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

Archana Agrawal: 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.

Brett Berson: 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 [email protected]

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.

Archana Agrawal: Thank you for having me. 

Brett Berson: 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? 

Archana Agrawal: 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.

Brett Berson: 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? 

Archana Agrawal: 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.

Brett Berson: 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. 

Archana Agrawal: 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. 

Brett Berson: 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. 

Archana Agrawal: 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. 

Brett Berson: 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.

Archana Agrawal: 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.

Brett Berson: 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?

Archana Agrawal: 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.

Brett Berson: 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? 

Archana Agrawal: 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.

Brett Berson: 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?

Archana Agrawal: 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. 

Brett Berson: 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?

Archana Agrawal: 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?

Brett Berson: 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? 

Archana Agrawal: 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.

Brett Berson: 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?

Archana Agrawal: 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.

Brett Berson: 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.

Archana Agrawal: 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.

Brett Berson: 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?

Archana Agrawal: 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. 

Brett Berson: 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?

Archana Agrawal: 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.

Brett Berson: 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. 

Archana Agrawal: 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.

And the reason to do that is because things are always, always changing. But the part of the trick there is to stay ahead of the game with those programs. And then we have things like growth teams. I've had them both here, but also at Atlassian that are mostly. Focused on running experiments and to do an experiment, to see how things can actually be productionized.

Once we find that they are successful, strategic bets happen really based on company priorities. I 

Brett Berson: guess this close out this set of ideas. Are there parts of the way that you organize or run the marketing function that you think is a little bit strange or unique or different?

Archana Agrawal: I don't know if this is a strange or different, but I know it was new to me.

And I think it was extremely impactful on how closely analytics was tied to the marketing team. And it may have just simply been my own inclination or the way things operated within Atlassian at that point in time. I had not previously experienced such a close linkage between the two teams as I do now.

And I think that that is still an ongoing part of the ethos of how marketing runs here, which is a very high reliance on trying to go back and ensure that we have good reasoning and data behind a number of the decisions that we take and the number of the programs that we actually keep the lights on.

Brett Berson: Can you give us some examples about two or three case studies that come to mind in terms of that linkage between marketing and data or marketing and analytics?

Archana Agrawal: Yeah. So examples here would be, I mean, the simple ones would be. Every team in order to be able to prioritize the work that they have to do are looking to close gaps, effectively quantifiable gaps that we may have, but these are in our funnel, whether these are drop off points, whether this is in our content, in the experience itself, but in order to get there and in order to make their plans and prioritize those, these teams have now become effectively.

Self-reliant. On being able to go in being able to build a business case, if you will, on the priorities that we need to put in place and be able to actually talk to the value of the resources that are needed in order to close these gaps. And so. Well think about wanting to govern new surface area with content.

You will have the SEO teams you'll have the content teams. You'll have them effectively doing the research of the areas that the kind of content that they need to write. What kind of traffic can we choose to get in? They will then work with other SME teams to see whether there is ways in which they could further take this traffic further down the funnel and make full fledged business case on why a particular surface area needs to be resourced.

Brett Berson: One other area I wanted to loop back as I was reflecting on the last few minutes of conversation is how you work and organize your own leadership team and the folks that report to you. I'd be interested. Can you talk a little bit about who your direct reports are? And you also mentioned the way that you internally at your team level leverage.

Air table. And I'd be curious how you keep everyone on the same page and you were mentioning, you've designed it in a way that ideally reduces the amount of status updates, and I assume, create space for more important discussion on a weekly basis. 

Archana Agrawal: Yeah. So the team at airtable, the marketing team is at an, a, maybe about 50 ish or so strong now.

And reporting to me, we'd have our creative director. We'd have our head of comms, someone leading demand, gen content, surface areas. We have product marketing as well, reporting into me. These sort of teams come together. We come together obviously in, in many, many different formats, but also on a weekly basis.

Tactical, I'd say way to get together to try to figure out how do we remove the roadblocks that we have, or how do we create more space for cross-functional partnerships within what we're delivering? So, an example here, when you talk about how the user table is. I can go in today and look at what we're trying to accomplish all through the end of the year on a table.

I can look at the objectives. I can look at the tasks that fall under that, but I can also look at my cross-functional teams where they currently stand on their timelines and. Through various sorts of views, like a Gantt chart to understand what's at risk. What's not at risk. So I don't need to spend my marketing team's time and trying to get a status update on things that are going as expected, where we then contend to do dig into.

Hey, are there any areas that we need to discuss? Can I support any of the team members with any of the items that they're talking about to each one of the marketing teams actually have a full understanding of what's on the other person's plate so that they, if they have input to share, or if there's a dependency, they can actually work.

