Megan Cook: belief

Transcript context

…I don't think you can beat that Mars rover story array. That's a good one. I think when you follow it up with the Canvas story, that one's less interesting now, but it's also amazing. Okay. Sorry. Keep going. So like you said, they are integral to our success. We do obsess over them. We think if we do right by them, then we're going to be going in the right direction. I don't think we've ever had this sense of arrogance of just... No matter how big we are, we've always got this healthy dose of paranoia that we need to keep working on improving things and being better. So to your point about customer feedback, that is a big part of it. We bake in these rituals just to make it super easy for everyone to do that. So the whole company gets an email every week and it's just got a random selection of feedback from our customers. It's got how they rate us and just a quote as well. And so everyone's sort of getting this dose of feedback all the time. We have regular share outs of all of the research that everyone gets. We get in-product feedback. We make it super easy to talk to our customers through social media or LinkedIn or X now. And then we also have a whole community space where customers can have longer conversations with us about different ideas that we're coming up with or feedback that they have for us. So I think that is all massively important for keeping Jira ahead of the pack. I think how we stay ahead in other areas is just that the culture is super, super open to innovation, kind of invites innovation. So we have these hackathons, we call them shepherd. The whole company stops and everyone can play with new ideas or technologies. It's a competition. So the best ideas get visibility. It can get people working with other people that they wouldn't normally. And also the visibility of the ideas helps generate more ideas all over the place. Like I said before, innovation can come from anywhere. So anyone can pitch new ideas or products. And when we see new technologies emerging that we think are going to be really foundational and interesting, we'll carve off a team to go and look at that. So I think we've had an AI team central to Atlassian for a long time, but with the advent of ChatGPT, there's sort of this huge move forward. There's this leak that's happening. And so in my team, I just carved off a small team to go and explore that and see what interesting things that we could do there. I think we don't shy away from tackling subsets of the market that we're seeing that need a bit more love, like the Jira Product Discovery story that we were just talking about a second ago. And we also use our products a lot and that helps us find all of those little problems and makes it really real. We get really excited about the different things that the whole team is working on. We send lots of feedback to each other. I think that's also a really important part of it. Another area is when we look at how we're investing, there's always this pressure to invest in the core business, of course, but we also make sure that we invest in seeding future businesses. And like we're talking about, they might not always work out. there's always this pressure to invest in the core business, of course, but we also make sure that we invest in seeding future businesses. And like we're talking about, they might not always work out. So we had then the Compass and the Atlas example of ones that have worked out, but we also see things through Atlassian inventions. So if there are interesting ideas or technologies, these might support the products later on, that's something that we'll go and seed out there in the market. And that's led to a few acquisitions there as well, which has been really useful. And the last thing is I think I am just really impressed at the way that we stay agile to move towards these different shifts that come up. It always surprises me just how agile we can be. For example, in 2020 we decided to double down on our mission to deliver a world-class cloud experience. And it was like hundreds of people just moved around in Atlassian to make that happen, which was in a very short period of time, which was impressive. And we're not shy about killing things off with their [inaudible 01:03:55]. So I'll give you another example of one of those products that was going through that we ended up killing off. So we had a whiteboard product that we thought would be its own product, sort of like a Jira Product Discovery. And when we came to one of those gates with the team, we realized actually this is more a really useful document type. And so now you'll see that it's a feature in Confluence. It was very quick to make that decision.…

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