Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery)

[00:00] I've been in the product management team at Atlassian for roughly 10 years now. I worked on HipChat and Stride, and more recently I started Deer Product Discovery. Why is it so hard to start new products, go zero to one within large companies? The company has a tendency to over-invest. Startups have the benefit of starving, and so you need to create scarcity. Like what we try to do is remind everyone, things are going to fail. Let's not drag the rest of the company into it. Sounds like one of the biggest lessons is super silo sort of team. [00:30] the autonomy to test the things that we needed, that is not going to scale, that is not going to respect our design guidelines. The biggest challenge I think a lot of companies have is just like, it's been six months, no one wants this, we're going to kill it. How do you protect that? Be very clear about what we're testing, doing that with data, doing that with personal customer stories. Give people a sense of velocity and speed. No one wants to fight with a high-speed train. [00:54] Today, my guest is Tanguy Coussaint. This is a really unique and important episode. [01:00] because we get into something you don't hear much on podcasts like this. [01:03] The real talk challenges of trying to innovate and build 0 to 1 at a large company like Atlassian. [01:10] Tongi has been at Atlassian for over 10 years and has worked on a bunch of internal big bets, some that have worked and some that have not, including products like HipChat, which I was a huge fan of back in the day, also a product called Status Page, and most recently Jira Product Discovery, which is one of the fastest growing products in Atlassian history that Tongi led from idea to launch.

[01:40] org, including how they structured their internal incubation program called Point A. There's a ton of gold in this episode and a bunch of really interesting stories, which is part of the reason that it went this long. It's the longest episode I've done yet. If you're looking to create change in your organization and foster more innovation, this episode will be worth your time. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. [02:10] With that, I bring you Tangi Croissant. [02:16] tongi thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast [02:20] Thank you very much for welcoming me here Lenny, I'm super, actually super proud to be [02:25] on this podcast i've been a huge fan whenever i get the chance that isn't to you when i drive somewhere so [02:30] What we're going to be talking about in this episode is we're going to be talking about building new products and going zero to one within larger companies. And in particular, the pain and the challenges that come along with that, but also the lessons that you've learned from doing this many times and seeing it done many times. You've seen a lot of this happening at Atlassian. You've been there for over 10 years at this point. And Atlassian has, I don't know, like over a dozen different product lines at this point, something like that. [03:00] people come to you asking for advice on how to build zero to one within a large company. So let me just start with a general question of just, could you just share a bit about your history of building zero to one and just seeing zero to one happening within Atlassian?

[03:14] Yeah, so like you said, I've been in the product management team at Atlassian for roughly 10 years now. [03:20] And I've been working mainly on bootstrapping new things. [03:25] So it was initially a journey to start the cloud developer ecosystem. So developers can build apps on top of the Atlassian platform and sell them on the Atlassian marketplace. I worked on HeapChat and Stride. [03:38] Hipshot was one known straight, less so. We were trying to win the enterprise communications market, before Slack and Microsoft Teams came about. [03:47] I did lead a business case to invest more in IT operations, got nowhere with it, then we acquired [03:53] status page, obsceni, [03:55] and something I tried to do, but didn't quite get off the ground. And more recently, I started GR Product Discovery, which was part of our internal incubator for two to three years, and came out of the incubator and generally available a year ago. [04:12] So my track record at Atlassian has been 50/50 at best. So, GRP Discovery is actually my first, what I would call, big success here. That one worked, but it was hard, and all the ones that I worked on before [04:28] were really hard to [04:29] And that's the kind of stuff that really bothered me for a super long time. And the good thing is working on a product for product managers. I got to talk to a lot of product managers and [04:38] across all sorts of industries in the past three to four years. And I realized that 50/50 is actually not that bad. Awesome. And I know there's going to be a lot of real talk in this conversation. I'm excited to share and hear all these stories.

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[06:32] authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at WorkOS.com to learn more. That's WorkOS.com. [07:02] you [07:03] Just broadly, why is it so hard in your experience to start? [07:07] new products go zero to one within large companies. What have you seen are kind of the biggest challenges and hurdles generally? [07:13] Yeah, so on the opportunity side, so Atlassian, 300,000 customers. [07:20] We play in a whole bunch of different markets, everything in the collaboration space. [07:25] We have a lot of markets that we play in, which means that we've got a lot of competitors. But basically, when we look at the areas we could go in, there's an endless list of areas that we could go in, play and have a decent chance to win. [07:39] Much harder to do if you're a startup. Like the breadth that we've got makes it easier to try and find areas where we could expand into. [07:47] We're not starving like a smaller company, so we can actually afford to [07:52] try to play somewhere, to do some bets, to have some of them fail and some of them succeed. [07:58] So that's amazing. Now our customers, I said 300,000, the thing that I admire the most about the Atlassian business model is,

[08:09] It's very broad. It's across small and medium-sized companies. We have startups using our products, and we've got also enterprises and very large enterprises using the same products, which means that there's a lot of areas where we could find a niche and go after it and expand progressively into all these areas. [08:26] massive distribution potential that comes with that. [08:29] When I worked on your product discovery, I didn't start with, "Okay, I'm going to need to start finding [08:34] product managers and it's going to be hard to find them. No, they were already all using Jira. Atlassian is a company that has a relatively deep organization hierarchy. [08:44] Thank you. [08:45] but relatively flat decision-making. [08:48] So it's more like imagine a network of key decision makers across the organization. It doesn't really matter the job title or whether you are a manager of people or not. The decisions are made by people who drive change. So there's a lot of empowerment that comes from that. [09:04] But also, it's a mix of top-down, bottom-up, [09:07] happiness, I'd say. And so it can feel really chaotic at first, but once you know how to navigate it, it's actually pretty easy to [09:16] go and try to go after something that you care about. [09:20] And of course, we're a big company. [09:22] So there's lots of ways we can get help. Corporate development, research, analysts that we can talk to whenever we want to explore something. Thousands of customers that, you know, I just have to put something in the AdLassian community group. [09:36] and get hundreds of people replying to talk to me from one day to the next.

[09:39] Thank you. [09:40] So that's [09:41] Like, that's amazing. Any startup would want that. This sounds like how can anything not work when you try when you launch a new product, you have 300,000 potential customers to launch it to. You have all the resources to build it. It sounds like decision making is is efficient. Relatively, it's flat. You have all these different. [10:00] customer segments that use all these different versions, product lines of Atlassian. Just like all of the opportunity possible. [10:08] to launch new products and still many things do not work out. So I think this is a really important point. I think many big companies are in this like, we have so much opportunity. Everything we're going to build is going to just go, it's going to grow like crazy because we have everything we need, but still it doesn't work out. And that's why I think what we're going to talk about is going to be so important. [10:27] It's going to be a bit of therapy for me. Hopefully, people out there could go, "Okay, it's not just me having a hard time." It can happen in companies like Atlassian too. So yeah, let's talk about the challenges for that. [10:42] So. [10:43] You want to start a new thing. [10:45] This thing is going to take time. [10:48] And you need to be able to have that time for the time it takes until you can prove whether there is a thing or not. [10:56] The thing inside Atlassian is that the path for success is [10:59] super high for a new bed. [11:03] Like if you come in and you create a product and it's got a hundred customers, it's gonna be... [11:07] It's going to look cute.

[11:10] Right, so remember we serve startups and enterprises, we have self-service and sales, we've got all these motions that are in place for our bigger products. A $100 million business is a good start. [11:22] basically. In most companies out there, like a hundred million dollar business is a home run. For us, it's not like that. We're trying to build businesses that grow really big and keep growing big over time. [11:35] Now, [11:37] Evaluating success, [11:39] can look very different between early stage [11:43] and establish products. And so for a long time at Atlassian, we were treating everything a little bit equally. [11:51] in that the metrics for success for the same. So, for example, things like mafia active users, [11:56] is the way that you, for a long time we looked at you, go, is that product being successful or not? [12:02] But if you're building an "internal startup," your monthly active user number should look very low for quite some time, [12:11] up until you know that your product is ready to serve [12:13] the vast majority of the customers that you want to put it in front of, so that they don't just look at it and go, "It's not ready for me." They're going to try it and then they're going to churn and it's going to take forever to claim them back. [12:24] Thank you. [12:25] So that makes it pretty challenging to try and start new things, unless we've got the right metrics and processes and everything internally that can give room and breathing space for the bats to succeed internally. And for many years, we were not there.

[12:42] We started getting there more recently with the start of point A, which was our internal incubator program, which is [12:49] where my latest that was successful, the ones before didn't have that, and I really struggled. [12:54] from that. And I see many companies struggling with that exact aspect. Amazing. So let's dive into an actual story. There's three that I want to talk about. There's HipChat, which you mentioned, there's Status Page, and then there's the product you're working on now, Jira Product Discovery. So with HipChat, funny story, I loved HipChat. I was a huge user of HipChat at my startup back in the day. I can never forget the billboard that you all put out promoting HipChat, where this little stick figure meme guy, and it just said, [13:24] use HipChat. And I thought that was the funniest thing. And the product was so delightful. There's just all these little emojis in there. And the idea with HipChat for Atlassian was basically to become the Slack killer, right? [13:36] That was the vision. Oh, you just killed me. We were here way before Slack. Okay. You see, first mover advantage, amazing product. Of course. It was an acquisition for Atlassian. It was an acquisition. Awesome. So let's talk about what went wrong with HipChat. What did you learn? Oh, no. The company has the tool that could almost have a... [13:57] Okay. Yeah. This is the therapy. The therapy session begins. Yeah, it's going to stop right there. Me and everyone else from the HipChat team, I can tell you. Okay, so yes, HipChat was an acquisition team of 20 people or so. It was Slack before Slack was there. Great traction and lots of... It was a darling with startups.

