How To Win Internal Marketing with Jesse Feldman, Product Marketing Lead at Loom + Atlassian | Ep. 358

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0:22Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray. And join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. I am here with Jessie. I'm going to let Jessie tell her who she is, but she leads product marketing for Loom. If you haven't used Loom before, you're probably in a ditch somewhere. I'm kidding, but Loom is everywhere. And if you haven't sent a video explaining what you do or a process or stuff, Loom is a great product for that.

1:14But I'll let Jessie explain it more. But also, Jessie, how did you get into marketing? Let's start there. Hey, Daniel. Thank you for having me. I actually had a weird roundabout path into my current role, as many marketers do. So I actually started in book editing, in publishing for one of sort of the big five at Penguin and Random House. And I then moved into SEO and content marketing when it was the buzzword. And I thought my skills would translate. I ended up being client facing at an agency role. Then I shifted into demand gen, had a couple of startups that I was working at be acquired and ultimately found myself in product marketing and quite happy in this very central, very connected collaborative role.

2:01I was at Loom a little bit before our acquisition by Atlassian. And now I am part of the Loom team and the larger product marketing org I'm on is the Teamwork Collection, which is a combination of Jira, Confluence, and Loom at Atlassian. I want to go into just to explain what product marketing is for you, because I think I feel like product marketing is one of the hardest roles to explain. But it's such an it's like one of the it is probably the most needed roles in an org, but it's also one of the hardest roles to explain why you you need product marketing. So could you give a like what does product marketing mean at Loom and Atlassian?

2:43Yeah. So I feel really lucky because product marketing at Atlassian, we're essentially the CMOs of our product lines or the general managers of our product lines or our app lines. And what that means is all of our go-to-market strategy is coming out of me and my team for Loom. So this puts us at, if you have those like Venn diagram circle examples in your mind, This puts us at the center of the product strategy, of the sales strategy, and of all of the sort of flywheel go-to-market pieces that we have bringing in self-serve customers. So it's a really great place to be if you love to always have too much on your plate, always be prioritizing, and be just super central to all of the work that's happening on go-to-market.

3:33I also, so you started at Zoom, I mean Loom, and then it got acquired. Could you explain what does day one coming into a company like Loom, what it looks like to execute a product marketing strategy? And what it looked like? How did you get that going at Loom? So Loom, we've really evolved our go-to-market strategy, obviously, as part of coming into Atlassian. Everything is exponentially bigger. The budgets, the teams, the collaboration size. But we have, over the last few years, shifted from doing sort of go-to-market launch announcements feature by feature into a much larger campaign strategy, solutions marketing strategy, where we're bundling things up.

4:23We're trying to tell these bigger stories. Now we get to tell stories like Loom Plus Jira, Loom Plus Confluence. So we're really at a much more mature phase than even just a few years ago and sort of go to market. If you think of like a maturity curve from sort of product marketing, maybe doing release notes or community notes and a blog post or two into like really being central to a demand gen, a paid social and organic social and SEO, all of these pieces coming together. Something I think that's cool about being head of product marketing for a product line like Loom is I bet you use it every single day to explain what you're doing.

5:06Could you explain how you use your own product to execute product marketing? Every single day. I am proud and authentic when I say I used Loom before coming to Loom. I actually used Loom very notably in a job interview a couple of jobs ago. And I was like doing an assignment, the take-home assignment. And I was like, I can't get what I'm trying to say across in the writing and like in an email, it's not working. So I did a Loom like walkthrough of what I was, what I've been working on and it went, the interview went so well. So I've been indebted to Loom ever since, but in my day to day, um, there really is so many aspects of Loom that helped me as a marketer from a marketing leader who is communicating with my team or being communicated with to how we work with our stakeholders to how we actually manage our campaigns.

6:02So I can kind of like break those into pieces if that works. Yeah, I think break it in pieces because I think even if this wasn't Loom, like I think what you're doing, explaining through video of what and explain through audio what you're doing to your team is super helpful. but break it down on those three phases that you do. Yeah. So again, back to if you are in that ditch and not using Loom, what we are at the core is you can record your screen, record your camera, record your audio, and send a video communication, a video message. So that's sort of what we would call like async video communication.

6:40You can also, as of recently, add Loom to your meetings and have a note taker doing all of the AI functionality that you expect to have, have those notes feed into Atlassian Confluence and Atlassian's AI Rovo. But I'll focus first on the async portion because I think it's the most transformative way a lot of marketing teams aren't operating and they're missing out on a lot of connection and efficiency and frankly, just like ease of work by not using Loom. Obviously very biased, but let me start as sort of a team leader a couple of the daily ways. So my manager actually every Monday posts a loom of top of minds into our leadership channel so that I'm able to, when I log in for work, kind of catch up on what they think is the priority for them, for where they're spending their time.

