This article is based on Daniel Kuperman’s stellar session at the San Francisco Product Marketing Summit. As a PMA member, you can enjoy the complete recording here.

Throughout my career – from my early days as a startup PMM to leading core product marketing and GTM at Atlassian – I’ve seen one challenge persist across teams of every size: how to get stuff done. 

Product marketers face an endless stream of tasks, making it hard to prioritize. If you’ve ever ended a week wondering, “What did I even accomplish?”, you’re not alone.

At Atlassian, we’ve researched this productivity paradox extensively and found that, despite being busier than ever, people aren’t necessarily productive. 

Consider this: 25 billion hours are wasted annually in Fortune 500 companies due to ineffective collaboration. Meetings that go nowhere, endless email threads, and scattered Slack conversations add up to staggering inefficiencies. Worse, only 24% of team efforts focus on mission-critical work.

So, what sets high-performing teams apart? Our research highlights three productivity pillars:

  1. Prioritizing high-impact work: These teams focus on outcomes, not outputs. They ask, “How does this task move the needle?” and confidently say no to low-value work.
  2. Taking control of time: Instead of letting their calendars dictate their day, they plan every minute with intention. They block focus time, use routines like end-of-day reviews, and leave space for unexpected priorities.
  3. Building and sharing knowledge: Top teams create a single source of truth, ensuring everyone knows where to find the latest resources. This eliminates wasted time searching for information and improves cross-functional collaboration.

By mastering these three pillars, you can take control of your workload, cut through distractions, and deliver meaningful results. Let’s dive deeper into each one and explore how you can apply them to your own workday.

Pillar #1: Prioritize high-impact work

You’ve probably been in this situation before: someone emails or Slacks you asking, “Hey, can you make this slide look nicer?” or “We’ve got a new feature coming up – can you build an ROI calculator?”

How do you decide what’s worth your time? Do you drop everything to polish that slide deck? Maybe yes, if it’s for a critical deal; maybe no if they could use last year’s slides with minimal tweaks. It’s a tough call, and it’s one we all face regularly.

Over the years, through plenty of trial and error, I’ve learned to rethink what “high-impact” means. The key is using a framework that distinguishes between outputs and outcomes. Let me explain.

Outputs vs. outcomes: what really matters?

Here’s a real-life example from early in my career. I was the first product marketer hired at a company. On my first day, the VP of Marketing welcomed me with a pretty standard PMM task list: “We need content – white papers, ebooks, videos – to sell our value proposition, convince executive buyers, and generate leads.”

At first, I zeroed in on outputs. I focused on creating content. I’d walk into meetings saying, “I’ve delivered four white papers, three webinars, and some videos.” But was any of this really making an impact?

That’s when I started thinking about the second part of his request: executive buyers. This forced me to change my approach. It wasn’t just about creating content – it was about tailoring messaging to resonate with executives. I collaborated with the demand generation team to target the right audience, shifting focus away from practitioners and systems admins to decision-makers.

But there was still one more layer: generating qualified leads. The content wasn’t just about messaging or reaching executives – it had to drive leads that fed into the pipeline. 

Once I connected the dots, I realized that I’d fallen into a common trap: focusing on what I was being asked to do instead of considering the outcome the business was trying to achieve.

The key question to ask yourself

Here’s the core takeaway: always ask, How does my work impact the business? This one question can help you shift your perspective and avoid the trap of just doing busywork. Instead of thinking about deliverables (outputs), focus on their business value (outcomes).

To do this, you need to understand what your business values most. Is it closing deals, generating pipeline, expanding accounts, or something else entirely? Once you know that, you can prioritize tasks that align with those objectives and confidently say “yes” or “no” to the requests flooding your inbox.

Let’s break this down with a few practical examples of outputs versus outcomes.

Sales enablement

When you’re working on sales enablement, an output-focused mindset might lead you to measure success by the number of training sessions delivered or slide decks updated. An outcome-focused approach asks deeper questions:

So, when the enablement team or a sales leader asks for more training, your response should be, “For what purpose?” The conversation shifts to how product marketing is enabling the sales team to close the right kind of deals and deliver real business value.

Product launches

Similarly, with product launches, focusing on outputs might mean counting features released or analyst briefings conducted. But what really matters are the outcomes. 

Are the launches driving signups, activations, or other key metrics your company values? The key question becomes, “What are we doing to ensure this launch delivers meaningful impact for the business?”

Demand generation

For demand generation, an output-focused mindset might track the number of assets created, emails sent, or webinars hosted. But the outcome-focused approach looks at metrics like:

  • Conversion rates
  • Pipeline generation
  • Activations or usage 

If you’re in a sales-led organization, you’ll focus on generating leads that feed a sustainable pipeline. In a product-led growth model, it’s about driving trials, activations, and usage. 

Understanding your business metrics and what’s most important at any given time helps you realign your priorities – and your team’s – to drive what the business truly needs.

How to realign your priorities: A framework from Atlassian

At Atlassian, we use a straightforward method to prioritize and organize work – starting with a simple spreadsheet. Here’s how we approach it: