Shaun Clowes
Chief Product Officer at Confluent. Previously CPO at MuleSoft (acquired by Salesforce) and Metromile. Built Atlassian’s first dedicated B2B growth team in 2012 — one of the earliest product-led growth practices in a B2B company. Also taught two Reforge courses: Retention + Engagement and Data for PMs. Contact via LinkedIn or @ShaunMClowes on X.
Clowes was an early practitioner of applying consumer-style growth discipline to B2B SaaS, and his work at Atlassian prefigured the product-led growth movement by a decade.
Key positions
- Real B2B SaaS lock-in lives in business rules and workflow configuration, not the UI. AI agents that replace the UI layer do not dissolve the lock-in — the business logic still needs to live somewhere.
- Data is a compass, not a GPS: it points a direction, it does not give an answer.
- LLMs are bounded by data quality and recency; information decay rate determines the ceiling of AI-assisted products in any domain.
- T-shaped is the wrong metaphor for careers; most people are scribble-shaped — the bingo card career (deliberately filling in gaps) is a more honest and productive frame.