adapting? This has happened in a table by the way, happened all the time in Atlassian as well, which is one of the biggest inspiration for the companies tends to be.

We actually see people take the product and make things from it that we never really necessarily envisioned. When you look at the large number of use cases, people end up using it for, but then you also see not only the use cases we're trying to inspire people for, but you end up seeing that it's being very successfully adopted in certain contexts.

Learn more about those contexts, be able to see, whereas majority of that usage being driven, what are the blueprint? Of success that you can take from that. So that the next customer that comes in is able to perhaps more easily adopt and more easily experienced that success. So when you talk about the process, it turns around to be a lot of both quantitative and qualitative research to describe the areas, the surface areas that you wanted to touch.

And when you do, that's when a lot of the experimentation comes in, are you putting forth the right proof points? Are you putting forth the right. Strengths of the product is what you're saying, resonating with the users and being able to get feedback both on a one-on-one basis, but even through the way your messaging is performing before you harden it.

And I think it's effectively being able to take that matrix if you will, and productionize it. Each one of those teams thinking about it almost as a blueprint for success that you'd like to create for customers. 

 Could you maybe give an example of one of the personas that you focused on maybe in the last year or maybe someone on your team and a little bit of that process.

 Surely. So as an example, and this one's an easy one to go, go to simply because being a marketer myself and being in this point in time where I'm trying to build a team and create the flywheel for lots of content, different types of content, content operations. Then becomes a very critical use case that I, as an example, as well, user table for, but a lot of our customers use air table for that.

And so not only do you see large examples where it has been successfully adopted, but also impressive ones as well, where you see people taking very, very large amounts of content, being able to tag creative. We go through the process all the way of envisioning that content to delivering it on the final platforms.

But once you've actually studied the journey that they go through, you're then able to create inspiration in the form of templates. There's an example or blueprints. Actually telling people, how do you get started with the product? How do you think about the data model for content? How do you think about automations that make lives for content marketers easier?

How do you think about content approval? How do you think about content performance? How do you bring all of that to create a single source of truth so that you can talk to your. Cross-functional teams about the velocity and the volume of the content that you're creating. All of these are all things that content operations folks think about.

Now, this would be a very different frame of reference. If I was talking about inventory management as an example, right? But honing on this one, persona of someone working in marketing content operations, I am able to. Craft the narrative of air table. I'm able to talk about other customers that used air table for content operations and bring those stories to life and the way they've managed their workflows.

That would be an example of how you take both a mixture of persona and use case. But then in editable scarce, you can imagine we have many of these that we then move ahead to production. 

 Do you think at all, when you think about the customer journey or the persona, how you move a given customer or user from one use case to another or similar to I'm sure.

A lot of what you spent time thinking about at Altassian and very similarly at airtable, how marketing fits into. The land and expand stories. So it's a 10 person marketing team. They're using this in a pretty bespoke way. How does marketing fit into the, how do we get 70% of the company using it for different use cases?

 Yes, certainly. And as a land and expand product, that's certainly top of mind. So I'll talk about the sort of two different ways. One is to really think about the customer journey and funnel as a product enough itself. That's how the marketing team was thinking about it, which. There's a portion of the marketing team that's working on the top of the funnel.

You almost think about your gaps at the top of the funnel as your bugs, that you need to go and fix or new features that you need to deliver at the top of the funnel. Very much so as the engine around expansions as well, that teams work on. And so when you're using team-oriented software or workload oriented software, As such, you might try to expand from one team to the next, you might be able to leverage your product features itself.

Think about things like notifications or integrations with other SAS products that would drive awareness with another team. You're also able to leverage product features like approvals, reporting, and other such aspects of it, which turn around to do expose the product to the team. Marketing again to use that example is such a multifunctional team.

The example that I gave you earlier on content operations, you can imagine the comps team would be interested in being able to leverage the core content marketing calendar. And gets exposed to the process. Enough itself also starts using it from a comms perspective. A lot of cons reporting is available to senior management or to product teams.

They would get exposed to it as well. And so at some part, using the product features in order to be able to probably show others the power of the product. And that's some of the advantages around the more product led growth models that we have. Whereas. The ability for another team to then just try it out for their use case tends to be low enough that folks can come in and experiment and prove success in their different context, but using the same product.

 One of the things that jumped to mind as you were explaining that is, it seems like in both the case of Atlassian and airtable, there's some sort of tight loop or interplay between product and marketing. And maybe at times that line is blurred. And so later on, I think we'll go. Deeper into organizational design, but maybe specifically with these more bottoms up oriented products, what are your thoughts on how those two teams fit together?

Or when is there overlap or who's responsible for what, at the different parts of the customer? 

