What’s a TAM?

Sorry, Aussie folks – we’re not talking about your beloved cookies. (Though a Tim Tam Slam never hurt anybody). We’re talking about another type of TAM: Technical Account Managers.

TAMs are experienced solutions advisors – typically experts in Agile, DevOps, and ITSM practices – who have brought their know-how to Atlassian to help our customers shape successful business outcomes. They’ll help you optimize the use of our products, work with your teams to reduce risk through reviews and planning, and assist with strategic approaches to deployment and upgrades that help prevent outages. TAMs advise on all products, so they can serve as an essential line of support across your entire Atlassian toolset. To put it plainly, a TAM is your dedicated, strategic partner from inside the company.

What does TAM engagement look like?

TAMs maintain a high-touch relationship with three cadences of engagement: weekly, quarterly, and annually.

• Weekly: The first level of engagement you will have with your TAM is a weekly call. This serves as an opportunity for the TAM to provide ongoing guidance and share the results of any research he or she’s been doing, discuss the status of your prioritized work, and walk through any active support tickets, among other things.
• Quarterly: Every quarter, your TAM will meet you on-site to review the previous quarter and plan for the next. They’ll perform a health check on where you stand with each of our products in use, and you can use this time to conduct workshops, do live product demos, and deep-dive into areas of interest.
• Annually: At the end of the year, they’ll do a similar retrospective, but for the entire preceding 12 months, and with more of an executive-level focus.

Across each year of engagement, and built into each touch point, you can expect TAMs to provide the following general guidance:

• Level-up plans: Through regular team assessments and heath monitors, we provide recommendations for stability, growth, culture, and team dynamics.
• Advocacy: We advocate for your use cases in roadmap conversations with Product Management, as the face of Enterprise within Atlassian.
• Modern practices: From upgrades and scaling to agile development and DevOps culture, TAMs bring a rich background of industry best practices.
• Discovery: We interact with system and app admins and product champions to understand where we can provide guidance and best practices.

What a TAM is not:

When learning about what a TAM is, it’s just as important to understand what a TAM is not:

• Technical support: For that, we have the Priority and Premier Support offerings. You can also get help from local Solution Partners for consulting, transformation, and other technical services.
• Bespoke development: TAMs don’t help to build custom integrations or code on behalf of Atlassian. If you are looking for that level of customization, we can connect you with a Solutions Partner.
• Sales: Our Enterprise Advocates and Solutions Partners can meet your commercial needs. TAM’s are purely focused on helping you build a strategic partnership with Atlassian and will help you achieve your transformational goals with Atlassian’s products.
• Customer Success Manager: Unlike our Customer Success Managers (CSMs), which come at no additional cost outside of your product purchase, TAM is an additional service – click here for pricing info. CSMs, on the other hand, provide customer onboarding guidance and direction to ensure that your adoption of new Atlassian products goes smoothly.

So, how do we get started?

If it sounds like a TAM would be a good fit for your organization, your first step would be requesting a consult with one of our TAMs to experience first-hand the type of value they provide, and allow them to get a sense of the problems you’re facing. From that call, they can provide you with the next steps to kick off an engagement.

If you make the decision to partner with a TAM, we have a structured plan to ensure that they can hit the ground running. Tactically, the first 90 days look like this:

1. The first interaction you’ll have with your dedicated TAM is in person, so we typically recommend that the kickoff meeting be held during the TAM’s first on-site visit.
2. That first on-site also gives them a bit more time to discuss your roadmap, give some insights into how our product roadmap may align over the next quarter or two, and prioritize your work.
3. Then we get to work!
4. At the end of the quarter, they’ll review how things went, refine a plan for the next quarter, and get back to work. We’ll likely hold that review on-site as well.

Interested in learning more? Have a no-commitment conversation today to see what a TAM can do for your team of teams.

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