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Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira)

4 Feb 2024 22 published claims 2 attributable people
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Speakers in the public record

Megan CookLenny Rachitsky

Claim mix

belief 11evaluation 5recommendation 3preference 3

Evidence policy

Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.

Claim ledger

The useful parts, with receipts.

22 published records

01 / recommendation

Recommends Scaling People.

“Look, I have a habit of sending books to everyone who reports to me every year just on a skill they're working on. So I've got a huge list that I actually send out, but the one that I send out the most to new PMs especially is just inspired by Marty Cagan. It holds up really well. It was recommended to me by my first boss, and it's just got a bunch of great tips in there, just great foundational knowledge. More recently, what I've been sending out for my managers is Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. I think that just came out within the last year actually, but it's just got an incredible amount of really useful tactical things, templates, all sorts of things that you can put into practice.”
Speaker
Megan Cook
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

02 / belief

You know that there's going to be a disagreement and it makes it much better. And I think the relationship we all have is so much better because we get on top of these things early.

“You know that there's going to be a disagreement and it makes it much better. And I think the relationship we all have is so much better because we get on top of these things early.”
Speaker
Megan Cook
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

03 / belief

I think the number of startups that enter this space, just so it shows how important the problem is that we solve and that problem of teamwork and collaboration.

“I think the number of startups that enter this space, just so it shows how important the problem is that we solve and that problem of teamwork and collaboration.”
Speaker
Megan Cook
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

08 / belief

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Megan Cook
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

09 / belief

I think that's really important. When you keep it scrappy and small in the beginning, it doesn't feel like it's as big of a bet, but that gives you the opportunity to really prove that the direction that you're going in could pay off.

“I think that's really important. When you keep it scrappy and small in the beginning, it doesn't feel like it's as big of a bet, but that gives you the opportunity to really prove that the direction that you're going in could pay off.”
Speaker
Megan Cook
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

11 / belief

I think in addition to that is having that mindset of being open to not necessarily coming up with the right solution, it's more about solving for the problem or the opportunity.

“I think in addition to that is having that mindset of being open to not necessarily coming up with the right solution, it's more about solving for the problem or the opportunity.”
Speaker
Megan Cook
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

12 / belief

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Megan Cook
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

13 / evaluation

That is absolutely the best test of whether or not what you thought was going to happen will actually happen. And so I think when you come to the meeting going, okay, here's the top-back so we actually know, and here's the hypotheses and here's my plan to prove or disprove them, then you're exposing your idea for people to go, oh, here's more that I know about that hypotheses, or here's some data that you don't have or here's another way to think about it.

“That is absolutely the best test of whether or not what you thought was going to happen will actually happen. And so I think when you come to the meeting going, okay, here's the top-back so we actually know, and here's the hypotheses and here's my plan to prove or disprove them, then you're exposing your idea for people to go, oh, here's more that I know about that hypotheses, or here's some data that you don't have or here's another way to think about it.”
Speaker
Megan Cook
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

14 / recommendation

Every time things were coming to leadership to give feedback on, it was just sort of painfully polished. And I think once it gets to that level, that's a really bad time to give feedback, because it probably means that a whole ton of work has gone into it, and you might waste a whole bunch of work if you have to correct direction or make significant changes.

“Every time things were coming to leadership to give feedback on, it was just sort of painfully polished. And I think once it gets to that level, that's a really bad time to give feedback, because it probably means that a whole ton of work has gone into it, and you might waste a whole bunch of work if you have to correct direction or make significant changes.”
Speaker
Megan Cook
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

15 / preference

Yeah, absolutely. It's a really good question because it's not easy and we definitely went through a whole bunch of pitfalls at the beginning, but we're really firm believers that you don't need to be in the office to build world-class products.

“Yeah, absolutely. It's a really good question because it's not easy and we definitely went through a whole bunch of pitfalls at the beginning, but we're really firm believers that you don't need to be in the office to build world-class products.”
Speaker
Megan Cook
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

16 / preference

I love that also gives those PMs a chance to, one, learn the skill better themselves because they're teaching it, and also just teach and present in public speaking and all that stuff.

“I love that also gives those PMs a chance to, one, learn the skill better themselves because they're teaching it, and also just teach and present in public speaking and all that stuff.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

18 / evaluation

And we also had great conversations with our customers. It was the kinds of conversations that are really rich and really helpful, but so painful to listen to and go through because you're seeing somebody really struggle with something that you thought was going to bring them so much value.

“And we also had great conversations with our customers. It was the kinds of conversations that are really rich and really helpful, but so painful to listen to and go through because you're seeing somebody really struggle with something that you thought was going to bring them so much value.”
Speaker
Megan Cook
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

19 / recommendation

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Megan Cook
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

21 / evaluation

I think that's a really good example actually, the CSAT example, because sometimes you can get caught up in let's add value, add value, add value to the product, but if the customer aren't satisfied with what you built, or in our case we found that one of the core reasons was the usability, it wasn't where it needed to be.

“I think that's a really good example actually, the CSAT example, because sometimes you can get caught up in let's add value, add value, add value to the product, but if the customer aren't satisfied with what you built, or in our case we found that one of the core reasons was the usability, it wasn't where it needed to be.”
Speaker
Megan Cook
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast
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