[14:18] It was a new way to collaborate back then. [14:20] There were a few of these smaller apps that were trying to do this thing. I remember actually joining Atlassian. [14:26] And I came from... [14:29] Before that, I was working with financial services, banks, and stuff like that. And we were making meetings to talk about stuff or going to someone's desk to talk about stuff. And I joined this company where my colleagues, who sit on the same floor as me and on the same table, we talk over the computer via chat. And I often felt weird at first, like looking over my shoulder to the person I'm currently talking to. And we're having an argument, but we're doing it with text. [14:59] born in the stack world, but it was a major change back then. Yeah, I remember that. I remember that. I was in the same office with my team and we're using HipChat to chat and it felt strange. Now it's completely normal. [15:09] It's just normal and Heapchat was one of the first to move there. Slack [15:15] came out of nowhere. The company actually initially was focused more on gaming, and they really took the market by storm. The growth numbers were dizzying when we're looking at them. And so at some point, like the hip chat was left relatively alone for a while inside the Atlassian, so you know you're doing something good, so keep going. And so, you know, you're doing something good, so keep going. [15:34] Keep going after it. [15:36] But with Slack, we now had to [15:39] try to go bigger. So we started this thing called HipChat Go Big. That was the name of the project? HipChat Go Big? Yeah, HipChat Go Big. And then it was HipChat Next Gen. There was a few different.

[15:51] Anyway, very clear. HipChat go big. I love it. Go big. But it was really a go big. Like lots of new developers, lots of new product managers, designers, like. [16:00] the full company behind this product. [16:03] Canada. [16:03] We tried to grow it very aggressively for a product that was [16:07] that did not change that fast before it had reached like good product market fit already, hundreds of thousands of users on a daily basis, and all of a sudden you get a lot of people who want to make changes to it to compete against this new threat. [16:21] The platform is not so ready for so many people to [16:26] work on it, and so we got to the inevitable [16:29] "Okay, it's too much tech tech, we can't do much about it, so we made the decision to rewrite it." So, there's lots of literature around there on should you do a rewrite, should you not do a rewrite? You ask me now, I tell you never. That's what most of the advice is, never do a rewrite, and people still do it. Never do a rewrite, and there's good reasons for that. [16:48] But basically, we did that and out of it came out actually a new product called a Stride, [16:55] could include hip chat next gen. [16:58] The problem is that the product was great, but by the time we were done, [17:02] Slack was just miles ahead of us. [17:06] At that point, Microsoft launched Teams. [17:09] And I don't know if you remember this moment where Slack put an ad in the New York Times, copying the Apple versus Microsoft thing from... [17:17] Ages before going, you know, welcome to the game, welcome to the party, we'll welcome new competitors and stuff like that. And like Slack got pretty much destroyed by Teams. We saw it coming because it was like Microsoft distribution advantage. Everyone in office is going to get it.

[17:33] They're giving it for free as part of Office. It was unbundled, I think, like a few months ago. Which is ironic because in theory, Atlassian also has that same advantage. [17:42] Right. Like you have all these products, you could bundle it. [17:46] We are going to talk about that actually in a minute because that's one of the, that was our, um, [17:53] What helped us? [17:55] how we thought we would win, and it was how I think we lost. Amazing. Let's get it. So anyway, this all happened, and in the end, we executed the market. We sold, keep track. [18:05] and stride to Slack and basically exited the enterprise communications market [18:10] Just to double down on that, you sold that to Slack and now Salesforce, basically. That's the word ended. I don't know if people know that. [18:19] Yeah, it was actually... [18:21] It was noticed by the market, [18:23] in that as soon as we did that, [18:25] our stock price went up, which was, I think it was $60 back then, and it went up to $70. Oh, wow. And I mean, that really sucked for us. [18:37] the team working on it. [18:39] It's like, so first no one tells you, but failure, [18:43] Like everyone tells you failure is great because you learn so many things, but failure to start with really sucks. None of us here were really happy about this on the team because we had spent [18:53] years, for my part it was three years, but the people who were before that on DeepChat was longer than that, obsessing over it. [19:01] obsessing over every detail, every customer conversation, every solution, should we rewrite, should we delete, should we let so many intense conversations

[19:10] And from one day to the next, it didn't matter. [19:13] anymore. We had worked on something [19:16] And that's it. That's the end. I'm sure many startups have been through that before. For me, it was the first time it felt that personal. [19:23] And the market the next day went, "Oh, you're stopping doing what you're doing? Awesome. Here's 10 more dollars to your stock price." So yeah, that's a personal side to all the stories for us. There was a bit like the seven stages of grief after we shut down the chat. How long was that period of mourning and stages for you and the team? [19:42] It lasted a few months, so... [19:44] When the decision, I was not part of the decision making team for shutting down KeepChat. I was one of the product managers on the team leading one of the three pillars. [19:53] And I got brought in, I think it was [19:56] a month or two, a month before it was announced to the team to go, "Hey, it's only [20:01] By the way, just so you know, Hitchat is no more, and now your mission is to find [20:07] a new mission for the team after that. And we basically spend the next [20:13] two, three months trying to make sure that the squads were created to fully own what they do there, to make sure that they are the ones talking to the customers, the other ones trying to come up with strategies, trying to come up with solutions and [20:25] and everything in that area, as long as it was people interacting with Atlassian products [20:30] On other surfaces, everything was fair game, and so it was a... [20:35] There was a lot of ups and downs and everything. But I think it took about two or three months before we got back to a new rhythm. And some people, when we talk about it, were still scarred by it, basically. So what are some lessons from that experience?

[20:51] Yeah, so the main one that I personally got from this, and it's back to the [20:57] hypothesis that you talked about, which we have all these successful products, we can expand into this one, which is and I caught it, but it's just myself, right? Don't eat your own bullshit, which is a mix of two things. [21:11] We've got company value. [21:13] that says open company, no bullshit. So we need to be able to talk about the things like they are. And we don't try to make things sound smarter than they are. We don't try to hide the truth. We go after that truth and we don't hide stuff from each other. We share with everyone. We are open by default. [21:29] So that's one of the values. [21:30] And we do a lot of dog fooding, so eat your own dog food. So we do test our own software a lot. And I've noticed that sometimes there are things that we do, [21:41] where we tend to believe stuff, [21:43] because it's worked for us before. [21:46] And we kind of have this assumption that it's going to keep working for us forever. [21:51] The founders keep telling us like what took us here won't take us there. That's kind of a thing we keep hearing over and over again. But it's very easy for teams when they see success of something to think that, [22:03] It's successful. [22:05] because of X, but X is not validated. [22:08] So that's where we go back to [22:11] The topic we've got today, which is [22:13] Why is doing this in a successful company harder sometimes? Well, at first, it was successful with a playbook. [22:21] And the playbook was:

[22:23] we've got people in like developers or tech or IT [22:27] They choose Atlassian Apps. [22:29] They love them? [22:31] They start to recommend them to people in the business. [22:34] and we start to see adoption, like bottom-up adoption across the company before people decide to standardize on Atlassian. [22:42] and [22:43] we made the bet that [22:45] We can [22:46] Apply this paybook to this market. [22:49] Thank you. [22:50] Thank you. [22:51] which is basically we can find people to use Jira, introduce HipChat, and then people would go into HipChat first in tech teams and then it will expand into business teams and it will go world to world, basically from that. [23:04] Thank you. [23:04] The thing is, we didn't... [23:06] In my opinion, do enough to validate that assumption, ready enough, [23:11] And we did a lot of work, a lot of work. [23:15] even on other things, even when faced with [23:19] signals that this might not work. I do remember talking with a lot of customers who were like, "Well, we've got the IT is on heap chat, but the business prefers Slack." [23:31] And then we started to see those businesses [23:34] Choosing Slack. [23:35] which is the initially it was like the developers try things and they like it and then everyone starts to adopt. In that case, Slack managed to create a very strong fan base in roles that will not take an IT. It was the moment where the consumerization of apps, that trend was starting to get really high. Slack really wrote that and they focus everything in their experience to catch that. They gamified onboarding. They focused a lot more on the look and feel.

