How Atlassian's Customer Success team uses Jira Product Discovery for account prioritization

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Hi Community! This week as part of Jira Product Discovery June, we’ll be sharing examples of how different Atlassians use Jira Product Discovery. This is part 4 of 4.

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We want to hear from you too! Leave a comment with any questions, tips, or how you use Jira Product Discovery within your team and get the Prioritization Pro badge.

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Meet the Atlassian

• Name: @jruby (Jaclyn Ruby)

• Role: Enterprise Customer Success Manager

• Where you’re from: San Jose, California

• Fun fact: I’m a 4th degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and I did martial arts for about 18 years. My husband and I met from martial arts too!

• Advice for anyone in Customer Success: As Customer Success Managers, we wear many hats and juggle many priorities. I look at my Book of Business as “mini projects.” Each customer is a complex and unique project. To manage this set of “mini-projects,” use a tool that allows you to be organized, strategic, and agile. I recently came across a saying that drives this point home - with poor tools, you can still do good work, but with good tools, you can do exceptional work.

1. What team are you on at Atlassian and what is your team responsible for?

At Atlassian, Customer Success Managers (CSMs) help customers get the most out of their investment in our products by becoming a trusted resource. They are responsible for post-sales engagement, focusing on four key pillars of the customer lifecycle: onboard, adopt, grow, and renew.

CSMs work closely with customers to align on goals, provide recommendations, discuss product feedback, and help with strategic planning.

2. What challenges was the CSM team facing that prompted adopting Jira Product Discovery?

The Atlassian Customer Success Team recently went through an account transition to provide more coverage across our customer base. As CSMs received their new Book of Business, we needed a way to strategically prioritize our outreach to customers.

We needed a tool that would let us see all of our accounts in a single view and consider different factors (i.e., Monthly Active Usage, renewal date, customer lifecycle stage, and customer readiness). We also needed something that was flexible enough to allow us to easily re-prioritize as we learned more about our new Book of Business (ie. account research, context from the account team, context from customers).

What are the primary ways in which the CSM team uses Jira Product Discovery?

The primary way I use Jira Product Discovery is for account prioritization and strategic alignment with the extended account team.

I conducted this prioritization exercise: (1) when I first received my new Book of Business; (2) ongoing - quarterly; (3) ad hoc - based on any customer changes.

The main feature I wanted to leverage in Jira Product Discovery (and the main differentiator from any other spreadsheet tooling) was the Impact Score. The Impact Score is a weighted score that allows you to assign a percentage to an input totaling 100%.

For example, a CSM can use the following inputs and assign a percentage to each input:

• Monthly Active Usage: 40%

• Potential CSM Impact: 20%

• Months Until Renewal: 20%

• Customer Readiness: 20%

After all of the data for those fields is entered in, Jira Product Discovery calculates a weighted score for each row (account), which can then be sorted by Impact Score.

You can also group your list based on a field. I did this to create account cohorts. This creates two-dimensional sorting (by group/cohort and by impact score).

After more internal and external conversations, I add additional information to Jira Product Discovery and refine my prioritization and alignment with account teams.

How has adopting Jira Product Discovery helped support your team’s way of working?

Jira Product Discovery helps me approach my customer engagement in a more focused and strategic way, and better communicate my strategy to my leadership and the extended account team.

Jira Product Discovery has also helped me be more agile with a way to adjust my strategy based on any new inputs or changes. It’s given me clarity and helped me stay organized in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.

Any pro tips or advice to share as a Jira Product Discovery power user?

1. Atlassian CSMs are focused on increasing adoption so I wanted customers with lower MAU to have a higher impact on the Impact Score. To do this, put a negative in front of the MAU number, which helps prioritize customers with low adoption
2. To get even more value from the Atlassian ecosystem, use Jira Product Discovery with Jira and Confluence. Jira Product Discovery can be used as your initial “strategy/roadmap” and then you can use Jira and Confluence for your “execution” or task management

Demo

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In case you missed them, here the other articles in this series:

• Part 1: How our Head of Program Management relies on Jira Product Discovery for portfolio management
• Part 2: How Jira Program Managers use Jira Product Discovery for design allocation and capacity planning
• Part 3: How Atlassian's Growth team uses Jira Product Discovery for program planning and execution

[Staffan Redelius]

Using Jira Product Discovery for CSM is a brilliant idea. I will absolutely use that to play around in my own JPD instance.

This made me think about adding the customers business processes in JPD to be able to score and prioritize process improvements. Do you have any thoughts on what inputs to use for scoring?

[Amanda Barber]

LOVE this idea for using JPD as a CSM. Definitely going to play around with ways to use this in a similar fashion.

[Harrison Ponce]

Thanks @jruby for sharing your use of JPD with CSM!!

We have thought long and hard about using assets as a CRM for our customers, because of their attributes, macros to embed into Confluence, etc. JPD seems like a fine choice also. Going to have to mull over pros and cons on using JPS v. assets. JPD certainly looks nicer and is more user friendly, but currently does not support any integration with assets.

I welcome anyone's ideas on JPD v. assets for this kind of use-case!

[Tomislav Tobijas]

I hope I don’t accidentally bump into Jaclyn in a dark alley — especially if I’m late on a renewal 😅🥋

Jokes aside, it’s awesome to see how the CS team is using JPD to bring structure and strategy into such a dynamic role. Having worked in Customer Success myself, I know how hectic and fast-paced things can get, and this kind of prioritization framework sounds like a game-changer. 🙌

[Dave Liao]

Appreciate the insights of using JPD as a CSM!

I may adapt this to manage my own customers - with a CRM mindset first! Where'd my CRM hat go... 🤔