Through that. And so we have these weekly cadences that become very operational. We of course have our own strategic meetings and cadences around that. But the way we use air table is both the mirror into what's happening today in marketing. But also what are the key points that we need to convey to our cross-functional teams?

Unfortunately, with them doing the same, we get that input on airtable at that point itself. 

Brett Berson: So if I were to be a fly on the wall and your core meeting with that small group of folks that represent the main functions, is it mostly sort of you're surfacing bigger rocks or trickier problems in you group problem solve?

Or what are the other things that are going on in that unit of time? 

Archana Agrawal: Definitely trickier parts, big rocks resource considerations, order of operations is a very commonly used term in that meeting where we're trying to figure out how can we actually leverage the team's time in the best way possible by grouping things together.

We also planning around our own marketing team. It's a new team. There's. That's also around our culture and our own working processes that gets discussed in that meeting. It covers, I'd say very, very important things for us to get right within the quarter, within the half year timeframe that we're working on.

Brett Berson: One of the areas I was interested in exploring with you is a cross pollenization that you've had over the last call it 10 or 15 years in your career. And maybe one place to start. We've talked a little bit about this, but obviously before air table, you spent, I think about seven years in a couple of different roles that Atlassian. I'm interested, what are the key concepts and parts of the playbook that you developed from Atlassian that transferred very well into this first chapter of your time at air table.

And are there specific things that you had to unlearn or relearn or meaningfully change? That maybe you thought would be easily moveable, but for some set of reasons may be. 

Archana Agrawal: I mean, that's been a question that I've reflected on as well so often, but then this last year I mentioned before, given that Atlassian addresses such a large market, I think one of my biggest learnings was within a class in itself, which is given the breadth of the portfolio.

I knew that my own learnings, my own cognition, my own understanding. Very situation dependent. So different situations would call for different tactics or conclusions, even though it was the same team and same company, just because different products, different audiences. And so I think what that helped me with is actually being able to look for aspects.

Even with an airtable that were not present in the class and vice versa before directly transferring any learnings, if you will, from one to the other, but a few things that I think I took with me from there that I hope to continue pushing forward even at their table. And some of them. May seem common practice.

Some of them may be slightly counter-intuitive, but one was treat every time a customer gets in touch with you as a bug. And they say that in the best way possible, because I think it's very obvious to most people that you have to stay as close as possible to your customers. You have to really understand them and engage with them and welcome every opportunity to connect with them.

But when a customer has to get in touch with you, when they're trying out your product, 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 if they're not clear about, and then it becomes sort of my team, the marketing team's responsibility to be able to design.

A better journey for them so that these areas of friction can be removed. And so we really treated us such. In fact, one of the things that I did here at a table was not the education team as part of the marketing team, some part because of that learning, which was wanted to be able to remove the friction from the customer's journey and help them understand various parts of the product.

The other thing that I've brought with me and I hope to continue is building a community that is a very, very. Large investment, but one that's hard to make on an ROI basis. I don't think I can build a business case that tells me today why there should be a community, but it is the faith and the trust that I've seen in it working so well, that when you invest in your users and let them connect with each other and give them a space to be able to connect within your own organization, give them a voice, give them access to your leaders, to your product teams.

You ultimately end up creating. Culture that truly trusts and engages with the customers and truly hear their voice. And that is such an incredibly powerful gift for the company. And so that's another one that I carry with me. And then lastly, to be able to trust that product usage is one of the most important metrics that we follow.

The more someone uses our product. The more value we've been able to create for them. And that is a leading indicator for so many other things that we care about. And so before I look at bookings or conversion or traffic or MQL, I look at product usage numbers, and that gives me a sense of the value that.

Delivering, besides that again, with the benefit of knowing that a lot of the classic products had been extremely mature products or in different markets, I've also learned that there are so many things that I then get to unlearn effectively. Marks from rebuilding the team from scratch here at a table, or trying to take a much more horizontal message.

Maybe that one that's not focused only on predominantly on developer or engineering audiences. And a lot of what we talked about, which is crafting it for multiple personas has parallels with the multi audience journey, but also has a number of differences in that regard. 

Brett Berson: Looping back to the first thing that you shared, which was treat every customer touchpoint with you as a bug.

I really love that idea. And I'm curious how you operationalize that in the companies that you work in. Is there some sort of predefined process where these touch points get logged and then explored in some way? Or is it more of a broad mantra that people just keep in mind as they're going about their day?

Archana Agrawal: While it is a broad mantra. It is also operationalized, right? In both these places, we have extremely active customer facing teams that are always reporting back top issues or Neo issues that they come across. So that we understand if it's a support Dutch or it's a success touchpoint it's because of someone getting stuck or not being able to do something, they want that's feedback that comes back very, very immediately to the marketing team and we actively seek it out.