[24:05] pleasant modern functional to use [24:08] There's a lot of stuff that we learned since then from what they did. We had missed that. [24:12] that part and the part that I took personally from that is that there's a lot of assumptions in what made it successful it doesn't mean that it's going to work [24:23] Just to understand what you're saying, which is really interesting that Atlassian was really successful selling basically to the buyer within the org, like the IT team for because they had everything they need. They checked all the checkboxes, but it turned out. [24:36] In the Slack case, it was the users that ended up having the most influence over what tool they adopted. [24:42] So I'd actually phrase it more as both were going after the users. [24:46] Atlassian was going after the users and tech teams. [24:49] Slack was going after the users and business teams. [24:51] In both cases, what happened was a bottom-up adoption. And the people on the other side, the business, were like, we prefer, like the developers, they prefer the heap chat. Like we did a lot of work. [25:03] in the streams I was working on, we're integrating with every developer tooling out there to make sure that every tool that they use goes into HipChat and from HipChat back to those tools. And basically they can do a lot of work by seeing an activity stream in HipChat. [25:17] Business? Not so excited by this. Emojis, a lot of other things that may, at some point, I remember we were thinking those things were trivial. [25:27] No, they were not trivial. It was just like a different approach for using the tool by a different set of users that we did not talk enough to. So the lesson here, don't underestimate the challenge you'll have convincing a new segment to buy your thing. You may think they're close or similar, but they're probably not.

[25:45] Yeah, that's one of them. The other one is [25:49] What took your career? Who's not going to take you there? [25:52] And so go back and try to explain why. [25:56] You are successful today. [25:57] and then if you try if you think you can use the same thing on the next thing [26:02] Find ways to validate it. Find ways to test it. [26:05] Don't just go and build on those assumptions. That's the main thing I [26:09] I got out of this ordeal, basically. Yeah, for the stuff I did after. How would you do that? How would you go about and test it? Is it user research? Is it the PMs talking to potential users? What would you have done there? [26:22] For example, when we started your product discovery, which is--so maybe I should introduce this for a second--it's [26:28] It's a product for product managers, which is mainly used for prioritization and road mapping. [26:33] So people use Jira to... [26:36] Plan and track. [26:38] work when it's committed. We wanted to create a space before that so people can debate priorities, [26:44] between with everyone that should be involved in that prioritization process, whether it be the developers, designers, so people in the product team, or people outside of it, customer success, salespeople, support, leadership, and so on and so forth. So when we started that, we thought, okay, the product managers are already in Jira, [27:04] You know what? We can reach them. [27:06] right? So we create the tool and then we distribute it from Jira. We could have gone down the path of [27:12] building that and then starting to distribute it. Instead, we did things like before we brought a single line of code,

[27:19] put an ad inside a Jira newsletter going, "Hey, [27:23] We've got this thing for product managers coming up. [27:25] And then we had a website that, before we had any line of code written, that said, "Hey, product managers, [27:32] Your job is hard, we want to help. [27:36] Put your name here if you want to join us on the journey, that kind of thing. And that's what we saw. I think it was in two weeks. We got more than 3,000 signups to that wait list. [27:45] So we're like, OK, cool. Validation of demand. So we are talking to [27:48] people who are interested and we can reach them. That's one example of the things that I tried later just to make sure that we [27:57] are we validate the hypothesis that we've got much earlier on in the game, basically, and not once it's too late. Awesome. That's an awesome, very tactical example. [28:09] Yeah, most of those are like, none of what I'm going to talk about today is revolutionary. A lot of it is just trying to apply like... [28:16] asking the right question at the right time and trying to go by whatever means to answer it really. Any other lessons from the HipChat experience before we shift to a different product? [28:26] I've got two. I'm gonna do them quickly. The first one is [28:31] Competitive myopia? [28:33] Don't fall for it. At some point, you know, the Slack was really gaining ground and gaining ground and capturing more of the mindshare. And everyone on Twitter was always loving them, even when they had outages, they were getting congratulated. I was like, this is fucking mad. But the love was so strong.

[28:52] And the way we tended to revert back is to our functional side of the brain going, "Okay, [28:57] we just need this one more feature. We just need this one more feature. We just need this one more feature. And we ended up reacting to whatever the competitor was doing, which I think is really, really bad, because that's when we lost basically what made HipChat successful so far, which is to serve [29:13] some users really well. [29:15] And instead, we ended up [29:17] not fast following based on what a competitor was doing, which is super bad because your competitor, like if you think of what they do as an iceberg, like the [29:25] the top side what comes out of the water is what they've shipped in terms of features, but it's based on all this stuff that they've built in terms of research and understanding of their customer base. [29:34] and everything else. And so you're just seeing the manifestation of what they were thinking maybe a year ago. [29:41] based on what they're shipping now. So, but we got there and [29:45] Now, whenever I work, I tend to try and ignore competition, other than watching key every three months or so, seeing what came out. [29:54] If there's anything we should be worried about, afraid of, [29:57] stuff like that, but really just try to disconnect all the creative process and the research process from what competitors do, because it just, you can't compare. The market is huge. There are hundreds of thousands of companies out there. Not everyone has the same needs. We serve a particular set of segments. We would do better learning from them to then expand to the others than watching what competition is doing. And this is advice you give to your teams, just like ignore the competition, maybe pay attention to big announcements and things like that.

[30:26] We always see in the Slack channels, team sharing, okay, they just did this with AI, they just did that. So it keeps coming up and I... [30:33] And so we often have discussions to go back, okay, to [30:37] OK, let's watch again. [30:39] what the [30:41] the user interviews that we did over the past three weeks. [30:44] Let's watch them all together now and remember who we're building this for. So there's a lot of trying to anchor back on [30:51] what we know and how [30:54] basically building our own journey on it. And I think it's much richer for everyone to be involved. I love that. So you're finding that when there's a big announcement and everyone's like, oh my God, look what Slack's doing or look what this company's doing. It's like, okay, now let's spend a little time reminding ourselves what our customers have been asking us to do. And let's watch a couple of user interviews. [31:10] And even when there is something that competitors do that is right, remember we're playing the long run and we don't always need to be [31:17] First and shinier. [31:20] We need to make sure that [31:22] People have a problem. We solve this problem. They tell us we solve this problem for them. They are delighted when we solve these problems for them. And so that's the stuff we should be obsessing about. I love that. [31:34] And you said you had one more lesson from this experience. Yeah, the last one, startups have the benefit of starving. Right? We're a big company, we can throw a lot of resources at something that we're excited about. So this notion of we're revealed e-chat was coupled with we're revealed e-chat and [31:52] We'll do this on a new platform. [31:54] which is microservices and everything that we build can be reused across all the other products. So the chat text box that you've got, it's an editor.

[32:03] that can be open full screen and it's a Confluence Editor, with everything that you can do there. It's built as a platform component, which is amazing when the platform is there when you start building the product. [32:13] Where it's really difficult is when you try to do the two at the same time. [32:17] That part? [32:19] If I were to work on Hipshot again and say I was leading that thing, that's the part I would [32:24] go, okay, let's, we need to win [32:27] the problem space first. [32:32] And if the platform is there, let's use it. If it's not there, [32:35] will hack it. [32:37] Tasty. [32:38] iterate on it with customers and then whatever is good there let's platformize it later but that's that's where you see the [32:48] What makes us super powerful as a bigger company can also slow us down and make us focus on the wrong assumptions. So in that case, I think we thought we would win. [32:58] Interestingly, I think we were convinced that we could actually, we had a great job at this market. [33:03] And at the same time, we thought that we could tackle the rewrite and we could tackle the [33:07] the platformization, all these things were necessary. [33:11] but all of them at the same time, [33:12] was probably a bit too much to bite. [33:15] Now, I'm saying that but today the editor you see in Confluence [33:19] started with what we did in KubeChat, [33:22] Okay. [33:23] So I would say that in terms of code, purely in terms of code, [33:27] 70% of what we wrote for Heapshot is probably still in the AdWordsome platform today. [33:33] But for a new bet, local Optima, that was really bad. Yeah, I'm just thinking about the fact that Atlassian could have had this $30 billion business if this worked out. And I could see why people would be frustrated that it didn't work out.

[33:47] So thank you for sharing that story. [33:49] Let's talk about Status Page, another journey that you were a part of that also didn't quite work out the way folks had hoped. Our therapy session continues. Talk about what that product was and what happened there. [34:03] Yeah, so this one is actually a success story, but became a success story after I was gone. It's more like a story of big companies complete the long run, and for you individually, inside that process, it might [34:18] look like a loss and you might feel like you're going around going nowhere, [34:23] yet the company stays on the opportunity for long enough to make it happen. [34:27] So what we're going to talk about here are my own challenges working through it for something that ended up being very successful in the end. But I felt as a failure personally back then. [34:37] So status page, at some point, [34:40] So Jira is used by developers. Right. And back then, [34:45] it was, I think it was back in 2016, or even before that 2015, everyone was moving to the cloud, everyone was adopting DevOps. You build it, you run it. [34:55] So basically, developers would implement the software, [34:58] and then they would put it to production, [35:01] And after they put it to production, they don't throw it over the world to [35:05] Operations people, it's the same developers who operate the software in production, they go on call, [35:10] Yari yara. [35:11] So back then I did market research to see whether Atlassian should play there, whether we had a crack at going after all the jobs around IT operations.