 Yeah, I think extremely close partnership, right? Between the product teams and very specifically the product marketing teams. It's clearly across both teams, but I'd say if I thought about them as Venn diagrams, that's where the intersection happens and marketing.

The API, if you will, between can limit the product teams and even the sales team, each of these cross-functional teams start finding their link with the marketing team, or that's what I like to think about as the role of marketing now, with respect to, how do we organize. Teams. I also think about cross-team squads, right?

That are almost exempt from any organizational construct when you're trying to deliver against a very, very specific outcome. And so you have very horizontal teams that are working towards things like larger launches or product features or trying to bring a narrative to life. But other ways that we try to get the teams to be cohesively working together, things like joint plan.

Shared. Okay. RS thinking about how you ladder together towards the company level OKR, quarterly business reviews between the teams. So they seem like tactics and there's so many different ways to do it. But the recurring theme here is to be able to have very close connective tissue so that the two teams are almost walking together towards the same.

 Can you explain more about how the two sort of functional orientation versus squad orientation and the different types of projects or how that fits together? 

 Yeah. So I had mentioned earlier something about thinking about almost marketing, having its own product, which is. The customer journey. And just as in any product or in a product led growth motion, you would have as an example, folks that are working on activation or expansion or different product surface areas, marketing touches all of those surface areas as well.

And so yes, it might be seen as. Product team that's working on activation and this is the marketing team that's working in activation, but in reality, it's actually a single team that's working in your nation towards the same shared goals. And so some part of that linkage happens around the surface areas that the two teams are trying to work together to plan together so that every child.

Whether it's external owned or internal channel are working in your nation during the customer's journey. And that's at least one clear part of linkage between the two teams as the surface areas that they touch, or the portion of the customer journey that they're working towards. 

 So in that case, this idea of cross-functional teams working on these joint surface areas like activation, what would be the in example of what that team looks like and the level below that in terms of responsibility?

 You would find in most of these eight, they're working towards a joint call, which might be, but then X amount of time, we would like the user to have done Y number of things or Y number of activities or specific number of activities. And just like, you'd have normally a product team, a PM. Developers designers working in Univision.

You also have the product. Marketer is someone who's responsible for messaging. That's working hand in hand with them and being an ensuring that all the messages that we put on every channel within that phase of the customer journey are very aligned with the product experiences that the product team is trying to build at that time.

So this might take its form. Okay. Emails that are sent at that time, or the videos that are available or education surfaces that are available in and out of product at that point in time and the customer's journey, but trying to do the same things, that product is nudging the user to do you have marketing informing or educating or partnering with the customer to deliver the same messages at that time?

 When you think about these type of marketing and product partnership. When something's not quite working, how do you diagnose her? Think about, do we have a product problem here or do we have a marketing or positioning problem? 

 Rapid experimentation dealing both with experimentation, but also a lot of research because you'd obviously both teams are working hard towards the same goal, but there's probably one part to feed that the experience, the messaging, that's not resonating if something were not working out.

And so being able to. Hold certain parts of the experience being, and by the way, it's, uh, I should also good to see. It may not be only purely at that stage of the funnel, which is why functional teams still work, because they might be an issue at the top of the funnel, which is then turning out and showing symptoms.

But, uh, later down in the activation journey or somewhere else. And so being able to take a very data-driven approach to finding out what are the cohorts that are showing progress and which ones aren't, what are the messages that seem to resonate that are helping users go to the next step and which ones aren't being able to have more real time conversations when possible with the customers.

Those are all part of the tactics and being able to diagnose where the problems are. 

 I think that helped to create a lot of clarity around the cross-functional party, your org, you mentioned there's more functionally oriented parts of the marketing team. Can you explain that in a little more? 

 Yes, the more functionally oriented part.

There's obviously we're very organized. I think fairly typically in some regards to communication teams and demand gen teams, but one of the ways we think about it is effectively very strong core central teams for any of the marketing functions. This might be product marketing as an example, it might be content.

To make that more real. I'll give it to you with an example. Let's say we wanted to have something around localization. The localization teams are still reliant on a fairly strong central team around core content, et cetera, or think about solutions, product marketing. They're still reliant on the core product marketing teams for the basic messaging that they can then take to their solutions and personas.

So in some ways you still have very strong within marketing. Being a multifunction enough itself. You'll have several different kinds of skills that come together. And each one of these has a very strong core central team with folks doing slightly different jobs depending on their exact surface area.

 And so in some ways the central team creates the standards that are then leveraged across the company. Correct. And. You were just mentioning the traditional marketing functions like demand gen or paid acquisition, is that just run as a small dedicated team or how does that fit into then things like customer journey, getting people to the right personas and making sure those personas have the right templates and messaging and that type of thing.

