Unifying Product Launch Tiers Across Atlassian’s Growing Portfolio

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, Ashley Faus.

Atlassian has grown substantially over its 25-year history through acquisitions, sunsetting products, expanding features into full products, and continuous deployment across the suite (Jira, Confluence, Trello, Loom, and our Forge platform). I’ve been here over eight years and worked across product marketing and now lifecycle marketing. We operate under the value “be the change you seek,” which empowers teams to solve problems—but it also meant multiple product marketing teams independently created their own launch-tier frameworks.

We had a proliferation of inconsistent tiering systems: gold/silver/bronze, sailing or swimming metaphors, simple 1-2-3 numbering, three tiers in some places and five in others. There was no shared language for what constituted a tier-one launch, no common criteria, and no aligned tactics. This created silos and misaligned incentives. Product managers regularly asked why a peer’s “tier three” or “bronze” launch received different support than theirs. We also couldn’t put 100% effort behind every release—both from internal capacity/budget constraints and from the risk of audience and market fatigue—especially when continuous deployment meant multiple releases per day, many of them bug fixes or performance enhancements that simply belonged in the changelog rather than a full go-to-market motion.