Race Car Growth Framework for Jira Product Discovery Launch Buy-In

John McKiernanJuly 24, 2026

Managing Director at Launch APAC

The context

This case study was created from an episode of the Product Marketing Adventure Podcast. It has been adapted into Dusted's case study format to preserve and showcase the guest's real-world experience. Written to preserve the voice of the true author, John McKiernan.

When I joined as lead PMM for Jira Product Discovery at Atlassian, the product was still in closed beta out of their accelerator. It had been beautifully built by a product team across France, Ukraine, and Holland, but it lacked a matching go-to-market vision. Eyes were on it from the co-CEOs, CMO, and head of the accelerator. Atlassian had 10-12,000 people and multiple products competing for attention, and in a big enterprise you can't have moderate success—it needs a clear path to something like $100M ARR within a few years or the engineering time gets redirected. Other accelerator products got folded or shut down; we had to escape that fate and turn it into a real standalone product. I had come from startups via an acquisition and naively expected launching inside a big company with resources to be easier.

The challenge

Growth had stalled in the early days and the product risked being completely closed down or reduced to a feature in big Jira. My first move was the classic marketer playbook: talk to customers, build a comprehensive GTM plan, and take it on tour to leadership. I got blank stares on the Zoom call with C-suite folks. The plan was too granular for executives making constant decisions, and tactics in isolation (like investing in the low-maturity craft of product management and community) looked strange next to demands for top-of-funnel signups and paid ads. In a noisy enterprise with 10 products fighting for energy, I had to carve out space and a protective brand around the launch rather than assume everyone was aligned.

The approach

I adapted Lenny's race car growth framework as a simple visual metaphor after an initial failed detailed pitch. It broke our vision into four parts I could stick to: growth engine (reliable, renewable source of signups that didn't need reinventing), turbo boosts (one-off tactics like paid ads, events, or email blasts that people often mistake for all of marketing), fuel (whatever sustains long-term growth—in our case upleveling the craft and practice of product management), and lubricants (removing friction that creates a leaky bucket). I limited myself to no more than two or three tactics per bucket to stay focused and digestible. Step one was always setting a crystal-clear goal at the top of every page and killing anything that didn't ladder up. Step two was obsessing over the clean ICP of product managers—I read everything they read and talked to three or four a week. Step three was rigorous experimentation: we tested surfaces inside big Jira for cross-sell nudges at the right moment (e.g., large backlogs at sprint end), fixed signup friction where non-admins couldn't get access, and tracked every experiment and result in a shared doc. I shared 4-5 minute Loom updates every week inside Atlas, walking through one part of the race car, the experiments (wins and disasters), and outcomes so leadership followed the story like a series. The same framework later transferred to Postman Templates, where we identified SEO-heavy growth engine and signup friction fixes in about three weeks.

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