 Yeah. And so those are central teams. When you think about demand gen performance marketing, you think about content or campaign teams. Those tend to be central teams, they're SMEs, but were gluing. A lot of that together is still product marketing. The team that is at the helm of being able to really go deep into the boat, the persona and domestic.

 So switching gears slightly, how do you design the operating cadence of the marketing team? If I were to look at your team broadly over the course of a day, a week, a month, a quarter or a year, what are the rituals or touchpoints or parts of the planning process that bring people together in different ways?

 As an umbrella, the broader planning process tends to be run at the company level. So whether that tends to be an annual planning process or a semi-annual planning process, but I see each one of the teams, including marketing, plugging into that cadence. But then when you take it one level below that you'll turn around and see that.

Product and product marketing have joint planning, which happens perhaps slightly before the rest of the marketing teams, just in order to provide input to them. Again, product marketing and sales planning as well happens, aligned with company goals. And then the product marketing team then becomes discontinuities, which.

It ends up having a lot more dependencies, as I mentioned on the SME teams that it can then relay back before sort of marketing. Okay. Ours or marketing goals are set. I kind of like to think about this in three different levels. If you, if you will. We are always running a number of different programs, right?

Independent there's some evergreen programs that every marketing team is running goals that it takes above and beyond. What are the cross-functional teams are taking. And those are sort of always on. Programs which each marketing function can go and plan on, but then there are experimental programs are hopes, dreams, desires that will someday be able to convert them into the evergreen programs.

That again, marketing teams can then take input from things like product roadmap or other aspects that marketing wants to experiment in and build those experimental programs into the operating cadences. And then. Importantly, there's large strategic bets that might be completely aligned with a broader company objective that we plan to words.

And so those half yearly or quarterly planning, cadences get set, where teams take on these different goals and they work together with shared OKRs. The teams, that's sort of a marketing function level, but within the function, each team then can create their own cadences of operations. Like on my marketing leadership team, as an example, we go through almost.

The top level goals weekly on a weekly basis to make sure that we know where we are, where we stack against, where we need to ramp up things or where we are ahead of the curve. But I'm sure each team gets a chance to do that at their own level. And it's not necessary again at a weekly basis or bi-weekly could be good.

But at the end of the day, it's just always trying to test against what have become. Where are we? And honestly, if we have to make any pivots or any moves, how do we do that in a manner that are the functional partners that are dependent on us are also kept aware of it. It seems almost needless to say being from airtable, we depend very heavily on airtable to help us run this process, but it makes things so much simpler because it's not really about.

Status updates or check-ins as such more about communicating the big picture of what needs to be done to get to where we are. 

 I really like the way that you frame the different levels of evergreen programs, experimental programs, and large strategic bets. I'm interested in when you look in that bucket of experimental programs.

Are there one or two programs that were experimental maybe over the last year, year and a half that have grown into now, what you consider an evergreen programming? What's the story behind those?

 I could give you the examples from airtable, but then it would seem like a huge home run only because I have been here only for the last year and a half or less, but also we didn't quite have many of these foundational programs in place when I joined.

And so some part of the. Maybe if I can say easier wins in terms of having performance marketing programs that have now become standard practice or even content programs that have now become standard practice. But these were large gaps that were being filled. So I'll go back a little to talk about experimental programs that have come to play, but.

Whenever there's a new channel or a new platform that's come in or we're taking a new approach towards content testing it in that format. All of those things I've usually tended to start off as an experiment to see whether I'm able to both scale it and whether there's ROI. Or any other metric oriented benefit I can get towards the program.

And so that's the way I generally think about framing. Any new initiative is it starts with the hypothesis. It starts with a small experiment, which we can then graduate. Once we see were able to scale it. 

 Do you find that folks in your marketing org work across those three different levels all the time?

Or do you have some people that spend more time on things that are experimental? Some people that just keep the trains running and run the evergreen programs that you're going to continually invest. 

 I think that's actually more dependent on the stage of the function. An example, there would be at the Atlassian, we would have a number of people that were actually focused on evergreen ROI programs that were extremely operational with respect to optimization.

And it wasn't an easy job by any means because these channels or the formats in which you want to run the program are always changing. I think that's one of the fix you earn actually in marketing, which is. You have to constantly keep on reinvesting in something that almost feels like, oh, it has been a proven success.

Archana Agrawal is CMO of Airtable and former Head of Enterprise and Cloud Marketing for Atlassian. She shares her biggest marketing lessons from the two product-led growth companies, including developing the right personas and strategic org design. 