7:31If anything new has come up in executive ops meetings, they can share that down, cascade the information right away. I don't have to wait for our next one-on-one to kind of know what's going on at the larger business sense. So that's actually how I start my week. And then throughout the week, there's various moments where I need to maybe update my team if we're probably all familiar. Maybe there's a pivot. Maybe there's a big announcement. Maybe Atlassian bought another startup and we have to adjust plans in some way. So sharing out information in this way with my team is like a top way I use Loom.

8:07I don't have to pause everything my team is doing, call a meeting, make it on my time zone. Loom gives me as a leader the ability to model time empathy, which is maybe something might be easier for me to call a meeting. Maybe it's not easier for my teammate to jump on at that time. So I do a lot of communication out, up and down with Loom. And we actually worked with our Teamwork Labs, which is a team of behavioral scientists at Atlassian to do a little research test of managers who shared information out each week with Loom updates and did a sort of control test with folks who did the same thing, but with like bulleted kind of, here's what I'm thinking about on Slack.

8:52And we saw like 2x connection with your manager when you shared these Loom updates and people knew their goals more clearly and they sort of felt recognized and appreciated. in increased ways with Loom. So from a leadership perspective, I think that Loom is a really great way for marketing leaders to just start to model that time of empathy, model a better way to cascade information and make your teams feel connected to you even when you can't do maybe all of the one-on-ones you wish you could do during the week. I mean, I'll add to that too, is I think the best thing you could do as a leader is make your team feel in the loop like really quickly.

9:35So after you go to a meeting, if you could just say like, hey, here are the three things I learned from the leadership, like the executive meeting or something, they don't have to wait for so long and feel also this anxiety that, hey, I don't know what they said and that I don't know what to do. I don't know what to execute. If a leader just comes and says, oh, here's the three or four takeaways. And you just said also that it's easier for the leader to now because they can use their AI note taker. The AI note taker takes a note. they can distill those three or four items in a video format and it's more personable because they're getting on camera or they're getting on screen and saying here are the three or four takeaways and now your team feels way more like hey i feel like i was in that meeting instead of feeling like i'm not i feel like that's the worst thing as a like a manager or like an executor to feel like you don't get a seat in a meeting, but this gives you a seat in the meeting pretty quickly.

10:36Absolutely. It's no fun to just always have contextless projects dumped on you and you wish you could see the bigger picture because you don't feel connected to the work without the context. Loom is a great way to do that. So the difference between me being like, hey, Daniel, can you get me this report just in a quick message with a period at it? Or, hey, I just jumped out of this meeting and I'm running to another one, this is a video message just to explain that like the CMO asked for this thing. Could you find this data? I have no idea where it is. Please help me. Like the difference in receiving that you're going to feel so much more valued when you're like in the loop.

11:10Yeah. And also like you could, what I also like about Loom is that you could like quickly screen share and say, Hey, here are like, if you just go here and go here and go here, you could find this and this and this um instead of like trying to explain go to this go to that click on this click on that and that's the most painful thing because then you're going to keep asking questions and questions and questions like it's easy to just be like here this is what i need to do here's this here's this because you put it in this and it's you put the and especially if you have like a a system like confluence or something where you're organizing things like showing people where things are.

11:51Like, cause sometimes when you're new to a team, you don't know where things are. And it's like, it's so much easier to see it visually than just have someone type it to you or just say it to you as well. 100%. You better believe all of my onboarding new hire pages have so many Loom videos. Like you can't just link someone to a report and be like, can you get the number from here? You have to give all the codes. Like you can give with Loom, walk through the report. What do all these acronyms even mean? What is this data actually showing how do you rerun it and then it's exactly like you said teach someone once with a loom they can reference it saves me 1 million meetings to spend time recording this once and keeping it handy great tool for for sort of getting what's in my head as a process out of my head yeah i actually was just talking about this um with someone about i don't know we can go to the phase two after but like ai has like made like doing documentation so much easier because you can like talk to tech and all that stuff.

12:50But now if you add talk to text with a video too, it's like now you can do the video with talk to text easy and or take the transcript on the video, feed it to AI and then have like a text version too. There's like so many different ways. Now it makes documentation so much easier when before you had to like type out every little thing, like step one, I have to do this. step two they can take screenshots and take the procrastinate doing that just because oh i never did it i would never do it no that was the worst part of my week i was like let me just do that end of month because i don't need to do it now this is universal across all teams it's you don't want to do the documentation when it's writing when you can pull up a loom and just be like let me show you this time i do it an ai like you said can take the transcript loom can turn it into a structured SOP from just you walking through.

