← 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 transmit it in a first meeting.

01 · What this engagement produced

12 of 34 outputs

Research

Competition

Segment, position and price

Message

Launch and enable

Measure and maintain

Solid is what this engagement actually produced. Dashed is what it did not reach.

02 · The diagnosis

This was not a messaging problem.

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. The buyer was being asked to assemble the offer themselves, from eleven parts, in a first meeting. That is a structural problem in how the company was packaged and sold, and no amount of better wording fixes it.

03 · The mandate

Build product marketing from zero, and make the portfolio sellable.

I joined as the founding product marketing hire, reporting directly 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 spanning chat, email, drive, video conferencing and voice-to-text translation, plus the services business sold alongside them.

0 → 8

Team built

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

6

Product launches led

France → Europe → Russia → Tunisia → Vietnam

Markets entered

The function, built

Day one

1

The founding product marketing hire. No function, no charter, no team.

When I left

PMM
PMM
PMM
PMM
PMM
PMM
PERF
REG

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

A function, not a service desk. PMM 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, no shared answer

One brand platform and one vision

Every deal restarted the explanation

A single membership that packaged the ecosystem

Six candidate values

Three ownable ones

No first-contact journey

A redesigned journey with the website at the centre

No product marketing function

A team of eight, reporting to the CEO

Launches negotiated one at a time

Six launches run through one process

05 · What I built

6 workstreams

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

01Market foundationWho this is actually for, established from evidence rather than assumption.

01 Research · 02 Competition

  • Customer journey mapping across Europe and MENA
  • Win/loss analysis run with sales
  • Segmentation into governments, regulated industries and enterprises
  • Competitive position mapped against US SaaS platforms and Chinese ecosystems
02Packaging, the turning pointEleven products became one ecosystem, sold as one thing.

03 Segment, position & price

  • Linagora One, a single membership bundling products, solutions and services
  • Pricing and packaging logic defined across the portfolio
  • The ecosystem itself became the product

Eleven products, one offer

Twake WorkplaceLinShareLinToLinIDLinPIKPetalsConsultingMigrationAuditTrainingCertification

Linagora One

ProductsSolutionsServices

The buyer stopped having to assemble the offer.

03Positioning and narrativeA category the company could credibly own.

03 Segment, position & price · 04 Message

  • "Your Open Source Enterprise Partner", anchored on technology independence: a third digital way between American and Chinese platforms
  • Six candidate value propositions reduced to three ownable ones
  • Corporate narrative, product-level positioning, persona messaging, sales story and objection handling
04The Twake suite launchThe front door to the ecosystem.

05 Launch & enable

  • Suite positioning across chat, mail, drive, video conferencing and voice-to-text
  • Targeted at governments, regulated industries and European institutions
  • Framed against Microsoft and Google on sovereignty rather than features
05The website as a go-to-market engineThe first meeting, before anyone takes a meeting.

05 Launch & enable

  • Corporate site rebuilt as the entry point to the ecosystem
  • Uniform product site structure beneath it
  • Distinct paths for different buyer intents
06Enablement and operating cadenceProduct marketing is a documentation project until it reaches a sales call.

05 Launch & enable · 06 Measure & maintain

  • Sales decks per segment, one-pagers per product, battlecards, demo narratives
  • Training rolled out across regions
  • A six-month execution roadmap naming the resource each line required
  • Six product launches run through a repeatable process rather than negotiated individually

06 · The outcome

What changed commercially.

€0 → €2M

ARR

+20%

Monthly active users

6

Product launches led

0 → 8

Team

Achieved through go-to-market strategy, positioning, packaging and lifecycle marketing, across an expansion from France into greater Europe, Russia, Tunisia and Vietnam.

07 · The judgment call

Diagnosing it as a packaging problem, not a messaging one.

Everyone agreed the messaging was unclear. The instinct in that situation is to write better messaging. But the journey work showed the confusion was structural: the buyer was being asked to assemble the offer themselves, from eleven parts, in a first meeting.

Linagora One existed to make the ecosystem itself the product. One membership, everything included. You cannot message your way out of a structure that makes the buyer do the assembly, and a positioning fix is sometimes a packaging fix wearing a different hat.

08 · What this proves

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

I build the function.

Founding hire to an eight-person team reporting to the CEO.

I own the commercial number.

€0 to €2M ARR, not assets shipped.

I work at portfolio scale.

Eleven products and a services arm, unified into 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; treating it as messaging would have failed expensively.

Frameworks installed

Product OracleThe Messaging Matrix