The power of internal branding in product marketing

Hey there, I’m John McKiernan, and I lead product marketing for a new product from Atlassian called Jira Product Discovery, a prioritization and roadmapping tool made for product managers (PMs). 

I’m here to tell you about the mistakes I made while launching this product and share some helpful lessons I learned along the way.

Launching a hit product

We launched Jira Product Discovery last May, and it’s grown tremendously since then. It’s one of Atlassian’s most successful product launches ever. Customers love it, and it’s great for business. For me personally, it’s been a proud career moment to launch an enterprise product from the ground up.

I must admit I was quite naive coming into this enterprise product launch. I’d launched products in past roles at startups, so I figured launching a product within an established company would be easy. You already have an audience and supporting teams in place, so what could go wrong?

Plenty of things, it turns out. 

As anyone who’s done this before knows, launching an enterprise product brings all kinds of unique challenges. 

To navigate these challenges, I had to dig deep into my experience. One tool in particular proved invaluable: internal storytelling wrapped into an internal brand. I know that sounds odd, but bear with me as I explain.

Falling into the trough of sorrow

If you’re familiar with the work of Paul Graham of YCombinator fame, you may recognize the graph below. It represents the trough of sorrow – the painful period when reality hits after you launch a startup. The initial excitement fades as you get stuck into the daily grind.

As I soon learned, the trough of sorrow applies equally when launching a product within an established company. It’s kind of like having a baby; the first few months are thrilling – then sleep deprivation kicks in and you enter the trough of sorrow for the next 17 years or so.

The power of branding

When launching an enterprise product, patience, tenacity, and culture are key to surviving the trough of sorrow. I also want to add internal storytelling and branding to that list of survival tools.

Now, “brand” is a loaded term, often associated with logos and marketing campaigns. But to me, branding is much more than that. 

Good branding gives you permission to do things you couldn’t do otherwise. For example, Airbnb’s brand made people comfortable letting strangers into their homes. Similarly, David Bowie's various alter-egos allowed him to explore new creative directions not possible for him as David Robert Jones.

However, when I joined the Product Discovery team, I wasn’t thinking about Bowie or branding. I was thinking, “S**t, what am I going to do?” This was a massive responsibility. Little did I know, I wasn’t only heading into the trough of sorrow; I was going to plummet even further into the valley of despair.

Launching an enterprise product at a multibillion-dollar company like Atlassian means the bar for success is high. It can’t just show potential – it needs to be on track to generate $100 million in annual recurring revenue quickly. Otherwise, it risks getting killed. I knew this product had huge potential and I didn’t want it to die on my watch.

Clarifying our vision, distribution, and partnerships

When I started working on Jira Product Discovery, I saw its immense untapped potential. However, the team was stuck in the trough of sorrow. Let me explain more what I mean by being “stuck” during an enterprise launch, boiling it down to three key areas:

1. Selling the vision and potential: I saw incredible potential for this product that nobody else fully appreciated yet. My product leader had built an awesome product but needed help spreading the vision and getting company-wide buy-in.
2. Distribution: We tested a few channels but lacked a clear strategy for driving signups and long-term revenue growth. We urgently needed to solve that.
3. Competing priorities: Atlassian has massive target markets, but teams compete intensely for resources. My still-unproven product felt like a risky bet compared to established cash cows. I struggled to get partner teams to run growth experiments to validate our model.

I realized that the key to success lay in using internal storytelling to craft an inspiring vision. This approach, coupled with patience and strategic alignment, would be crucial in gaining support from others. On top of this, honing my persuasive skills with partner teams was essential. I knew if I helped partners see our product’s potential contribution to shared goals, I could quickly generate excitement.

Plummeting into the valley of despair

So, I went on a storytelling tour, meeting with teams across the company to share our vision and strategy. I tried to highlight the immense promise I saw in this product if we could just get some key puzzle pieces to fit together.

Often, it felt like for every step forward, we took three-quarters of a step back. Because we were presenting the product to so many different teams and levels – from customer service reps to the CEO –  it was hard to capture and convey all the relevant info in one place. Our strategy risked becoming diluted; I had to fight the temptation to abandon our bold vision and first principles by taking an easier path.

I vividly remember a video call when our CEO, CMO, and other executives asked me to explain our strategy. I rambled on until someone mercifully ended my misery. It was my fault, not theirs, that I hadn’t clearly connected the dots.

At this point, I was deeply frustrated. My team was distracted and being pulled in all directions. We were losing control of the ship.