13:47I can meander and like swear 37 times that doesn't make it into the SOP. Like it's great. It's so much faster. Yes. I mean, that was, I think one of the worst parts of a marketing role, I would have to say is like the documentation, especially at a place like where you're at scale, where everything needs to be documented, Like startup, it's like you start that process a little bit, but at the scale like Loom, Atlassian, like every process needs to because someone else needs to know how to do it. Well, there's another team in another region that needs to know how to do it. And you have all these time zones, like you said.

14:23It's just like someone needs to be a backup plan for you sometimes. So it's so much easier. I love how much time is saved now with tools like Loom and AI that are feeding this way easier. Back in marketing ops, if I had this, I probably would have stayed in marketing ops because it makes it so much easier. There is possibly, this is very dorky, but there might be nothing like the joy of seeing, because we have like sort of an AI agent integrated into one of the channels where our sales team asks for a lot of help. And like a lot of times it can just pull in like the Loom video or the documentation that my team has created already and just automatically answer a question.

15:08And I'm just sitting back like, we have it all. There's no traps anymore. We're ready. Exactly. It's like, that's, and that is also the worst thing too, is like someone asks for something and now there's another task on your list. But if it is already created easily, Like you already knocked off a task before a task even was created. I think that's the worst thing. And AI can serve it up. Like that is the glory of the future. We're actually spending time. Yeah. Please don't DM me now. Just ask the AI bot. And then if you really need questions, you could DM me after. But I don't need my DMs full as well.

15:45Yeah. Yeah. We actually have a marketing team mantra, which is, did you rovo that question first? which is Atlassian sort of AI tool, which is like that old snarky version of like, why don't I Google that for you? But like a lot of this information exists and our first instinct needs to be sort of use our little AI sidekick. I love that. I think I'm going to use that now. Like, did you, did you ask AI yet? Or did you robo that? Yeah, that's a great question. So phase two. So as a marketing leader, there's great tools. Now what's like the next other use cases that you see are very successful? Yeah.

16:19So I'm actually really excited about how my team runs our campaigns with Liam as sort of the backbone. And I can kind of start from, we do like one big quarterly campaign and we usually rotate amongst my team who is sort of the lead strategist. that person is often orchestrating across 50 plus stakeholders from engineering product legal social demand gen leadership all of these people who need to be at some stage informed and the old way of starting a program like this is you just invite people to a meeting they might have a little bit of context and an agenda but they don't they're kind of like okay this meeting's on my calendar, I'm going to show up or I'm not going to show up and I'm going to be completely out of the loop.

17:06So my team starts from our documentation is Confluence. So starting with the campaign strategy, we get that in a really good place on a Confluence page. They record a walkthrough of what the program is, what our goals are, why we're doing it, who the audience is, and run through like all the different pieces. So everyone in the pre-watch that we share out has all of this grounding in what it is, why they should spend their time or not coming to this meeting. If they don't have questions, they're welcome to skip. We will be recording it with Loom. But you don't have just a kickoff. You have all this context rich before aligning folks, and that gets shared out really broadly.

17:43And then we have these async Loom pre-watch checkpoints throughout the campaign process through with what we call crits. So we do this both for marketing programs and product programs, where we have sort of a critique review channel. And 24 hours before your scheduled crit, whatever the topic is, whether it's a feature or a part of the program, you share a pre-watch going through what you want feedback on showing designs, or maybe it's a marketing webpage that we want feedback on or things like that. And everyone who is participating in the crit has to watch the pre-watch and share their questions ahead of time.

18:22So no one's coming in and getting like surprise curve ball questions. All of them are organized in a doc and a page that we focus the live discussion on. And it makes those meetings much shorter. So instead of an hour-long meeting that's half context and half just like, what's going on? Catch me up. It's just a really focused, here are the top questions we want to discuss, align on, decisions we need made. And a lot of the work and thought shifts into that pre-watch async. So it's using Loom in this way that is not passive. It's not a share out. It's actually just like that context setting moment and time for everyone to get their best questions and their best feedback and their best ideas to the working team.

19:05So as an example, that's more specific, the last crit before our campaign goes live is what we call end to end marketing journey. So we work with product. We have a whiteboard of everything from our initial marketing touch points, social posts, emails, where they're driving to, where in the product or website that journey is, what the in-product messages are, what the upgrade flow is, all the way through to either using the feature or upgrading all of these things and looking at the admin view, the different persona, different pricing tier views. And so we can use that to show leadership. We have thought of this holistic journey.

