For 10 years, EM has been championing b-to-b all-stars, delving into their career journeys, portfolios, best practices and industry forecasts. Meet this year’s crew: The 2026 B-to-B Dream Team.
Jeremy Youett, Head of Proprietary Events, Atlassian
Jeremy Youett has an impressive, and extensive, background in musical theater and stage production. But for his second act, he’s playing the part of a b-to-b event architect.
After studying theater and performing professionally for a few years, Youett moved into entertainment production in his native Australia. But Broadway was calling, so he packed his bags and moved to New York, where he launched his own theater company, and produced on- and off-Broadway shows—to the tune of a Tony Award nomination.
Flash forward seven years, and Youett was ready to move on from the Big Apple. While he was plotting his next move, a client offered him an event position at Microsoft. It was a game changer.
“I thought he was joking because I didn’t even think Microsoft would have event producers. And I said, ‘Look, I don’t think it’s for me, but I will try it. I’ll give it a year,’” Youett explains. “I ended up being there for seven and a half years because I loved it and was able to really grow my career there, learn different event types, formats, audiences, and about the fundamentals of marketing, operations and strategy.”
From Microsoft, he moved on to Smartsheet to take a position as a corporate event production lead, handling everything from the brand’s small-scale roadshows to its large flagship event, Engage.
Now, Youett is managing live experiences on an even bigger scale, serving as head of proprietary events at Australian-American software company Atlassian. He and a team of eight direct reports execute just under 30 first-party events per year, including global product roadshows and two annual Team flagship conferences, one in the U.S. and one in EMEA.
Customers interact with Atlassian’s products in a multitude of ways, so when it comes to attendee engagement, Youett takes a decidedly nuanced approach. The engineers, executives and business users who attend the brand’s various shows each have specific needs, and the event team responds accordingly.
“For builders, it’s more about enablement. It’s about how can we demonstrate their ability to use our products to amplify, augment and energize the work that they do,” Youett says. “For decision-makers, it’s about influencing, it’s about changing minds, it’s about demonstrating new use cases… For business audiences, it’s about making them realize there are new capabilities they can use and deploy that they might not have considered.”
In a similar vein, Youett is hyper-focused on enabling personalized customer experiences at scale. Behind the scenes, for instance, his team is using AI to expedite the creation of the brand’s persona-specific acquisition communications, and deliver more targeted messaging—the impact of which is already being seen at registration.
And on the customer-facing side, he’s dismantling cookie-cutter strategies built for the masses and replacing them with curated experiences. Take Atlassian’s flagship show, where the closing party has transitioned from a 5,000-person concert to a range of offerings, including a lounge, a quiet room, an activity space and a networking area, allowing attendees to engage with whatever format they’re most comfortable with.
As far as measurement goes, Youett’s motto is simple: be consistent. That doesn’t mean using the same metrics to gauge a partner event and a third-party event, “because they’re doing different things at different stages in the funnel,” he says, but rather, ensuring that there are reliable benchmarks in place.
“You want to have some consistent datapoints that enable you to create a baseline for measurement, and then to compare those measurements across programs,” he says. “If it’s an external-facing event, you want to be measuring engaged pipeline and pipeline creation. That’s consistent across all of our first-party events.”
Looking to the future, Youett says that while AI in events is a hot topic, it will soon be viewed as table stakes across touchpoints and operations. But a movement that really has his attention is the transition of large-scale flagship events into regionalized experiences, a strategy he believes yields a better all-around experience for attendees.
“You’re seeing a lot of enterprise companies start to decentralize their flagship events from being one large moment in time, and taking them on the road,” he says. “And that inherently leads to personalization, because you can cater better to cultural nuance, to language and localization needs. You can also personalize to the sales teams’ market needs in more specific, dedicated, curated ways. So I think we’ll keep going in that direction.”
DAY IN THE LIFE:
Photos: Courtesy of Jeremy Youett
