ClickUp's Adjacent Teams Strategy
Tommy Wang, Chief Business Officer at ClickUp, on the rise of the all-in-one
The core move is to enter through the teams that feel the pain of cross functional coordination first, then pull engineering or sales in later. Product managers, product marketers, customer success, and revenue ops all spend their day translating work across systems and handoffs, so a shared workspace solves an immediate problem before ClickUp has to beat Jira in developer depth or Salesforce in sales standardization.
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Engineering is a natural land point for ClickUp, but not because it replaces the whole dev stack on day one. The better wedge is the layer around engineering, where roadmap planning, launch coordination, docs, approvals, and status updates involve product and marketing teams that already need to work with engineering but do not want to live inside Jira.
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This is the same expansion pattern used by broader workflow platforms. monday.com launched monday dev for product and engineering, while separately packaging marketing workflows on the same underlying platform. The play is not one giant rip and replace, it is shared adoption by adjacent teams until the platform becomes the default place where work gets coordinated.
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The same logic applies on the go to market side. RevOps exists to connect marketing, sales, and support operations into one system of process and reporting, which makes ops teams a better control point than frontline sellers. ClickUp can sit beside HubSpot or Salesforce, own project execution and handoffs, then expand as more revenue teams use it every day.
Going forward, the winners in work software are likely to be the products that become the coordination layer across specialized tools, not the ones that insist on replacing every specialist workflow immediately. If ClickUp keeps winning the adjacent teams first, it can turn product, marketing, and ops adoption into a path toward deeper share in engineering and sales over time.