19:44Here's how we are getting to our business goals. Here's what the customer more experiences, making sure the messaging is cohesive. And this is a really great thing to do async and a loom because you can show everyone the full journey, let them sit with it, let them come with ideas or, Hey, actually this feels like there's too much friction here. What can we do? And then the live conversation can be, is that worth something that's fixable? Like, should we take that as a note for next time? But I think a lot of times marketing and products are separate. And this process of crits really brings us together and makes us true partners in everything that we're doing and go to market.

20:22Campaigns get stuck. 17 strategy drafts, feedback on multiple channels, approvals in email thread limbo. Enter Loom, the AI-powered video tool to get your team aligned and your campaign unstuck. Loom records your screen, camera, and voice to share video messages async so you can get the clarity to move forward fewer bottlenecks faster launches smarter campaigns go to loom.com that's l-o-o-m.com yeah i also think two things that it does like i don't think intentionally but it it's it's like a qa process because you had to go through the process so you're like oh wait this is this is actually not working this is not working when you do the qa before like so i think it's a forcing function to for you to go through the process and because someone's going to find it and it's better than you the stakeholder finds the problem than someone else but i do love that the context setting part of it because i think there's always that one person in the meeting that says catch me up what this meeting is about and if there's like a like if you put it in the like hey to come to this meeting you have to watch like the context it just saves so much time with that that that one or two people who don't take the the meet like that meeting seriously beforehand and come and say why we're in this meeting what's this meeting about it just and no to be honest nobody wants to read the worst thing i hate is when there's a 15 page document to read before or a meeting to get context?

22:07I know my brain doesn't work well when I'm given a bunch of data and asked to react live or creative and asked to react live. Like I need that time to sit. And I think a lot of other people do too. So you get your best, get the best of everything. But to your point, it is a change management that you need to introduce and sort of model top down. We don't come to the meeting without watching the pre-watch. And that's for our head of product. as for our leadership, our executives, we set this standard. And if you're not prepared, like if something happened, like, yeah, you'll watch the recording later and you'll share that feedback later.

22:43But just like getting in this model of we don't derail with the context setting piece. We really work to get that as a way of working. Like you need to manage your calendar for async work. So set aside the time to review looms or to prep. I also think one of the most surprising thing I see in marketing orgs is how many people do not know like how to use the product because nobody's walking through like new feature updates and what's going on and having a team that's actually doing that in a marketing like product marketing actually helping explain that and make it easier for marketing like like content marketing to understand demand gen to understand because if you're not in an org like loom where you could use the product every day and know the tools there are some teams that are like serving a different audience that aren't and it's so much easier to be like hey we this is the new feature this is what it does for for this is how what happens this is what like if if i was to say a plumber this is how a plumber would use this in their day-to-day um here's here's something you should know for the marketing material and show them like that was like the worst thing is like as a marketer and an org where I wasn't using the product every day it was hard when there was like four more new features and I didn't I had to get an explainer not like I'm not a plumber so I don't know what this actually means in in marketing terms so someone explaining in video is so much better in an organization I think yes yes I'm I'm fully spoiled because I do get to work on a product that I can use every day but the idea of Loom is the is very it's the same no matter if it's a really technical I've worked on products where I couldn't even get a login it was very like tech heavy but the person who does have a log on that PM can record all of that feature and explain it and voice it over in an accessible way and hand off that information so it feels much different than like a PRD that you're getting that's just like a wall of text and you don't actually know what the product experience is And I think especially, I mean, I think one of the number one things in marketing to succeed, it doesn't matter what org you are.

25:00And there's always ways to get this faster. But like speed is one of the biggest things too. And even if you're at Atlassian or you're at a startup, there's ways to accelerate you as a marketing team, getting a campaign out faster. are getting and i think some a tool where you can explain things faster everybody's on the same page faster everybody knows things faster um saves those contexts of most orgs are bigger orgs it's because someone can't meet for a week and a half so now we're a week and a half back on the campaign launch because that one person can't give context but if you have video format and ai transcripts it's sinking into your organizational system that you have now there's no excuses to for that wait for that one person anymore because that one person can catch up by a video format 100 this will sound made up but i swear it's true our we just did our first brand campaign ever for loom at last scene has an amazing brand marketing team and after we finished the campaign they were like, this was so much faster than any other campaign we've done.

