Megan Cook: recommendation

Transcript context

…Kind of along the same lines, being fully remote, it is harder to get buy-in on things you're working on I imagine. And something I hear you're great at is getting buy-in, especially getting buy-in on ideas and projects from executives. So I think things that make it extra challenging at Atlassian, there's two CEOs which I didn't know until recently. You're also all very remote and so maybe those two reasons make it extra hard. Plus it's just generally hard to get buy-in on projects that you're working on. What advice do you share with product leaders, PMs that come to you asking for advice on how to get better at getting buy-in for your ideas? Yeah, this can be really hard to get right. I watch a lot of people struggle with this, and you're right, being fully remote can make it a bit more challenging. And then I think also you've got your cross-functional partners that you're working with as this tight-knit team and how do you form that relationship? But I'll start with just general buy-in. Most of the time when people come to me and they want to ask how to get by-in, they've got a date in mind, they've got a particular meeting and they have this idea where they're going to crop this perfect proposal, they're going to present it, everyone's going to give them thumbs up and they win. And that's the wrong attitude I think even to start with to getting buy-in. It's more of a journey. I'll give you an example where I was looking at how do people start their day in Jira and how do people get started in Jira? And we had this idea of we could craft more templates so that we could give people a better way to start with very different use cases when they came into the product. And this could change everything from even just the front homepage where they started all the way to what's happening in product. It would create this really nice flow. Jira is also a platform as well as just Jira software the product. There's actually four different products built on top of it. So when you want to go and change something like that, you're actually changing it for all of these different products. It's not just the one. And so what was really important there was partnering with a whole bunch of different stakeholders. So every product that this could potentially negatively or positively impact, we went to very early with the idea and the proposal and we got their feedback and then we came to them and again and again as we developed it further. So as we got designs, as we got more data, as we tested things out with users, we kept coming back and we take their feedback on board. And so I think creating those partnerships is really important. And also the same can be true at the executive level. So often you go into these meetings where you're giving a proposal and you're trying to get that final yes on the decision. You've got a lot of people in there with a lot of different angles that they can look at that problem and so much good experience to draw on. So your CTO is going to have a totally different way of looking at something and different concerns from your chief marketing officer to your head of design. They're all going to look at things differently and be thinking about it differently. And so if you know that you're going to be having a big impact in someone's space and you want to hear from them, it's good to set that meeting up early when you've got some clarity but it's not fully fleshed out and so that you can fold in some of their concerns because they'll have this much broader view. And that also creates people who will be an advocate for you once you get into that room, that final meeting. o that you can fold in some of their concerns because they'll have this much broader view. And that also creates people who will be an advocate for you once you get into that room, that final meeting. So I think all of those in the lead up, there's a lot of lead up work to getting buy-in that makes sure that you have a good time in that meeting.…

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