Buildkite is a fast-growing software delivery provider serving global leaders including Airbnb, Canva, Elastic, Lyft, Shopify, Slack, and Uber. However, in early 2024, it had a problem: it was still known as the “best-kept secret in CI/CD,” not exactly ideal for a growing company.

To address this, 2024 saw new marketing leadership at Buildkite. This new team had specific deep experience in developer tools and B2B scale-ups.

As part of the reorg, customer research moved into marketing, and I transitioned along with it. I began reporting to the new VP of Product Marketing, who tasked me with developing Buildkite’s first Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This work would define Buildkite’s best-fit customers, and serve as a strategic foundation for all our further messaging and positioning work.

Data, synthesis, and tools

As a product manager at Buildkite, I’d already spent years talking to our customers and synthesizing insights for product development, but this was the first time I was asked to direct that experience toward a go-to-market strategy. Some things were new to me — like knowing what firmographic information was available via which sales enrichment tools — but the core approach of gathering information, identifying patterns, and presenting information in a way that makes sense was familiar from my years as a UX researcher and product manager.

To build the ICP, I pulled together both qualitative and quantitative sources, including:

• Enriched firmographic data (via 6sense and LinkedIn Sales Navigator)
• Internal win/loss insights (via Hubspot and other internal notes)
• Customer usage patterns and feedback (via internal research and interviews with the revenue org)

I created initial drafts for direction from marketing and sales leadership. Based on their feedback (and later feedback from our product team, salespeople, and solution architects), I refined it, always focusing on clarity, targetability, and business relevance.

The final ICP became the foundation for:

• Defining three buyer personas (with one prioritized and fully developed)
• Target account development for every future campaign
• Our significant company re-launch in October 2024.

Internal enablement

While Buildkite had a good understanding of user research in the context of product development, this ICP work was the first time many people had heard of using company and customer information to inform and sharpen the sales motion. Because this was new to the org, enablement was as critical as the strategy itself.

I worked to bring everyone along through:

• Presentations at multiple all-hands meetings
• Slack threads with Loom videos
• Internal documentation in both the company-wide and Sales-specific knowledge bases
• 1:1 and team meetings to gather feedback and build buy-in

I worked with leaders across sales, marketing, product, engineering, and customer-facing technical teams to both validate our direction and socialize the work.

Putting the ICP to work

Once we had alignment, the ICP became the lens through which we developed product positioning and marketing content, as well as target account lists for campaigns.

The first major campaign we launched based on our new foundation focused on “Architecting for Scale” — a concept we felt directly targeted our buyer persona’s key pain points. We built a full campaign around this theme, with outputs that included a dedicated solution landing page, a case study, a webinar, and several supporting content items.

This initial research also informed the development of Buildkite’s solution content, including pages for Testing at scale, Monorepo mojo, and Bazel orchestration, as well as related campaigns and their independent content items, LinkedIn ads, sales enablement materials, and landing pages.

Results

We were just beginning to analyze the results of the campaigns launched since our company re-launch in October when my role was made redundant at the end of Q1 2025, as part of a broader company restructure. At that time, we’d only just finished connecting all the systems needed for meaningful funnel analysis and had started digging into the data.

Even in those early stages, the difference was clear: having an ICP gave us a shared language and lens. For the first time, we could have grounded conversations about what was working and what wasn’t because we had a stable framework to compare against and iterate on.

This was one of the most rewarding projects I’ve worked on. I learned a huge amount and had the chance to apply my existing skills in a completely new context. It was especially meaningful to contribute to work that helped lay the foundation for Buildkite’s next stage of growth.