[35:23] So, GR was basically GR software, to build software. Could we have GR for operations, so for operating this software? And so I did market research, found a few companies that were doing super interesting things there, like PagerDuty, Obstini, New Relic. [35:38] Big Panda was a small startup doing lots of cool stuff there, and StatusPage. [35:44] Now, I discovered StatusPage and found their offering super interesting, in that Atlassian is not an operations company. [35:54] like we don't really build like super deep operations tooling. What we focus on a lot is the collaborative aspects around everything. And when I was watching teams in incidents, I realized that there's a lot of [36:08] Chicken without a head syndrome. Headless chicken? Yeah. People running around like a bunch of headless chicken. Shit hits the fan. [36:15] And then what you see is teams just scrambling and everything gets mixed up all together in trying to fix the problem straight away. But at the same time, questioning what happened, arguing over why we got there. Your boss is pinging you to go, "Hey, what's going on? I've been hearing that the app is down. We're losing money." Customers are emailing you and asking you what's going on. Your support channels get blown up. [36:40] salespeople are worried because their customers are calling them. So basically it ends up being like a super stressful experience for everyone. [36:48] And what StatueStage was offering is something seemingly super simple, which is, well, [36:52] What you should have is a status page.

[36:55] for your services and you tell your customers about it and you can subscribe to your status page. [37:00] Over there you've got your services. And for those services, you can publish an incident whenever there is one. [37:07] and your customers will be notified, which means that they're not going to get in touch with support because they know you're on it. [37:14] It's going to build trust with them. [37:16] because basically you are honest, open in your communication with them. They are more likely to empathize with your position and be supportive, as opposed to, you know, ah, that stuff is down again. So there were just so many benefits of that. [37:46] blog was about the power of being transparent about being down, telling people the status of, "Things are broken right now. Here's when things are going to return." It was like a whole thing I was really obsessed with. And I was deep into this space. So when I saw Status Page back in the day in Atlassian work, and I was like, "I love this." And I actually chatted with the founders a bit, because they were fans of that work I was doing back in the day, completely unrelated to anything else I've done in my life. But I was really passionate about this very strange topic. And I [38:16] that companies are embracing it. [38:19] It's an amazing, I really loved diving deep into it for a few years. It's an amazing topic. [38:25] And so anyway, there's so many fascinating things about this particular domain. Back then, so found status page.

[38:31] And we invited a few of those companies to work with us for a week to go, "Hey, [38:37] So we're Atlassian, we're basically the collaboration hub for everything that happens for developing teams. What would an experience look like that takes, that puts everything together? [38:47] and where Jira could actually help you get the right information to the right team so they can act on it. [38:51] And so we did a week of hackathon in San Francisco all together. [38:56] So people from [38:58] new Relic, Status Page, and a few other companies. And out of that came really interesting concepts, [39:05] And there was really something there. And I was like... [39:08] Okay, I should start to work on a business case for [39:11] A question for... [39:13] basically IT2/operations. Now, [39:17] Big companies like Atlassian, we've got money. [39:20] Thank you. [39:21] So in every strategy that we've got, so we've got cash in the bank, [39:25] We always look at: should we build? Should we buy? Should we partner? [39:30] Acquisitions can be really powerful to accelerate you. We've got quite a few success stories there. [39:35] I can't remember how many we did, but Trello is one of the good examples of that, for example. [39:41] So we decided to buy [39:43] status page and I was running the integration of the status page business inside the Atlassian business. [39:49] Thanks for sharing all that context. What are some of the things that you learned from going through this experience? It sounds like basically it was really painful when you were a part of it, and then it ended up being really successful. What are some lessons from the pain? My learnings from it were on the acquisition side. So big company, we've got cash, we can buy a company, it will make us go faster. It's not always the case. In my case, there were quite a few things that were not as easy as I would have thought. The first one is the culture shock.

[40:19] Thank you. [40:19] of a starter that joins your company. [40:21] So, imagine you're a startup, you've got, I don't know, 20, 30 staff or something. [40:26] and things are going well, and you're in full control of your destiny, [40:30] and then a company buys you to accelerate you. [40:33] Thank you. [40:34] But then you stop owning all the decisions. [40:37] So the CEO, maybe you become a product person. [40:40] The person who was running GTM but was also doing a bunch of product stuff and was also doing a bunch of maybe engineering stuff, all of a sudden is just [40:50] Working in marketing. [40:52] There are decisions that are made. [40:54] above your head, for example, portfolio feed. [40:57] which should be part of [41:00] your product. [41:01] which is things that we should reuse from the platform that we've got. [41:04] So there's a lot of decisions that you're able to make on a day-to-day basis that are [41:09] escape you start to escape you [41:11] Thank you. [41:12] Big companies look [41:13] much further out in the future. [41:16] So Atlassian would look at how [41:19] the long game. And so I remember with status page when they first joined, we asked about the roadmaps and they were like, well, [41:25] For the next three months, we're working on that. And for the following three months, we're thinking about potentially X or Y or Z. [41:31] And so when we're like, "Okay, so what's the three-year plan?" They're like, "What do you mean the three-year plan?" [41:38] I don't know, we'll survive, I guess, which is the, you know, what startups do. [41:42] And they were like very pencil ideas about the future, but not to the extent of what a big company would expect. And so that's a really big culture shock. And what you end up with as well, and that's...

[41:56] for companies we're looking to get acquired out there or buying other companies. [42:01] Before you had a startup and everyone was one team, [42:04] depending on how the buying company is organized, you might land with silos from within your team. [42:10] So the way Atlassian is organized is like many Atlassian companies, we've got a product organization, we've got an engineering organization, we've got a marketing organization, design organization, and they each roll up to a different leader, which may then roll up to the same person, but still, like by and large, different organizations that are then assembled into squads, and those squads operate together, but they are rituals. [42:32] that are part of the squad, and there are rituals that ladder up to where you are in terms of crafts. [42:40] So, I do remember how daunting it was for the status quo each team when they joined to understand how to navigate that. [42:48] hire a new designer, I'm not talking to the status quo anymore, I need to talk to the head of design for this area, [42:57] which, [42:58] has [42:59] Pretty much nothing to do with the status page business up until the acquisition. [43:04] That's [43:05] is the things that people told me when I started working on the integration which is, "Hey, remember, [43:09] I mean, you don't know yet, but integrations are mostly about people. [43:13] They're not about technology as much or product vision. All of that stuff is the easy stuff. The hard part is the people. [43:19] And I didn't quite understand at first. And then I really got it by the end of it.

[43:26] So because what we tell those companies is we can accelerate by buying, but in reality they are going to be faced with more internal processes. [43:34] around like how they manage staff, performance reviews, this concept of engineering allocation, revenue forecasts, OKRs, long-term roadmaps, all that stuff. [43:43] Come see. [43:45] very new to them. So one part of the company [43:49] Top down says, we bought you because you are successful, keep doing what you're doing. [43:54] why many other teams without meaning to basically end up like, [43:57] Thank you. [43:58] constantly interrupting so that the right processes are followed, so that the right things are done. That's a really interesting point that like one group is... [44:06] Keep doing what you're doing. We don't want to leave you alone. You're the experts. And then other people that are on the ground actually building are like, hey. [44:12] build with this component. Hey, we need this process. We need this document. And it's the things that you use to be able to focus 90% of your time working on your product, and all of a sudden, all of that stuff may seem parasitical, but comes in and interrupts you all the time. And often the new joiners, they don't know [44:30] that they basically are not only being acquired, they've been hired by the company. So they basically are joining a different... [44:37] company with different sets of rituals with a different culture with [44:40] All of that is very different basically. It's not going to be the same for every acquisition. Like I said, we had some acquisitions that were great. Status page [44:48] ended up being a huge success inside Atlassian, but when I was there, I basically worked through the difficult parts of it. It's not as simple as people may think. So, worth of warning, if you're planning to do acquisitions, make sure you factor all of that in and think about the integration plans to compensate for these aspects. So, you don't expect the business to join and keep running at exactly the same pace. Because there's going to be a big slowdown before it accelerates again.

[45:16] So maybe as a last question here is just say you were to do an acquisition again, and I don't know if you've gone through more. What's one thing you would change? What's one thing you'd recommend of like, let's make sure to do this thing very differently? [45:27] One aspect that I'm going to talk about to then go there, but [45:31] One aspect we didn't talk about which is we bought a product, how does that product fit with the rest [45:35] And so, we had different types of [45:38] of acquisitions that we did. One is we buy the company and we keep the product running and then we try to integrate it with our tech stack. And then the other acquisition is we buy the company and then we kind of rebuild on our platform. [45:50] We buy with this huge synergy with our platform. [45:53] And so we call that the FrankenStack. [45:57] which is you get one tech stack here, one tech stack there, and they can't quite talk to each other. Identity is different. Integrating is different. And so it looks like a patchwork of products and that's not what our customers want from us. So the next time I try, [46:12] Personally, I would treat it like harring, [46:16] over treating it like buying business only. So there would be a huge component, which is to both educate and tease out. [46:25] what it means to actually hire a team inside the company. At the same time, I'm saying that because I don't want to do a big one. [46:33] Right, the next one I want to do is relatively small. [46:36] Find a company that has [46:38] amazing product that we can bring in as a check-in [46:41] shut down the product, rebuild it on our platform, and so it's basically the equivalent of an act we hire. [46:46] And what, because basically what we are buying is the acceleration of our roadmap. We could try and form a team to do what they did, but they've been successful.