So some part of it is just the operational nature of being able to ensure that you're taking. That feedback from all your customer facing teams. You're also taking that feedback from user research teams, wherever you get that you're taking that feedback from your NPS surveys, et cetera. And the other part is the attitude around it, which was like, make a lot of this information as available.

Two audiences as possible. I'll give you a tangible example, like an Atlassian scale. They will agile project management tools and you can go there and you can learn the best advice. There is on agile project management, the culture, the playbook. The practices you need, the tools you need. And the idea is to make all of that information available with the customer, not gated, not making it difficult for them to reach it, but not with the goal of creating leads or the fear that, well, then they'll use all of this great information and use it on another tool, but rather with the.

Customer service orientedness of seeing, I want you to truly be successful in agile project management and learn the best practices they are. And I want to give you all the information I can to help yourself serve your way to success and get out of your way. I will be there in every which way possible if I can help support in that journey, but I didn't want to create friction of any sort.

Brett Berson: Is there an example, maybe similar to that in airtable, when someone on your team saw a bug gets surfaced or a certain issue pop up across these different channels, whether it be MPS, customer support, et cetera, and what a marketing intervention looked like. 

Archana Agrawal: Many different examples, but in some part, maybe also given the good fortune of being able to start marketing in such a foundational way that a lot of the ways our own content roadmaps are created are by effectively taking that input from these teams, from the customer facing teams.

The very Genesis of what should we write about? There's a good part of our content roadmaps that would be created about how do we help surface that right. Information. And we've recently like just completed a larger research project around actually talking directly to our customers to see what formats can we actually help surface this information.

When we found out there were certain areas where they were getting stuck and. Them get unstuck in that case. And sometimes the information we were presenting was not doing that. And so there's definite effort here to turn around and say, okay, I need to help. And I need to help in the format that most customers would find most useful, whether it's text or videos or in product chat, different people consume information in different ways.

But a lot of the strategy around it is to be able to provide contextual help when people need it. 

Brett Berson: So continuing on this thread that we're pulling across the idea of cross pollinization in your career. I think one of the interesting things is that you started out as classically trained CS person and at the first chunk your career, I think you ended it in a VP of analytics role.

And then you started to move over to marketing, call it over the last 10 or so years. And I'm interested, I assume, along that journey. Maybe some of the data-driven parts of marketing, I assume, would be quite intuitive given that you came up in a more quantitatively rigorous upbringing, but I'm interested in what ways or how did you learn more of the creative parts of marketing or maybe that first bucket that you were describing in terms of creative messaging?

And I'm interested because I think there's a lot of founders. That tend to be much more technical and tend to come from a more quantitatively rigorous world and are trying to grow their understanding and educate themselves in this other chunk of marketing. And so I was curious if anything comes to mind.

Archana Agrawal: Where my own sort of progression is concerned. I think it was very gradual. So when I think about like, I started at Atlassian in a very analytical role, building up the analytics team, moved on to dig on a little bit of growth oriented tactics. And then that was such a close cousin to performance marketing.

So that was the next thing I picked up. And so it was more a gradual progression. During the round Dysart be able to help me lead marketing was speaking up these bits along the way, but creative has certainly been an important aspect of that. One way that as you can imagine, I dabbled in it to begin with was again, around the concept of experimentation, which.

We had so many different things said different avenues. How does it all work? What creative is working, what creative is working on, what channel in what format, how do we present it? And so that was my introduction to creative teams. It has such a tremendous impact, especially when you think about a lot of the product led growth models that are there today and even more.

So the non-developer ones, I'd say a lot of it is around inspiration around how the. It might be used. A lot of it is around the metaphors around how a product could be taught to off. And a lot of that comes from the creative teams as in building my own team. I think one part of being a developer and knowing that, that has been the strength around the data oriented aspects of it.

It's also actually tremendously. To me with understanding the diversity of skills that our marketing team needs to bring to the table today. And the way I think about crafting my own leadership team then is to sort of get folks that I think are really fantastic in their are of areas. And this, this is across all of marketing, right?

And creative certainly is one part of that communications and other even demand gen and product marketing, all of that. And at the end of the day, build a truly. A-plus steam because it's marketing such a multi-headed function that think that one would go across all of them with equal vigor. It's just hard to do.

And so that's how I think about sort of building that A-plus bench and perhaps very similar points of view around how founders and others who probably can think about it, that you can develop your intuition around it. You can develop a strong sense of. What you like, what you don't like and how you build teams and how you develop talent in that area.

But you can also lean in on very, very strong leadership as well to help reinforce a lot of that. 

