ClickUp's Surround Strategy
Tommy Wang, Chief Business Officer at ClickUp, on the rise of the all-in-one
The key point is that ClickUp is trying to enter high budget teams by first winning the people who work next to them, not by beating the incumbent head on. In practice that means product, product marketing, customer ops, and revenue ops adopt ClickUp for planning, docs, dashboards, and workflows, then engineering or sales joins because the surrounding teams already run in the same system. That is a cheaper expansion path than building a fully vertical product for every major function.
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Engineering and sales are hard beachheads for different reasons. Engineering buying is bottom up and rewards best in breed tools like Jira. Sales buying is top down and rewards familiar, simple systems. Both have large budgets, which also means dense competition.
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This is different from Airtable’s enterprise play. Airtable has used prebuilt packages like Airtable for Marketing to raise retention and seat value. ClickUp is leaning more on one flexible data model, shared views, and adjacent team adoption than on packaging separate vertical products first.
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The broader market is moving this way. ClickUp, Monday, and Notion all push a good enough bundle that keeps tasks, docs, chat, and workflow data in one place, while specialists still hold the deepest users. The prize is not one team, it is owning the handoff between teams.
From here, the likely path is more opinionated solutions built on top of the same core platform, especially where adjacent teams already share data. AI makes that easier, because issue tracking, CRM updates, planning, and support work can increasingly surface inside the interface a team already uses, which strengthens the surround strategy over time.