[46:56] So they know what they're doing. [46:58] we could probably get there one year faster. What does that mean for our revenue at the scale of Atlassian? If we can [47:04] like enter a market one year earlier, it's probably going to pay the acquisition back on its own. [47:09] So that's the my learnings from it were basically up that yeah, it's it needs to be treated like harrowing and What I would like to do next time is more doing it like that. Hmm. What about in the case of? Hip chat where it feels like that was it was sounds like a mistake to rebuild the thing is there like for this kind of startup? I [47:31] Thank you. [47:32] "Don't rebuild for this kind of startup, start again." Do you have a thought of how you separate those two? There's actually a big difference. There's a big difference. Which is in one case, what you try to do is... So when you rebuild, you've got a successful business. [47:43] You've got hundreds of thousands of customers, for example, and you're trying to rebuild the same thing or a different thing, but for the same customers that have got expectations about your current product. And the other one is you buy a company that's got [47:56] some traction, not too much, so you can shut down the business [48:00] Right? And then rebuild on your platform to reach your customer base. [48:05] So it's not the same as trying to rebuild the plane mid-flight. It's delaying takeoff. Like, it's like, yeah, we did a trial run, the plane landed. Okay, cool. Switch to another plane, takeoff again. Got it. I love that. Any other key insights and lessons from this experience before we get to... [48:23] share product discovery. [48:25] One last one, and then I'm going to stop with the therapy session. No, no. We've got to keep it going. I've got to rack up the bill on this therapy session.

[48:33] Which is, remember I mentioned I was working on a business case for basically going bigger in IT operations. And so there was status page as part of it, but there was a lot of stuff that I wanted to be able to do inside Jira and a whole bunch of other products to basically go big in that [48:51] IT operations before Jira Service Management, which is [48:56] like a very successful product we've got around that before it was really entering that part of the market. [49:02] Everyone was excited. It was before we had an incubator internally. [49:08] And so I was trying to pitch it like, let's build a new product that's centered around that thing. It's on Jira and it integrates with these tools that we discussed and we can put in Spader Switch there and that's actually how we could accelerate them as well and so on and so forth. Everyone was excited, thought it made sense, lots of encouragement. I pitched it to every level of the organization from [49:29] business leaders, to the CTO that we had at the time, to the CEOs, [49:34] No one said no? [49:38] No one said yes. [49:42] for months. For months I was in this limbo of, I think, [49:46] Everyone's excited about this. Everyone wants this to happen. [49:49] you [49:50] But it's not happening. [49:52] And so I remember talking with my boss at the time going, [49:56] What's going on? [49:57] When do I stop... [50:00] Thank you. [50:00] Push it. [50:02] Because at some point, I'm sure I'm going to start pissing people off. And he was like, well...

[50:06] basically when you lose the passion for it. [50:09] Keep going up until you feel like it's not worth pushing anymore. [50:14] And I remember looking at this advice and going, wow, that was not helpful at all. [50:19] based on the situation that I was in, but basically, [50:23] At some point, I'll be thinking about it. [50:25] What happens though, and I understood that after, because the company ended up going there just a year later, [50:32] was that I misread the appetite and sense of urgency around the topic, [50:36] And the fact that Atlassian being Atlassian [50:38] we invest in so many markets, we have many opportunities like this that sit on a shelf. Someone did the analysis, someone created a business space, [50:49] That thing makes sense. [50:51] There may not be a trigger for the wind-out. [50:54] So we need a very strong trigger for Y now to go after it. And I did not do a good enough job at articulating this. [51:01] Why now? [51:02] Why do we have to do this now? [51:05] versus in a year's time, in two years time, [51:08] And the next team that came in afterwards did a much better job at that. [51:12] But for me, that was a great learning, which is, wow, great work. [51:17] can get parked and c'est la vie. And yeah, that's just what happens, which is we, because we have so many opportunities and there's many companies out there that are probably faced with that, doesn't mean that we have to go after all of them. [51:29] But it does make sense to explore them. And then this side went to pull the trigger and, [51:35] DAH. [51:36] That rational, the sense of urgency needs to be there and it needs to be beautiful to the business base. This reminds me of my chat with Mahika, who does similar work at Figma, where she works a lot of zero to one stuff. And she described it as your job is to keep the flame alive and help it spread throughout the entire business if you're trying to get everyone on board with a new idea. And I like this very tactical piece of advice you're sharing here of how to do that is make it clear why this is. I think of it as why is it perishable? Why is this opportunity perishable?

[52:06] don't act on it now. You could think of it as, "Why do we have to do this now?" It's not just like, "This is a huge opportunity," but we also need to do it right now to give people motivation. Yeah, that was a huge learning for me. I wasted months on it, but like with every failure, learnings came out of it in a painful way. Product managers are often biased towards action, or at least that's my case. I want you to go and do stuff. [52:29] build stuff and try stuff with customers. And so being idle, waiting for a confirmation is not a great spot to be, but sometimes you need to recognize when you're there, [52:38] And it's good to step back. [53:08] perfect time to get started with Coda, especially its extensive planning capabilities. With Coda, you can stay aligned and ship faster by managing your planning cycles in one location, you can set and measure OKRs with full visibility across teams and stakeholders, you can map dependencies, create progress visualizations, and identify risk areas, plus you can access hundreds of pressure-tested templates for everything from roadmap strategy

[53:38] to strategize, plan, and track goals together, you can get started with Coda today for free. And if you want to see for yourself why product teams at high-growth companies like Pinterest, Figma, and Qualtrics run on Coda, take advantage of this special limited-time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io slash lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit. That's coda.io slash lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit. coda.io slash lenny. [54:08] Let's try to summarize some of the biggest lessons so far that you've shared before we get to product discovery. So a few things I noted here, just like how to be successful building zero to one at a large company. One is be very clear. Are there users you're going to be building this new product to? [54:22] actually the same users you're already selling to and it may feel like [54:26] They are close enough, but in the case of HipChat, you learn maybe not, and it's a lot harder than you expected. Two is be careful when you rewrite. In some cases, shut it down, rewrite it immediately, accelerate this new idea internally. In other cases, you shared, and so you could rewind if you want to get the actual details of when it makes sense to go one or the other. [54:47] Sometimes it doesn't make sense. We write just... [54:49] Just keep what you're doing and focus on the user problems and don't slow down. [54:54] Another tip I wrote down is ignore the competition. Don't be obsessed with what they're doing. Focus on what your users are asking you for. And then this idea of paying attention to the why now. That's a really good one. Just like when you're trying to make a case, make it clear why it has to happen now. Is there anything else that comes to mind as I try to summarize some of the advice so far? No, that seems like a good one. The main one I'm getting also out of this is like your...

[55:16] If you try to start new things, it's going to be coming from your drive and your passion [55:22] And that's what pushes stuff. [55:24] forward. So don't give up. Because I... [55:29] I tried really hard before getting to one that worked. So I guess that's probably a testament for it's possible. [55:36] And a testament to your grit and desire to make something work. So on that note, let's talk about Jira product discovery. I know this is a success at this point. I know there's also a lot of pain that went into this and things that didn't work. So I'd love to hear both sides of it, just like what was hard about getting this off the ground. [55:54] and then also just what worked, what allowed you to make this work. So start wherever you want to start. Yeah, cool. So let's start with the good stuff before we go back into therapy. Some of the good stuff here is Atlassian at that point had recognized we are innovating [56:13] in our big successful products, [56:15] or by doing acquisitions, we have to correct that. [56:19] and start building new products ourselves as well. And so there was a huge push from the founders to go, "Hey, we need to restart that." [56:26] Out of it came point A, which was an internal incubator program that was meant to fix that. And the way they framed it was like, [56:33] Innovation is like a muscle. [56:35] Unless you exercise it, it becomes weak. And what we have to do now is to work on it again. [56:41] And so out of that came point A and GRP discovery was one of the, I think it was one of the hundred pitches that went through that innovation.

[56:49] program there were 100 pitches and out of it came out [56:53] three products that basically went through all the different stages of it. [56:59] And so it started with JiraPoder Discovery was actually made possible because of that. [57:06] and because we're in South Atlassian. So we started with a lot of [57:10] I could take time to focus on this stuff with nothing else to do. It was a full-time job because of this incubator. I was able to form a team easier because there was budget allocated. [57:20] I was able to form a team that was not worried about losing their job. [57:23] because the program was made so that basically, technically speaking, you would borrow people from other departments. If that thing doesn't work out, they go back to your department. [57:31] So there's no fear of losing your job basically. [57:34] We were able to tap into all the research that was done by our Research and Insights team internally, [57:40] we were able to have the corporate development team working with us. I met with probably 20 companies that played in [57:48] in things around product management before forming a view that, hey, maybe we should play that. And all those teams are waiting to talk to us. [57:56] because Atlassian is a big player in this market. [57:59] And so there's always the opportunity of [58:01] integrating, being broad, partnering, that kind of stuff. [58:04] I was able to meet with analysts to say, "Hey, so what do you think about the product management market?" [58:10] This was all part of the point A structure. So the point A structure was basically... So not all of it was formalized in point A. Remember, point A back then was created alongside the bets, the first bets that went through it. And ours was one bet as part of that. So we kind of forged a path for all the ones that came afterwards. But basically, it gave us the creds to go in and ask for help from everyone. And everyone knew it was important.

