Megan Cook: belief

Transcript context

…This is really interesting because again, I think Atlassian is one of the very few companies that has done this so well. And I don't know, this number is absurd. I've never heard of another company that's 15 successful products. I don't know how successful they're, but they're out there and people seem to be... They're being promoted. I guess is there any other advice to share along the lines of if someone is thinking about launching a second product, anything you would suggest they do or think about they may not be thinking about? I think my advice is skied towards the Atlassian case, which is where you're in a 12,000 strong employee company and how do you seed something that you want to run as more with more of a startup kind of mindset. So when you get to this size, you've got quarterly planning and business reviews and all of these different process and you don't necessarily want to put your seed startup through that. It's not quite ready for that kind of thing. So I think the key things here that make it really successful is starting really small with the idea and the solution to be proved and don't add too many people, don't feel pressured to add too many people. I think it's easy to get really excited about the potential and just want to throw four or five teams at it, but that can... We were talking about this stat. That can make things run slower and so you want to protect them. And the second thing is just give them freedom to move really fast and solve those problems in a different way. So there are different expectations. They don't necessarily need to be a part of that process that I was talking about before. This team should just be running hard to prove whether or not the idea's going to work and whether there's product market fit. And for different approaches. If I want to add something to Jira software, but we're talking millions and millions of users there, that thing has to be resilient. It's got to scale. There are all these things that users inherently expect from something like that. But for something small like this, we are proving product market fit. You don't need to think about that initially. So you've got to hold this to a different standard, otherwise you're just going to slow them down way too much. And actually we found that by letting them tackle problems a little differently, we found innovative way of looking at things that we can pull back into our other products. So for example, if you look at Jira Product Discovery, and just the way that it gives more of a spreadsheet kind of view of a list of ideas and things like that, some of the experience there is definitely something that we'll be pulling into Jira software. You mentioned that over the years, Jira has weathered many storms. From my perspective, it feels like it continues to weather many storms incredibly well. One, because there's just endless startups always coming at Jira trying to become the new project management tool that everyone uses. And two, it just feels like people are always dissing on Jira like, "Jira sucks, I want to use something else." On the other hand, it continues to dominate. Many people love it. I'm curious what you believe Atlassian generally has done and your team has done to keep Jira ahead of everyone. And I know you're probably going to say, "We listen to customers better than anyone." So if that's a big part of the answer, definitely share that. But I'm curious, is there anything else people may not be recognizing of just why Jira has been so successful for so long?…

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