26:20And I was like, what's the difference? They were like, you made us use Loom for all of the executive reviews instead of setting the time for like a week. And then that meeting got pushed and then our ad wasn't approved. We just recorded it with all the context and like sent it over. And it was like, okay, the next day. So I was like, yeah, that feels good. I'm going to use that in our marketing now. i i yeah i mean it's also it's just one of my good friends like he's been using loom for so long and every it just saves it saves so much time him having to explain especially when you're like attacked it when all these systems that marketers have now like hey here's the five clicks that you need to do to do this this is the reason why you need these five clicks um i'll explain why here's the goal for it and you just send it out so quickly and it just it's so annoying having to do it yourself and then say hey wait this step like what does this step actually do when you it's just a pain it's a pain no no i can't walk i can't take instructions the old way anymore i love it um so could you walk me through like an example campaign that you would run and how you would fit looms into it and organize it so people can, like you said, that campaign move fast.

27:45What does it look like from like inception to like execute execution? Yeah. So we have a, we have a fun campaign we just did over the summer, which was the feature at the heart of it was we were GA-ing the note taker functionality that lets loom come to your, come to your zoom calls, come to your team calls, put the meeting notes and the recap into Confluence instantly have a robo agent that can analyze it. Um, so we could have just gone to market with like that, like it's a note taker, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and being very straightforward. Um, but from a place of, we always want to remember like our B2B buyers, they're, they're people like work is work is actually really emotional for a lot of people.

28:34And like, we need to connect to that need. So the campaign strategy became, you know, it's summer for a lot of our customers. Right now we have a pretty US heavy base working to improve that and go full global. But summer vacation season is actually pretty stressful for people to feel comfortable. Like in the workup to a vacation, you're so stressed. You don't, you're worried you're missing a bunch of things and then you come back to work and you have heartburn because you missed all this stuff. So how can we position our launch as sort of this, um, AI based way to prep for and feel confident before and after your vacation, your summer vacation, like what can you do best practices for setting your team up for success, knowing you're not letting anyone down.

29:18And so we built out all this content around there. Um, and it all started from, um, someone on my team had this idea that they just pitched via loom. So we do this a lot where it's like, Hey, loom idea, like, idea bulb emoji, not a rush, but like, what if we did this thing? And they kind of talked through their idea. They didn't wait for a meeting. And a bunch of us were like, this is great. Let's, let's like build out the strategy on that. Um, and we'll start socializing it. So we use Loom from the very start from like idea into, like I talked about, we do our full kickoff with like a pre-watch of what the strategy page will be, what everyone's role will be on the program.

29:55And so the program moves forward like that with Loom kind of behind the scenes, helping orchestrate, helping catch people up as they're brought into the program, making sure that there's always this like overview in the documentation page of all the pieces and the goals and the timelines and all that. And then, so there's like that piece behind the scenes where we're doing the crits, we're sharing feedback, we're doing design reviews with Loom. And then there's also a customer facing piece, which is we can then do all of our education with Loom videos. So maybe we do have this blog post. That's like the step-by-step guide to being out of office, like what to do before, how to use AI to catch up and all of this.

30:34Well, there's a Loom-like guide in it also that really takes you through the clicks. So maybe you're not familiar with using a robo-agent and you actually want a little like 30-second demo. We have that. We have that for sales. We have that for people to use and all of these different pieces. And so from the customer-facing Loom side, we see a lot of success with email click-through rates and higher engagement when we include like that GIF of the Loom in the email. and it's not a standard like text email it's like actually just click through we will tech we will demo this for you there's no gating like it's really easy um so so from like both the backbone and the customer facing side we use loom like end to end uh which i know most people aren't able to do as the product they use but you can use loom even if you're not marketing loom to do whatever or you're trying to campaign.

31:24I do. I do love it. I love the, I think images and GIFs are the way to stand out. So I do love when you see like, hey, like someone says like, hey, Daniel, or like something funny as that GIF to like get me to click on. Cause I get, I swear I get the people who DM me with a Loom video. I'm more likely to watch that and see what they're trying to say versus someone who just dms me and says nothing it makes it it makes it personal we we bring this into our sales training all the time which is of course another facet of product marketing um and we see i want to say it's like it's a 29 increase in win rates when our sellers use loom to like send demos or send recaps of the calls to prospects just like not even if they're selling loom necessarily.

32:19We train like all of the Alassian sellers that it's a really great way to capture attention, to build that connection. It's hard to get on people's calendars. Like you, everyone is getting a thousand like outbound messages every day. And it can really make it much more personal, make it clear you put some effort into tailoring this pitch, thinking about this person and introducing yourself. I want to ask you one more question is what is a marketing hill you would die on? I ask everybody in the podcast this question. Do not forget about your internal marketing. So I think a lot of really wonderful marketers don't build into their programs the hype internally that we need to bring people along on all the great stuff we're doing and how it connects to the business impact.