[58:35] because everyone knew the company priorities and the new products were top company priorities. [58:40] And so Atlassian playing the long game had decided that it was okay to invest in these bets and to reassess them every three to six months to understand whether we should put more chips in it. Right. And so the psychological safety of everyone's job was safe. [58:55] coupled with access to all the resources from the company, that part was just invaluable. [59:01] to the success of what JPD is today. [59:04] To give you a bit of context, Jerry Jarba, the discovery started four years ago with some research. I was alone back then and then we were three. [59:12] Thank you. [59:13] The first line of code was written three years before we launched officially, as generally available, which means that for three years we were in alpha, [59:24] Dogfooding alpha or beta? [59:26] and able to do that with the full support of the company. [59:30] right so that's something which is like when i mentioned the long game i mean it it's something that's very hard to get [59:35] in most companies out there and [59:37] Still the thing that I, when people ask me about how to start incubators, [59:41] Think about it with when you're going to get your daughters back. [59:45] and forget about it for a while, what you need to see is how the teams are answering the right questions that they ask along the way and seeing whether you are still excited about the bets as they do that. [59:56] So anyway, we launched a year ago. Fast forward to today, we've got 8,000 customers. Amazing CSAT, great traction. It's one of the fastest growing products in Atlassian history, which is great. So what was hard though, the first one was

[1:00:13] reminding everyone that failure is the most likely outcome and I will die on that hill [1:00:19] to explain to people when they want to stop things internally [1:00:23] Frame it like that. Remind everyone. [1:00:26] there's a 70% chance number completely pulled out of thin air that whatever you're working on is not going to exist in six months. [1:00:35] We are trying to launch a new product, enter a new market. Our goal is to get to $100 million businesses. [1:00:42] There's not that many of them out there. [1:00:46] We have tried and we have failed at a few of them at Atlassian. [1:00:49] And so remember that, and it's super important. [1:00:52] to remember that because otherwise the company [1:00:57] has a tendency to over invest. Not the company top down, parts of the company have the tendency to come [1:01:05] and try to help. [1:01:07] So for example, here we want to build this. Oh, if you want, we could change this service to be able to X, Y, Z for you. [1:01:12] No. [1:01:13] We are a bet which is seven people. Let's not drag the rest of the company into it. The appetite that the company has right now is the seven people. We'll see what we can do with these seven people, was what I was telling everyone. The reason I was saying that is that, [1:01:28] Otherwise, yes you get the help, but the help always comes with condition, and the condition is usually things slow down. [1:01:35] So, what we try to do is remind everyone things are going to fail. [1:01:40] so that we could basically buy the opportunity to half-ship together that is not going to scale,

[1:01:46] that is not going to respect our design guidelines. [1:01:48] that is not going to fit with the Jira target architecture, [1:01:53] But we're going to test these with customers and see [1:01:56] If the concepts make sense, if the prototypes make sense, whether they get value out of those, [1:02:01] before we tell you, "Hey, you know what? That thing is a thing. And by the way, now we're a proper business. We should build that thing into the platform." [1:02:08] This is really interesting because it's counterintuitive to think that you should position your new bets as this is most likely going to fail. This is just the thing we're trying. Don't worry. Don't commit too much to this yet. Don't worry by giving us all these resources. Why do you think that's so important? Because I don't think most companies position new incubations that way. Why do you think that's so effective and more effective? Yeah. So the thing that we're trying to do when starting new products is to basically emulate a startup in an environment that is not hungry. [1:02:37] Like there's no stopping. [1:02:39] And so you need to create scarcity. What I wanted with my team is to make sure that they feel the urgency, that thing needs to move. I also needed the rest of the company to go away so we could get the autonomy to test the things that we needed to [1:02:53] to know whether this thing is even going to work on it. We could not go into a planning session for the next six months to negotiate something with a platform service so we can build a feature to then test with users. I said, "No." [1:03:05] We're rebuilding this component and we're testing this with customers next week. It's not perfect, it's not perfect. [1:03:11] And so that helped us a lot. But otherwise, there's always this tendency of the process that works for everything else is going to work for this. And we need to keep reminding them, hey, we might not exist in six months.

[1:03:23] Do you really care that much about this process right now? The product might not exist anymore. The process goes away usually. So it's basically a trick to keep everyone else within the org away and not worry about what you're building because you just tell them, don't worry, this is not going to work out. We're just going to try this thing just to see. So it's not like for your team to be like, this is probably not going to work out. I imagine the team is like, oh, we got to make this work. It's such a good idea. It's more to like as a trick to keep the org from swallowing you up and pushing you around. [1:03:53] There's also really a need from, like, we need to respect Atlassian's dollars here. [1:03:59] And if we don't know whether this thing is going to work, I do not want to drag a team of 50 people into this. [1:04:04] I want to know that this thing is worth the investment of a team of 50 people. So it's a bit of both, actually. [1:04:10] Now it's, [1:04:11] It's of course easier said than done. And so that's where again, point A helped. We had four stages. [1:04:16] called "Wonder, Explore, Make, and Impact," where in the first stage, it was all about proving that there was a problem area we could go into, there was a market, [1:04:27] We could answer very clearly, articulate why Atlassian should move there. We could articulate why now. [1:04:33] the stuff that I struggled with before, and have enough data to validate all those claims. [1:04:40] Explore was about exploring solutions, which doesn't mean [1:04:43] build it and throw it out there and see what sticks. It's about [1:04:47] If you get a bunch of customers raising a problem, can you get them to play back that the solution would address their problem?

[1:04:54] And so in the case of Jira Product Discovery, because we were not building, we didn't need any new technology, it was many new UX and new workflows. We basically validated all of that with Figma, with Figma in like dozens of Zooms. But it's basically coming back saying, here's how those companies are framing it. Here's their problems. Here's how this thing would be solving it for them. So that's part of Explore, which is validating that it's worth investing in, in terms of solution. [1:05:24] solutions. Then make is about making it happen in stages, starting with an alpha, then a beta, and then coming out there. And impact is that stuff is [1:05:34] actually ready to go GA, and now let's see the impact it has on Atlassian's business, and keep monitoring it from there, and it turns into a real business from that point onwards. But everyone at Atlassian knew these four stages: wonder, explore, make, impact. Whenever we were talking with teams, we were telling them, we're currently in [1:05:55] Explore! [1:05:56] And we started doing that with the full bet itself. Then we started doing that to talk about the different features that we were working on, our problem areas we were going after. Which means that now every time we go into a conversation with other teams, and we mention it's we're in Rwanda or we're in Explore, they know what to expect. [1:06:14] When we go to someone in the leadership team and we say, we want to go from explore to make, they know they're going to ask for budget, right? Because they need developers now. So all that vocabulary and clear expectations set for every stage of the process really helped us to facilitate all the conversations that we had with everyone in the organization and really protected us again from all those busy teams that felt like they had to chime in.

[1:06:40] No, we're in Explore, we don't have anything [1:06:43] that's been validated, [1:06:46] Let's not have opinions about how the architecture is done before we have validated. [1:06:50] That customers want something. [1:06:51] This is super cool. I feel like we could do a whole podcast just on the structure of point A and how you all do this. But just one question. What does the gate look like when you're [1:06:59] move from [1:07:00] Explore to make make the impact is there like a group of people that sit in a room and decide thumbs up thumbs down? How does that decision? Yeah? So we basically write the six page up that's [1:07:12] looks at all the different aspects of all the questions that we want to answer. And then we are in a meeting with the Point A stakeholders and the founders of Atlassian. [1:07:25] And everyone reads that page for about 15 minutes, and then question, answers, comments, and all of that. By the end of this meeting, we know whether we are clear to go to the next stage. We got booted back one time, when we were like, hey, we're ready to go into, anyway, from alpha to beta as part of make. And they're like, no, you're not. And I was like, no, we're not. And so we stayed, and we basically got more time than what we had was initially allocated to us. But basically the founders, [1:07:51] and the leadership of point A, as well as heads from the different lines of businesses of Atlassian were participating in those sessions. That is super cool. Basically visibility all the way up. [1:08:05] And they might also just decide, let's kill this thing. It's not working at one of these meetings. So it might be, let's kill this thing, which happened to a number of pets that we did. Or it might be, let's roll this thing into something else.

[1:08:17] So for example, on your White Boats product, [1:08:20] which I say product, whiteboard's feature, part of Confluence, initially came out of point A, [1:08:27] and was eventually rolled into Confluence instead because portfolio fit made more sense there. [1:08:33] That's so interesting. So you said there's like 100 projects that went through point A. So there's kind of this funnel and there's these, is there a meeting for all 100 of these that the founders go to for all these incubations or do they come join later down the funnel? It's not the full 100 of them. Basically, there's their first, and I'm saying 100, it's over a few different quarters of teams coming in and coaching. But not for the initial stage of entering point A. It's usually when they've been accepted. Yeah. [1:09:01] I interrupted you and took us on a tangent. You were sharing essentially the things that went well and how this all came together. [1:09:07] So failure is the most likely outcome is the one thing I would stand behind in everything because I've seen before what happens when we get to completely separate, it's going to work. [1:09:17] lessons from the previous things I was talking about. So this one, really key. Second one, this one is much harder, which is [1:09:24] If you're starting something like this, your teams will need to break a lot of rules [1:09:29] Thank you. [1:09:30] that are established, but they need to be able to do that without breaking the trust [1:09:35] of everyone in the organization, [1:09:38] The rules were created to support the business at the stage where it was successful. [1:09:44] And it just so happens that they might not work.

