165: Ashley Faus: Building content that matches actual human thinking by integrating lifecycle, content and product marketing

Humans of Martech

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13d ago 1:08:28

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What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Ashley Faus, Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Atlassian.

Summary: Marketing frameworks often fail because they ignore how humans actually behave. People don't follow neat, linear paths; they explore, double back, and leap ahead based on genuine interests. Drawing from her diverse experience across corporate communications and lifecycle leadership, Ashley exposes how artificial walls between marketing functions create dysfunction while offering a solution: an integrated ecosystem where audience insights, compelling content, and strategic distribution flow continuously between teams. Her approach identifies truly predictive behaviors and measures success through bold experiments rather than smaller tweaks. By respecting how people naturally learn and make decisions, Ashley's content structure creates pathways that connect conceptual, strategic, and tactical pieces, making your content genuinely valuable to visitors and dramatically more effective at converting those ready to purchase.

About Ashley

Ashely started her career with generalist marketing roles at a bunch of different small companies before settling into a role in the commercial aviation industry
She took on a generalist Marketing role at a training firm where she got a taste of marketing operations including a Marketo integration and lots of email campaigns
She later had 2 content strategy and product marketing roles at network security companies
Today Ashley is Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio at Atlassian where she’s been for over 7 years
She’s been interviewed on more than 50 podcasts, her writing has been published on TIME, Forbes, MarketingProfs, she’s a well traveled speaker and she has an upcoming book coming out in May called ‘Human-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI’

Why You Should Look for a New Job Every 18 Months

Ashley has spent over seven years at Atlassian, navigating through four distinct roles while the company itself transformed dramatically around her. This longevity stands out in an industry where most professionals change employers every 2-3 years. Through corporate communications, integrated media, product marketing, and now lifecycle marketing, she's crafted multiple careers without changing her email address.

> "I look for a new job every 18 months, so that I am prepared to make a move and solve for any gaps at that roughly two to two and a half year mark."

"I look for a new job every 18 months," Ashley explains, "so that I am prepared to make a move and solve for any gaps at that roughly two to two and a half year mark." This calculated strategy creates perpetual career momentum. You begin exploring opportunities six months before the typical stagnation point, positioning yourself to evolve professionally right when most people start feeling restless. The genius lies in the timing: plan your next move while you still love your current role, not after burnout or boredom sets in.

The company Ashley joined barely resembles today's Atlassian. "We actually have grown like five or six times, both from an employee standpoint and from a revenue standpoint as well," she notes. This parallel evolution of both person and organization created a unique synergy, allowing her to ride waves of company growth while pursuing her own skill development.

Her initial role came with an unexpected twist. Despite being hired for corporate communications, PR represented one of her weaker skill areas. During interviews, the hiring manager focused more on her versatility across content strategy, email marketing, and social media. Genuine curiosity opened doors that formal applications never could. "Because I was nosy and stuck my nose in other people's business," she admits candidly, "they were like, 'should you come sit with us?'" These informal interactions led to her integrated media role, which connected previously siloed functions:

Press relations
Owned channels like email and social
Thought leadership content
Brand marketing campaigns

Ashley applies this proactive mindset when managing her team. She challenges them with pointed questions about their future: "Who do you want to be when you grow up? Are you growing up in the next year? In the next five years?" This framing transforms vague aspirations into concrete timelines. "That breakdown of how to get to where you want to be in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years starts with the next 12 months or 24 months," she explains.

The social media team placement at Atlassian illustrates how organizations evolve their understanding of marketing channels. "At the time, our social media person sat on the email team because the mindset was that this is a broadcast channel," Ashley recalls. Both she and her interviewer recognized the flawed logic in treating social platforms as one-way communication tools, creating immediate rapport around a shared marketing philosophy.

Key takeaway: Schedule dedicated job hunting time every 18 months, even when fully satisfied with your current position. This practice maintains your market value, expands your professional network, and positions you to make strategic moves at the two-year mark when growth typically plateaus. The next perfect role might exist within your current company if you actively seek it out.

The Overlap Between Lifecycle, Content and Product Marketing

Marketing departments love creating artificial walls between functions. Product marketing owns messaging. Content creates assets. Lifecycle handles channels. We've all seen the org charts with their neat little boxes. Ashley brings refreshing clarity to this organizational fallacy, particularly for companies using product-led growth strategies where traditional marketing borders simply cannot hold.

The organizational divide shifts dramatically depending on your go-to-market motion. "In larger companies using product-led growth versus a sales-led motion, there's a lot more blurring of the lines," Ashley explains. SEO strategy, trial signups, and in-product upgrade experiences often migrate to product marketing in PLG companies, even at enterprise scale. This reveals a fascinating truth many marketers miss: your core GTM motion fundamentally reshapes role boundaries more than company size does.

> “I don't understand how you're gonna write content with no insights from the market, the competition, and the audience. I don't understand how you're gonna distribute content with no understanding of the channel mix and the quirks of the different channel."

Ashley's decade of experience across multiple marketing functions gives her rare perspective on their interdependence. Ten years ago, she led marketing strategy at Duarte when marketing automation platforms were just becoming table stakes. "I actually had to do the RFP, choose between Marketo, Pardot, or Silverpop," she recalls. This hands-on experience taught her how lifecycle marketing (channels, nurture campaigns, cross-sell strategies) and content marketing (creating assets for those channels) form an inseparable partnership:

Content marketing typically focuses on creating assets
Lifecycle marketing typically focuses on channel strategy
Both become meaningless without the other's expertise

At large companies like Atlassian, specialization creates absurd scenarios where a single email might involve five different people: one writing copy, another creating visuals, someone handling lead scoring, another doing audience segmentation, and finally someone building and testing the actual email. While this level of specialization brings depth, it risks bre...

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