Buildkite started in Australia over a decade ago as a hybrid-first, secure CI/CD platform. Trusted by engineering teams at companies like Airbnb, Shopify, Uber, and Canva, by 2024 Buildkite had grown into a mature, multi-product software delivery platform, but its external messaging hadn’t kept up. Despite an impressive customer base, Buildkite was still described as the “best-kept secret in CI/CD.” Our value wasn’t coming through clearly, especially for new buyers.

The solution? A full relaunch: new messaging, new website, and clearer positioning, all underpinned by our newly-defined Ideal Customer Profile and interviews with champion customers to better understand what made Buildkite great.

I was part of the small cross-functional team responsible for shipping this relaunch. It was a high-pressure, high-collaboration effort that drew on my background in product and team facilitation, and added to my toolbelt as a product marketer.

Project coordination and execution

As one of the few people who had worked across product, marketing, and engineering — and with a strong track record leading large projects — I stepped into a central program management role.

I ran weekly launch check-ins with stakeholders across product marketing, growth, design, engineering, sales, and leadership, as well as coordinating multiple external teams. My job was to keep everyone aligned, on-track, and unblocked.

I also owned our comprehensive workback plan covering rows and rows of deliverables over 3+ months. This allowed me to identify dependencies early, chase inputs across functions, and clearly define what was essential for go-live versus what could follow after.

Writing the website

Partway through the launch, our lead content writer moved to a new role with another company. I stepped in to fill the gap, ultimately writing the remainder of the copy for the new website, including homepage messaging, platform positioning, and several solution pages. This work was then leveraged for our first call pitch decks and other marketing collateral.

On reflection, this was some of the most difficult writing I’ve done. Nailing communication on technical topics that’s accurate, succinct, and memorable while managing stakeholder feedback is no easy feat! I relied on my background in meeting facilitation to run structured feedback sessions and distinguish between subjective preferences and business-critical input.

To accelerate alignment, I partnered with our design engineering team to create live in-browser previews of in-progress work. These versions weren’t pixel-perfect, but they allowed stakeholders to see the copy in context, which in turn helped them give more concrete, specific feedback that sped decision-making.

I also used my frontend skills to implement copy and layout updates directly in code, rather than waiting on designers or engineers. This avoided bottlenecks and sped up iteration, earning kudos from the design engineering team.

Spotting the pricing gap

One of the most critical contributions I made during the relaunch wasn’t originally on the project plan.

As we built out content for our relaunch, I realized we were missing a fundamental piece: how Buildkite’s new platform pricing would work, both from a product and a sales perspective.

At that time, no one at Buildkite owned our cross-product pricing narrative, and so it had slipped through the cracks. Without a clear model for pricing and packaging, we couldn’t explain Buildkite’s value — not on the website, in collateral, or in sales conversations.

I raised the issue and pushed for internal alignment. This led to a series of conversations between product, sales, and leadership to clarify our new platform pricing (just in time).

Once the details were confirmed, I adjusted our existing pricing page to reflect the new model, striving to be as correct as possible within the existing layout given the time constraint. It wasn’t flashy work, but it was some of the most important.

This surfaced a larger gap: pricing enablement. In the following weeks, I partnered with the sales and product teams to build a training deck and sales guides to help the entire go-to-market org understand and communicate the new pricing model with confidence.

Results

We launched the new site and brand in October 2024 to strong internal and external feedback. While funnel analytics were still being connected when I left Buildkite in early 2025, we’d already heard from AEs and customers that the new messaging was clearer, more compelling, and easier to sell.