Atlan's answer: Buy what scales. Build what only you know.

The job nobody had a title for yet

Atlan is a data catalog platform. the kind of product that sits at the center of how enterprise data teams understand, govern, and activate their data. It's a technically sophisticated product selling to technically sophisticated buyers. Data engineers, platform leads, heads of data. People who will see through a generic pitch immediately and respond to one that shows you understand what they're actually building.

Jake Biskar's job is to make sure Atlan's AEs and BDRs can have that conversation. His title is Pipeline Operations. His actual role is something the industry has only recently found a name for: GTM engineer.

He started as a seller. Evolved into sales ops. And then watched the tooling evolve alongside him—Snowflake, MCP servers, Claude—until the job stopped looking like ops and started looking like engineering. He does the plumbing and the strategy, often in the same afternoon. From his perspective, you have to get the operations foundation right first, then you earn the right to build on top of it.

"There's all this mundane janitorial stuff, but at the same time, there's all this more complex work that you wouldn't realize you need to fix if you're not in the weeds consistently. Trying to balance those two things is a challenge. But that's the job." — Jake Biskar, Atlan

Before Common Room, Jake was the system. He'd manually surface the intelligence, synthesize it, and route it to reps through Slack. It worked because Jake is exceptionally good at what he does. It didn't scale because nothing that depends entirely on one person ever does. What he needed wasn't more data. He needed a foundation that could hold the weight of what he was trying to build.

Today, he only has one other person on his team, yet he manages a stack that would take most RevOps teams far more headcount to maintain.

What Common Room got right immediately

When Jake brought Common Room into the stack, two things landed fast.

The first was contact prioritization. Atlan sells to technical buyers across large enterprise accounts; accounts with hundreds of contacts, most of whom are irrelevant to the conversation Atlan wants to have. Common Room's scoring surfaced the right people at the top. AI leaders, platform engineers, heads of data. Not through a static filter that someone configured once and forgot about. Through a live, continuously updated ranking that changed what the team looked at first every time they opened an account.

The problem it solved was more acute than it sounds. Before Common Room, reps would navigate to Salesforce, pull up a contact view, and give up. The same thing happened in Outreach. The data was there but finding the right person at the right account was painful enough that the team couldn't be held accountable for basic follow-up tasks on inbound leads. Rep adoption of any contact-level workflow was broken before it started.

"I love the scoring that you guys do. ‘MasterCard has 244 people in here,’ I refreshed the page and all of a sudden the AI leaders are showing up at the top. That changed the day-to-day for our team immediately." — Jake Biskar, Atlan

The second was AI-readiness scoring. Atlan's ICP isn't defined by company size alone. It's defined by how ready a company is to actually use what Atlan sells. Are they investing in AI infrastructure? Are they hiring the right roles? Are they building the kind of data foundation that makes a data catalog worth buying? Jake built an AI-readiness score that answers those questions at the account level, and Common Room is where it surfaces for the team.

The platform earned its way into parts of the organization Jake hadn't targeted—and the expansion wasn't passive. He'd set out to support the full-cycle AEs and remove every barrier between signal and send. When reps started finding the right person at the right account without the usual pain, word spread fast. BDRs wanted licenses. CSMs wanted licenses. Leadership wanted licenses. Supporting fifty sellers evolved into every customer-facing person at Atlan wanting access. The reason, Jake says, is simple: aggregating signals across systems is genuinely painful without a platform built to do it. Once people saw what it felt like when that pain went away, they didn't want to go back.

But there was still a gap. And it was the gap that mattered most.

The problem with signals nobody acts on

The signals were good. Jake knew that. The team knew that. Nobody was questioning whether Common Room's data was accurate or whether the accounts it surfaced were real.

The problem was what happened next.

AEs saw the signal. Understood it was meaningful. And still didn't act. Not because they didn't trust the platform. Because a signal is not the same thing as a reason to call. Knowing that a company visited the docs last Tuesday is information. Knowing that the same company is hiring three platform engineers, that their current stack doesn't include a data catalog, and that two contacts at the director level have been active on the site in the last two weeks: that's a story. That's something a rep can walk into a conversation with.

"People want to disqualify signals, because if they qualify a signal, that means they have to go take action on it. The question isn't whether they trust the data. It's how do you coerce them to pull the thread? How do you stack signals and build a story on why an account is worth their time?" — Jake Biskar, Atlan

Jake tried Common Room's Spark Brief. Spark Brief gave him the right starting point, but Atlan's motion required a level of proprietary context no out-of-the-box summary could carry: the persona definitions, the signal stack-ranking, the value props mapped to each buyer type, the messaging tone, the most current assets from the marketing team.

