← All work

Acting CMO & Head of Product Marketing · Paris · 2020–2022

Linagora: turning eleven open-source products into one sellable ecosystem.

SECTOR

Open-source software

STAGE

Established, founded 2000

MARKET

France, Europe, Russia, Tunisia, Vietnam

ROLE

Acting CMO & Head of Product Marketing

PERIOD

2020–2022

REPORTED TO

CEO

TEAM

0 → 8

COMPANY

linagora.com
Open SourceDevTools

The situation

Prospects had no comprehensive idea of the offerings and no understanding of Linagora as an ecosystem.

Those aren't my words. They came out of the customer journey work. Linagora had been publishing open-source software since 2000: Twake Workplace, LinShare, LinTo, LinID, LinPIK, Petals, plus a services arm doing consulting, migration, audit, training and certification.

Eleven products sold eleven ways meant every deal restarted the explanation from zero. The company had twenty years of credibility and no way to get it across in a first meeting.

01 · What this engagement produced

33 of 34 outputs

33 of the 34 outputs, across all six stages.

Linagora One, the single membership, came out of stage 03, segment, position and price.

01Research6 of 6
01Voice of customer02Win / loss03Market report04Why now05Assumption log06Pre-mortem
02Competition3 of 4
07The Fifty08Table-stakes read10Competitor monitor

1 not produced

AI visibility

03Segment, position and price6 of 6
11ICP and segments12Use cases13Buying committee14Positioning15Packaging and pricing16Deck spine
04Message4 of 4
17Messaging framework18Claim check19Landing page review20Message drift
05Launch and enable8 of 8
21Launch tiers22Launch brief23Channel and funnel24Product Oracle25Sales enablement26FAQ27Onboarding journey28Release notes
06Measure and maintain6 of 6
29Product funnel metrics30Launch post-mortem31Trust metrics32Customer case studies33Half-Life Map34Six-stage readout

Solid is what this engagement produced. Dashed is the one it did not: AI visibility was not yet part of the job in 2020 to 2022.

02 · The diagnosis

The buyer had to assemble the offer from eleven parts.

Everyone agreed the messaging was unclear, and the instinct in that situation is to rewrite copy, redesign the site and launch campaigns. The customer journey work said otherwise. Linagora asked the buyer to assemble the offer themselves, from eleven parts, in a first meeting. That is a structural problem in how Linagora packaged and sold its products, and better wording does not fix it.

03 · The mandate

I was hired to build product marketing from zero and make the portfolio sellable.

Linagora hired me as its founding product marketing manager, reporting to the CEO. There was no function, no charter and no team. The remit covered go-to-market strategy for a suite of open-source, cloud-based collaboration tools: chat, email, drive, video conferencing and voice-to-text translation. It also covered the services business Linagora sold alongside them. Within eight months, after I devised the strategy and launched Twake, my first product there, Linagora promoted me to Head of Product Marketing.

0 → 8

Team built

6 product marketing managers, 1 performance marketer, 1 regional digital marketer

6

Product launches led

France, then Europe, Russia, Tunisia and Vietnam

Markets

The function, built

Day one

1

The founding product marketing hire.

When I left

PMM
PMM
PMM
PMM
PMM
PMM
PERF
REG

6 product marketing managers, 1 performance marketer, 1 regional digital marketer

Product marketing owned positioning, launch and enablement, and reported to the CEO.

04 · When I arrived, when I left

When I arrived

When I left

Eleven products, sold eleven ways

One brand platform: Your Open Source Enterprise Partner

Every deal restarted the explanation

Linagora One, a single membership for products, solutions and services

Six candidate value propositions

Three the company could credibly claim

No designed first-contact journey

A first-contact journey with the website at the centre

No product marketing function

A team of eight, reporting to the CEO

A new negotiation for every launch

One process for six launches

05 · What I built

7 workstreams

An end-to-end go-to-market system.

01Customer and competitor researchWho buys, taken from journey mapping and win/loss analysis.

01 Research · 02 Competition

  • Customer journey mapping across Europe and MENA
  • Win/loss analysis with the sales team
  • Segmentation into governments, regulated industries and enterprises
  • A map of the competition: US SaaS platforms and Chinese ecosystems
02Packaging, the turning pointEleven products became one membership.

03 Segment, position & price

  • Linagora One, a single membership bundling products, solutions and services
  • Pricing and packaging for the whole portfolio

Eleven products, one offer

Twake WorkplaceLinShareLinToLinIDLinPIKPetalsConsultingMigrationAuditTrainingCertification

Linagora One

ProductsSolutionsServices

The buyer stopped having to assemble the offer.

03Positioning and narrativeA position a French open-source publisher could credibly claim.

03 Segment, position & price · 04 Message

  • "Your Open Source Enterprise Partner", built on technology independence: a third digital way between American and Chinese platforms
  • Six candidate value propositions cut to three the company could credibly claim
  • Corporate narrative, product-level positioning, persona messaging, sales story and objection handling
04The Twake suite launchThe product a new buyer starts with.

05 Launch & enable

  • Suite positioning across chat, mail, drive, video conferencing and voice-to-text
  • For governments, regulated industries and European institutions
  • Positioned against Microsoft and Google on sovereignty
05The website rebuildWhere a buyer learns the offer before talking to sales.

05 Launch & enable

  • Corporate site rebuilt as the entry point to the ecosystem
  • One structure for every product site beneath it
  • Separate paths for different kinds of buyer
06Sales enablement and launch processDecks, battlecards and training for the sales team.

05 Launch & enable · 06 Measure & maintain

  • Sales decks per segment, one-pagers per product, battlecards, demo narratives
  • Sales training across regions
  • A six-month execution roadmap naming the resource each line required
  • One repeatable process for six product launches
07Lifecycle marketing after launchThe user funnel after launch, from first login onwards.

05 Launch & enable · 06 Measure & maintain

  • Followed the user funnel from first login: which features people used, which they ignored, and where they got stuck
  • Worked with the product team to fix the places where users got stuck
  • Personalised drip emails and in-product messages to raise the number of active users
  • Monthly active users rose 20%

06 · The outcome

ARR went from €0 to €2M.

€0 → €2M

ARR

+20%

Monthly active users

6

Product launches led

0 → 8

Team

Go-to-market strategy, positioning, packaging and lifecycle marketing produced these results, while Linagora expanded from France into the rest of Europe, Russia, Tunisia and Vietnam.

07 · The judgment call

I diagnosed a packaging problem where everyone else saw a messaging problem.

The journey work showed where the confusion came from. Linagora asked the buyer to assemble the offer from eleven parts in a first meeting.

Linagora One made the ecosystem the product: one membership that included every product and service. Better messaging would have left the buyer doing the assembly.

08 · What this proves

Five things, if you're deciding whether to hire me.

I build the function.

Founding hire, Head of Product Marketing within eight months, then a team of eight reporting to the CEO.

I own the commercial number.

€0 to €2M ARR.

I work across a whole portfolio.

Eleven products and a services arm in one commercial model.

I run the launch.

Six launches, and a repeatable process that outlived them.

I diagnose before I write.

The problem was packaging. New copy, a new site and new campaigns would not have fixed it.

Frameworks installed

Product OracleThe Messaging Matrix