Brett Berson: So I wanted to wrap up our time together by maybe chatting a little bit about what are the types of questions you tend to get. From founders, as I assume in general, it relates to marketing, but I assume you're at a point in your career and given the companies and products and projects that you've worked on, that you probably tend from time to time to get founders reaching out with different questions.

And I was interested. Do you tend to get the same types of questions a lot or is it more of a long tail. 

Archana Agrawal: I think it's more of a long tail, but I think people generally love to understand best practices that I might have seen work. In some of the cases, there might be people who want to dig in deeper into something like developer marketing, in which case might lean into a lot of that.

Because I think when you look back at some of the classes, products, that's where there's a lot of strength. There's a lot of questions around. Growth. And how does marketing work best with product in that model? There's questions around the hybrid nature of how do you transition from product led growth into building sales teams and having sales become part of your go-to-market motion?

There's questions around internationalization. And how do you think about approaching new markets? Generally, it's a long tail, but it's perhaps the areas that folks tend to focus.

Brett Berson: I'm interested in one that we actually didn't touch on, which is developer marketing. Do you find that there's something quite different about marketing to developers or doing developer marketing than other types of marketing? 

Archana Agrawal: I've found developer marketing to be much more, I don't have the right word to use here as hands-on, but developers love to be able to. Try the product, perhaps have a lot more patients in tinkering with the product to achieve their goals are a lot more upfront maybe about where they're stuck or what they'd like to see. It's probably comes easier to them to be able to think about it in that way.

I've heard a lot of people say developers don't like advertising. I don't know that that's True. But most people don't like un-targeted advertising, but I think in the right way at the right channels, with the right messages, they're very receptive to that. There are a lot of differences. They love to be able to find information themselves.

And therefore, perhaps the entire aspect around self-serve businesses became much more intuitive to be able to follow with developers. And they do have such an outsized impact in their companies as well in a number of things. But it is also easy to be able to get feedback from developers and convey it, knowing that it's fairly widespread when you convey it back to the product team.

Brett Berson: Have you found that the last 10 years, the, this big push towards product led growth has made more general marketing resemble what might have used to been defined as developer marketing and it's all converging, or do you find that there's still a very specific playbook for developer marketing that is quite different than getting a given person to use? Call it a non-technical person to use Airtable.

Archana Agrawal: There are still large differences. There's certainly converging point. There are things that I may have talked about, which are around friction and about making information easily accessible, which turns around to be very common as principals. But the kind of information you make accessible and sort of the level of depth you go into and the formats in which you can present it.

I think to still defer audience to audience and send, it's not just developer versus non developer, but you can actually expand that to any sort of persona, right. Something that works for developers will be, you'll have to do it differently for sort of it teams. And you have to do that differently for marketing teams as principals.

Some of them still work. Horizontally, but I think the specifics around how you do it do change. 

Brett Berson: I thought we could just wrap up with a question that I always like, which is, can you share the story or the person that has had an outsized impact on you as a marketer and maybe is there something tangible that they shared or something that you've taken away from that relationship that tends to serve you well to this.

Archana Agrawal: Yes, it's, it's hard to call out one person, but I would say, and I think he's actually been on your show, which would be Jay Simons from Atlassian has been an incredible mentor marketer and perhaps someone that has helped in. What I call it this gradual journey into marketing with deep emphasis on messaging with very, very deep emphasis on almost thinking about your customer journey as a product that you bold.

And so therefore thinking about it from first principles and building reinforcement along the entire way and has had an out-sized impact in the way I think about marketing. 

Brett Berson: I realized that you mentioned this at the very beginning and gave us a couple examples, but do you think we could wrap up with just expanding a little bit on when you think about that journey as a product?

What exactly you mean by that?

Archana Agrawal: Yeah. And so specific examples would include things like the skills that you need. Let's say you would think about the product as a funnel or a customer journey and what you need to build. Depends on what. Phase of the funnel you're trying to fix. You start thinking about it as jobs to be done the same way you would think about it as any product the jobs to be done at the top of the funnel is very different than the jobs to be done.

If you're trying to focus on improving engagement in product is very different from the jobs to be done, if you were trying to reduce friction around that. And so when you think about how I spoke about organizing your teams, that. Even is it exactly what a product team would do? My PMM teams are organized based on the stage of the funnels that they're working on.

Or when you think about setting up north star metrics or goals for the team, you actually think about the surface areas that they're working on and set up goals, according to that. And that's how I think about it effectively are building a product and you're trying to reinforce the same message, different parts of that journey.

Brett Berson: Awesome. Well, that is a wonderful place to end. Thank you so much for spending this time with us.

Archana Agrawal: Thank you.