For most teams, that's where the story ends. They file a product request and wait.

But Jake built the next layer himself.

The build that made the buy worth it

The Chrome extension Jake built sits directly on top of Common Room. It's not a replacement, but rather an extension of what the platform already does, pulling in the signal data and Spark summaries that Common Room generates and combining them with a layer of proprietary context that lives in a GitHub repository his team maintains.

That repository is the context layer the industry hasn't figured out how to standardize yet. It contains markdown files that define Atlan's personas in detail, map value props to each buyer type, specify messaging tone, stack-rank which signals matter most and why, and pull in the latest assets from the marketing team's own GitHub. When a rep opens the extension on a contact, all of that context collapses into a single, actionable brief, and then generates a personalized LinkedIn connect or email sequence, drafted directly to Gmail to avoid the deliverability issues that come with API-based sending.

The distinction Jake draws is important. He didn't build this because Common Room failed. He built it because Common Room gave him a foundation solid enough to build on. The contact data, the scoring, the signal aggregation, the Spark summaries, those are things he would never build himself, because Common Room does them better than he could.

"We would never build a UI for our contact database. We'd never try to summarize everything a contact has done. We'd have to pull in all these tasks and events, and you guys seem to be doing that really, really well. So it's not worth it to us to do that. But the messaging layer? We know the tone, we know the most up-to-date assets, we know the personas. That part is worth building, because we know it better than any vendor could." — Jake Biskar, Atlan

That quote is worth sitting with for a moment. Because it’s more than a clever workaround, it’s a philosophy.

The real answer isn't "don't build." Jake built his own contact database. He built his own scoring model. He thinks that's worth doing because building it forces you to understand your own motion deeply enough to know what actually matters. The thing not worth building is the UI that surfaces it all and the connectivity layer that holds it together. That's what Common Room does.

Don't build the interface. Don't build the system that connects everything. Buy that. Then build the context on top of it that only you could build. That's the distinction, and it's the one most teams miss.

Reps who used to open an account and start from scratch—tabbing between LinkedIn, the CRM, and whatever research they'd done themselves—now open the extension and have everything in one place: who matters at the account, what they've been looking at, and a draft message that already knows what to say. The time between signal and outreach collapsed. The quality of the first touch went up. And for the first time, reps were asking for access to the tool rather than being asked to use it.

Common Room is the foundation, and for Atlan, the Chrome extension was the last mile. Neither works without the other. And the results showed up fast.

What the orchestration layer looks like now

Jake has a view on where GTM infrastructure is headed.

The question GTM used to answer was educational: here's a problem, here's how we solve it, here's why you should care. The question it has to answer now is contextual: here's what we're seeing in your business right now, here's what we think you'll feel in six months, here's whether our approach matches your vision. Enabling that message requires knowing who the account is, what's happening inside it, and why now—pulled together fast enough to be useful. That's a different kind of intelligence than intent data alone. It's intent data plus agentic research plus a system that can surface it before the window closes.

The old orchestration layer—Outreach, Apollo, the traditional SEP stack—was built for a world where volume was the strategy. More sequences. More touchpoints. More activity. That world is over. Buyers are saturated. Generic outreach doesn't get responses. Activity doesn't equal pipeline.

What replaces it isn't a better version of the same thing. It's a different question entirely: who can visualize their accounts most effectively? Who can look at an account and immediately understand what's happening, who matters, what's changed, and what to do about it?

"Common Room is in this really unique spot where there is no orchestration layer anymore. It used to be Outreach, it used to be Apollo, it used to be whatever. Those don't work anymore. Now it's who can visualize their accounts most effectively." — Jake Biskar, Atlan

Jake's Chrome extension is his answer to that question, because it’s built for Atlan's specific motion, on top of Common Room's specific foundation. Every team, he suspects, is going to have to build something like it. Every team is going to have to maintain a GitHub repository that gives their AI context. Every team is going to have to figure out what their context layer looks like.

And the teams that figure it out the fastest will share one thing in common: they’ll know what to buy and what to build. Buy the connectivity layer, buy the UI that surfaces it all, and buy the system that holds it together, then build the context on top of it that only you could build.

Jake figured that out. He went from 50 licenses to 100 users. He built a Chrome extension that his AEs actually use. And he's still, in his own words, trying to put into words exactly why Common Room is the platform he couldn't do without.

The answer is in what he built on top of it.