Worse, my old nemesis imposter syndrome crept back in. I thought, “What am I doing trying to run a major product at a public company? Maybe I should go back to being a mall Santa or writing for a  British Balls magazine.” (Those are genuinely two of the jobs I’ve done in my rather winding and eclectic career path!)

The Racecar Growth Framework

That’s when I had an epiphany: Santa Claus and Jira aren’t so different! I know I’m likely the first to ever compare the two, but hear me out.

As Santa, the costume gave me permission to captivate kids with magical stories. Likewise, Jira's brand opens doors to tell stories that connect with customers on a deeper level. I realized I needed an internal brand that would be the equivalent of a Santa suit – a vehicle that would help people to quickly and consistently grasp our vision. 

Then I came across growth expert Lenny Rachitsky’s Racecar Growth Framework. Although he calls it a framework, I think of it as a disposable brand. Whatever you want to call it, it was the perfect metaphor to generate internal excitement and alignment on Jira Product Discovery.

In this framework, the growth engine was a two-way doorway between Jira Software, where developers live, and Jira Product Discovery, home of product managers. Rather than relying on traditional marketing, we could create value by better connecting Jira’s existing audiences.

Turbo boost represented traditional marketing campaigns – short-term pushes to get people in the door. Together with the growth engine, this combined sustainable long-term growth with quick wins.

I especially loved reconceptualizing complaints (for instance, about friction points in the sign-up process) as opportunities to add lubricants. Presented positively, these friction points became opportunities for partner teams to solve problems together and help get Jira Product Discovery over the finish line.

Another essential component of this framework was, of course, fuel. 

As I mentioned earlier, Jira Product Discovery is built for product managers. We hypothesized that PMs who lacked confidence in their role would likely churn and go back to using spreadsheets. On the flip side, more confident, capable PMs would bring in cross-functional team members to carry out product discovery as a team – harnessing the collaboration that’s critical to building great products. 

In this context, adding fuel meant helping PMs develop the skills and knowledge they needed to carry out their roles and use our tools effectively. This would help sustain our product’s growth in the long run.

The shared language this framework provided was invaluable in creating internal buy-in and a sense of purpose leading up to our launch. 

Putting the Racecar Framework into action

Crafting a unifying brand is one thing, but putting it into action is what really matters. There are a few ways I did this:

• First, I made the racecar my mascot, incorporating it into every planning document, meeting, and update. I still reference it to this day.
• I also shared the Racecar Framework via Loom videos to set the context more vividly than if I was just relying on the written word. 
• I used our internal communications tool, Atlas, to share weekly Racecar updates across the company. 
• I organized our quarterly plans under pillars like fuel, turbo boost, and growth engine, and had one member of my team look after each of these areas. 

I had hoped just to create some alignment through these initiatives. Instead, I created genuine excitement. Soon our founder, department heads, and CMO were using racecar terminology in comments and meetings. 

Everybody finally understood my vision thanks to this simple, branded unifying theme. 

The beauty of disposable brands

Thanks to this framework, I became known internally as “The racecar guy” – better than just “That weird Irish guy” I guess! 

However, I don’t want to be the racecar guy forever, just like David Bowie didn’t want to be Ziggy Stardust forever. That’s the beauty of these disposable brands – they allow you to wrap your vision in a memorable package, achieve alignment, and then move on. 

And you don’t have to use the Racecar Framework; how you brand your internal projects is limited only by your imagination. For example, my colleague Ashley runs content marketing for Jira. She wanted to evolve our overly simplistic funnel approach. Instead of a linear progression, she saw the customer journey as more of a playground with multiple paths.

Her brand conveyed that we need to keep the content playground open so customers can go from the slide to the swings, go for a milkshake, and then come back again, engaging with our blog posts and videos in their own way. The playground brand told that story powerfully to reshape content and marketing strategies.

It may feel silly to use cartoonish images with executives, but we all connect more to stories and pictures than lofty terms like “macroeconomic headwinds” and “paradigm shift.”

Tips for making internal branding successful

I’d like to wrap up with a few final tips on deploying disposable brands successfully:

1. Repeat, repeat, repeat - as Nike and Apple have for decades. Make your brand ubiquitous across Zoom backgrounds, presentations, team names, etc.
2. Choose a brand with longevity – the racecar has worked for over 18 months and will likely last until the product scales.
3. Don’t be embarrassed – this creative approach helps you stand out. I’ve seen it give less vocal team members their chance to shine.

As you struggle to launch a new product, it takes guts and tenacity to climb out of the trough of sorrow. Internal branding can rally people to your cause and put you on the path to launch success.

This article is based on a presentation given by John McKiernan at the Product Marketing Summit in Sydney. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.