[1:09:48] From you, that's... [1:09:50] So, you need, like the trick here is, for me has been to, the way I pictured it is, I've got a bunch of chips. [1:09:59] Since I joined my class, I've been accumulating chips. And those chips are like... Social capital. Yeah, it's like trust I've built with the founders, with different business leaders, with succeeding on stuff or failing and explaining why and trying to do better next time. And like all that stuff gave me, like you said, capital. I've got these chips and I decided on these bets. You know what? I'm going to go all in. [1:10:21] So I always said, if it works, it works, if it doesn't work, I'm probably out of here, but I'm going to go on in. See, if I see something that's not going to work, [1:10:29] I'm going to say it, we're not going to do it. [1:10:32] Thank you. [1:10:32] And so I knew I was going to put myself in tough [1:10:36] conversations because people are here to protect things that need to be protected, they just don't make sense for the stuff I was working on. So [1:10:43] One example, breaking rules without breaking trust, where it was tricky. [1:10:47] We have a lot of rules in a company like a class here. This is how it works in engineering. I mean, engineers are the biggest part of our workforce, right? That's where all the... [1:10:59] that [1:11:01] this shit gets done because engineers work on it. [1:11:04] And what I needed was to be able to hire the right team. Only principal levels. People who have a lot of internal creds so that they can commit to any team's repo. No questions asked. [1:11:14] people who are not looking for the next promotion, but they want to make a splash. [1:11:18] And when that's not possible, I want to be able to hire contractors to fill in the gaps and stuff like that.

[1:11:24] And I was like, "A lot of the rules that I need to be able to break [1:11:28] is basically in engineering. [1:11:30] So I decided not to have an engineering leader in the tool. [1:11:34] than to do it myself. [1:11:36] So I was the product leader and the engineering leader. I was technical enough to be able to have these conversations, [1:11:42] But mainly I was just working with amazing engineers who just could self-drive themselves. [1:11:48] So they were able to make changes in areas that were not owned by them, [1:11:51] They were able to do changes that do not respect any of our standards, [1:11:55] They were able to hack their way around rebuilding services and whatnot. [1:11:59] We are now not in the position where we need to do stuff like that. At that time, I needed to take a position like that. So we could actually go and move fast with basically the equivalent of being a startup inside Atlassian. [1:12:12] That's not comfortable. [1:12:14] to do stuff like that. [1:12:15] And I would not recommend that in a... [1:12:18] In many environments, Atlassian was very forgiving throughout the whole thing. It doesn't mean that it didn't grow great hair on that. That was not simple. One of them rules, for example, was one of the rules is, [1:12:33] At that time, we didn't want to have a footprint in Europe. [1:12:35] Back then. [1:12:37] for more engineering teams. It's different today, but back then it was like that. I was like, "Shit, I'm based in France. I'm trying to start this stuff. [1:12:45] I don't want to move to the US or move back to Australia just for this right now. [1:12:50] So, I heard contractors, lots of contractors when we started, or not lots because we're not a big team, but contractors to build this stuff. And again, contractors, they don't fall into the same rules as the rest of engineering staff.

[1:13:02] Basically all the [1:13:04] rules around you need to contribute to, for example, the engineering team could say for one day to the next, leadership could say, you need to invest 15% of your time in reliability. [1:13:15] And for us, it's like, we're not there yet. We don't even have a prototype out. Yeah, but that's the company rule. All right. Again, no engineering manager and contractors. Boom, none of these rules are blanked. [1:13:23] So it was people who were looking at it from the outside, you were like, wow, dude, you're a... [1:13:28] "Are you sure you are a coward?" All this, and it felt super uncomfortable, but we have the support of leadership from it. It's just a tough transition for Atlassian from the "we only invest in the big ones or acquisitions" to "let's invest in net new vets." [1:13:45] This is a crazy story you're telling me. So you were leading this team. You hired a team of contractors to build this product. You're in a whole different country from the rest of Atlassian, basically. And the whole idea here was just to do stuff that wouldn't be necessarily allowed at Atlassian. They wouldn't let you work this way. And you found that to make the thing you needed to make, the thing that you were betting your career on, it sounded like. You're just going [1:14:15] in France. And it worked out. [1:14:18] So the point A emoji, an Atlassian, is a pirate flag. I was not the only one. There were quite a few of us working on new beds, basically operating like that. [1:14:29] Each question in different roles, the end goal was not to question the roles. The end goal was to get to the stuff that we needed to do.

[1:14:36] which is we just need to clean the space to work with users, to test prototypes, [1:14:40] Up until it works. [1:14:42] and progressively get to a product that's going to be enough to launch, right? [1:14:47] So we never intended to break the rules [1:14:51] which is the things that we were going to choose the ones that were going to work to support us on this mission and say no to the others. You mentioned Europe. [1:14:59] Thank you. [1:15:00] At the time, a lot of other [1:15:03] Point A founders were struggling with the fact that they were operating from the mothership in Sydney, [1:15:09] Because they're still with everyone else. [1:15:11] And so, like you're talking about doing all this stuff, yeah, but remember that we've got this OKR thing, we've got this vision for Jira that we're building, like you need to participate in all this. [1:15:21] And so [1:15:23] I was in Europe going, fine, schedule it at your time. [1:15:27] And teams were like, "Oh, we like…" I think a lot of teams were like, "We don't care enough about this. [1:15:36] That's the thing that it's not going to exist in six months. I don't care enough about this to stay up late or wake up super early every day to disagree with them. [1:15:43] Yeah. [1:15:43] And so there was a lot of the early [1:15:46] success that we had in being able to move super fast that came from being so far, [1:15:52] That's [1:15:53] People just did not engage [1:15:56] to stop us. And that's why we were initially the group with the fastest speed, then the other teams were able to, like, then it was possible to institutionalize those things into point A, to then make it possible to do it from within Atlassian.

[1:16:12] But at first, we just needed to blaze our way through. So that's what we did. [1:16:16] So it sounds like one of the biggest lessons and things that work well for something like this is a super silo sort of team, as much as you can disconnect from the core business and let them just do what you think you need to do. [1:16:29] And you've interviewed Megan on the show before, and you listened again to the way she pitched point A, and yes, that's exactly what came out of what she was saying, which is we gave the space for those teams to be able to do this with a lot of autonomy. And that was the outcome of all that work, basically, which is the program was then set up so new teams could do it and fitting within the mothership, basically. [1:16:56] And I think people hear that like, yeah, okay, of course, news, incubation, silo, separate, they do their own thing. It's like people hear that and it's like... [1:17:04] And they try to do that, but I imagine it's not actually what they need to do. And what I'm hearing is you went to a pretty far extreme of making that happen, not basically breaking the rules to allow for a silo to actually exist. And I love that. What else was key to success of making this work out? Yeah, so the one that I'm most passionate about is how we work with customers is very different in a... [1:17:29] super early stage bet versus to what you do in a very established product like Jira. So the first part is how can we innovate in a way that doesn't fuck up existing customers?

[1:17:44] Jira, 120,000 customers, Atlassian, 300,000 customers. We can't just go in there, start experimenting, breaking a whole bunch of shit that millions of people experience and go, "What are you doing Atlassian?" [1:17:57] So what we needed is to create this area where we could experiment that's [1:18:03] away from Jira while being inside Jira. That part was a bit tough. [1:18:08] It's possible to do. In fact, I came across an article from Ben Ways, no, sorry, Noah Ways, from many years ago now, where he was basically talking about innovating in a successful mature product and talked about three stages of incubate, iterate, integrate. [1:18:27] And as part of that, he gave the examples of Instagram, Twitter, and Foursquare. [1:18:32] where basically it was explaining, you know, at the beginning, for example, Instagram was a feed that was chronological. [1:18:39] And then the team started to experiment with the popular tab that was on the side, that was not integrated into the core of the product that everyone uses. They iterated on that for a while, that became the explore tab, [1:18:50] and then the explore tab became the main feed. The feed is not chronological anymore, it's based on your interests. [1:18:56] And that thought really resonated with me. [1:19:00] where I was like, you know what? We're going to try to apply that to Jira. [1:19:04] which is we're going to get it in zero, [1:19:06] But we're going to kind of [1:19:08] extract ourselves from a lot of the core components of the core base to rebuild the UX that would work for the audience for going after. Our audience is product managers, they have no patience for spinners,

[1:19:20] Things need to be visual. They need to be able to quickly move things around to visualize the potential options they've got on their roadmaps and stuff like that. It needs to be snappy. It needs to get out of the way, but also something that they can feel proud to present to their stakeholders to have discussions around that. It can't be bogged down into the details. It can't go to very, very deep trees. It needs to be a space where you feel like you can breathe and have creative conversations. [1:19:50] was not exactly known for that. [1:19:53] And in fact, most of the product managers I talked to were like, I don't want to do this in Jira. It's too strict. There's too many workflows. It's owned by IT. [1:20:00] Yadda yadda. And so we said, that's fine. We're going to experiment with an experience that's going to be detached from Jira. [1:20:08] Still on the same platform. [1:20:09] And that's what we did, basically. And so this concept of incubate by working on something on the side, iterate until you've got it right, and then integrate it back. [1:20:20] into the main product is something I would definitely do again. We're currently in the middle of the integration phase for Geopoder Discovery. [1:20:27] So the lesson there is don't force yourself to be a part of the broader product initially. First figure out what it could be if it's its own thing, and then eventually you can integrate. [1:20:39] fans who you're doing it for and the programs that they've got don't feel limited by your platform [1:20:45] to answer the core things that are necessary for your product to work. [1:20:50] basically. So if the platform is good enough for

[1:20:54] For us, if the UX was good enough for the product managers, we would not have done that. [1:20:58] and we would have had a hard time justifying it. But because it was not, [1:21:02] We basically give ourselves the [1:21:04] the stamp should be able to do it. [1:21:06] The second one was something I read from, so still in Don't Fuck Existing Customers, something I read from a site from Reforge that talk about the safety funnel. [1:21:15] So they have this thing where the typical growth funnel goes from acquisition all the way to revenue and there's a whole bunch of different stages in between. Your goal is to maximize the number of people who go through. [1:21:27] this funnel successfully. And I was trying to explain to people what we were trying to do with your project discovery, and I was trying to put a name on it, and it was [1:21:35] We're going to work with a few [1:21:37] Small number of customers. [1:21:40] Up until it's right for them, [1:21:41] And then we're going to expose it to progressively more people. [1:21:45] And I know it's very common sense, but that's basically what we decided to do. Instead of the Atlassian [1:21:51] way which was more, "Hey, we measure our success based on," for example, at that time, I think it was still before all those projects, monthly active users. If that was a measure of success, we would have been pushed very quickly to go and expose it to as many people as we could. We didn't want to do that because they would have had a bad experience, it would have been very hard to claim them back. [1:22:10] afterwards. So someone in ReefArch put the name on safety funnel. [1:22:14] So the safety funnel is amazing. People don't understand that. You basically put a hard stop and you limit the number of people who have bad experiences. [1:22:22] and you do that for a while, up until you can prove it's amazing, and then you invite more people. So we did a lot of that. So we basically created that pocket away from Jira to reimagine what Jira could be for product managers, and we only exposed that to a very small number of customers at first. So that's don't fuck existing customers.

[1:22:42] First, um... [1:22:43] principle. And the reason that's important, just to put a point there, is the business will start to get upset if you're [1:22:51] making many customers upset. That would have been it if we had triggered an incident that brought down Jira for millions of users. And first time might have been okay. I mean, by the third time, [1:23:02] we would have been asked to back up and go home. Got it. So the advice there is just limit how many people even get exposed to your early, very early product. Even if it's going to hurt your numbers, you don't want to cause people to be like, what the hell are you doing over there, man? So hurt your numbers is now the interesting one. So how do you frame success and how do you define metrics when your goal is to work with a small number of customers for a super long time? [1:23:26] So that's where what I ended up defining for this [1:23:31] is based on a term that was used at Atlassian, but I kind of tried to formalize it into something that everyone could refer to, which is the Lighthouse Users Program. [1:23:40] And so the principle for it is it's a program, so it's an official thing. [1:23:46] We have hundreds of thousands of customers at Atlassian, [1:23:49] but we will only build the experience for a small number of them. [1:23:53] And so there are stages to it. The first stage is we work with 10. [1:23:59] And we prove. [1:24:00] that the problems that they had are the things that we solved. [1:24:05] and where we spend most of the time, [1:24:07] for the first 10 Lighthouse users is to explain why they are the Lighthouse users.

[1:24:12] everything that explains why we believe they are a proxy for every customer that we serve afterwards. We then have the stage from 10 to 100, [1:24:21] where we sort of recruit more customers, but we're still not in the fully self-service, don't need a lot of onboarding stuff. We're still testing out the value, but we're testing the different [1:24:29] variations in the scenarios that people face to make sure that the core solution that we've got can cater for those. So there's a lot of different options and different security needs or different... There's a lot of subtleties that you catch between 10 and 100. [1:24:44] Then we get to a stage where we're like, "You know what? It's good. [1:24:46] It solves people's problems, but it's not self-service. We need to explain stuff. We need to work with people on Slack. We need to work with them and answer a lot of support tickets, or do a lot of Zoom calls to explain stuff. Now we need to get from 100 to 1000. And by getting there, we basically need to solve all of that. And after that, we graduate. So basically, by detailing that and explaining all the success criteria in between, [1:25:11] It helps to define success in that in the make phase, we've got 10, 100, 1000, and then people can understand exactly where we are there and the types of questions we're trying to answer. In the 10, we're answering every question with a user snippet of a video call. [1:25:27] with them either talking about their problem and solution, but showing the product and how to solve with it. That's how we wanted our stakeholders to view it, which is it's very qualitative, but have it felt from the user's perspective. It's different when we go from 10 to a hundred, from a hundred to a thousand, but for each of those, that's this kind of a playbook for how you go from one to the other.

[1:25:51] That helped us because we could then claim the space to do the right thing. And we were not asked to hit, for example, a monthly active user's number, a number of customers number, or percentage of users who use this number, because it's very qualitative [1:26:06] when we're at that stage. [1:26:08] That is super cool and super interesting. And it's kind of along the lines of the gates. It aligns with at each gate, here's how many users we're looking for. Basically sets expectations for what success is, keeps you from having to scale things too early. It's such a cool idea. And you call it Lighthouse Users, like the Lighthouse Users program. Lighthouse Users, and there's two sides to it. We just talked about the... [1:26:29] stakeholder facing side, the one I'm [1:26:32] I love is the team-tasting side of this, which is I've seen a lot of teams, at less than in other companies, as the products grow, you tend to leverage a lot more user research, formal user research, or CSAT surveys, [1:26:47] And the way I call it, it's hiding behind research. [1:26:51] and not being close enough to the ground with customers. And what I want to do in the teams I work with is to create a direct [1:26:58] feedback loop with customers, but not like someone gives you feedback and you do it. We talk to those customers, we build stuff for them. And so there's something I've seen, which is [1:27:09] Climate change, it's a thing. Everyone knows it's a thing. We all read reports about it. We all like, every time we read an IPCC report, we're like, shit. [1:27:17] Do we change anything? [1:27:20] Not enough.

[1:27:23] What makes people want to [1:27:26] change and actually gives them a trigger to change. I've seen [1:27:31] is a lot more empathizing with individual peoples [1:27:35] experience [1:27:37] If I know someone that's impacted by climate change, it's going to make me relate a lot more strongly to the concept of climate change and want to change myself. So sorry for the power load here. I'm not. That's such a good example. Such a good way of making that point very clear, just the power of talking to a small number of users versus thinking that the more data you have, looking at data, CSAT scores, NPS retention will tell you what you need. And so what we do with that is we recruit 10 people. [1:28:05] And we put these people in front of the whole team, not just the PMs. [1:28:09] PM, Designer Engineering. We met on Zoom, we chat, we work with the same ones over a month to build a product that are with us on Slack. [1:28:18] who have regular things. [1:28:19] What we've seen, what I've seen for going fast, is that the engineers would go into a planning meeting and the PM would say, so we should work on X. And the engineer would go, wait a minute, we've had a talk with... [1:28:30] this customer and they struggle with this. So I think we should work on that instead and fix that, that part of the experience and so on and so forth. So all of a sudden you're not talking about a product manager, you're talking about a product team with product engineers. So there was this thing at Atlassian where we called some [1:28:44] engineers were more like system engineers, some were more product engineers. [1:28:48] In my opinion, everyone can be a product engineer. They just need to be exposed to the right user context. And the right user context, what is it? It's 10 customers. You know by name, you know their context, you know their problems, you can empathize with it.

[1:29:02] This empathy makes you want to act to change your product to solve their problem and you get really huge pride [1:29:10] coming back out of it. And it can seem counter-intuitive in a company like Atlassian, [1:29:15] 300,000 customers. [1:29:18] right we should build for them where you can't [1:29:21] We're limited in our ability to make changes that will work for the vast majority. So might as well embrace that, embrace that we are indeed biased [1:29:31] that we are [1:29:33] Indeed, reacting based on feelings, [1:29:36] like wanting to help or not wanting to help, or reacting strongly to what you've seen. [1:29:40] But we are embracing that to try and build the best product possible. And I've actually seen that the outcome [1:29:46] is [1:29:47] So far on this product, it's worked. [1:29:50] Like, if you actually think about this from the perspective of how would a startup approach this, this is exactly how a company that's just starting out would approach it. So it makes tons of sense to think of it this way. It's just people don't actually do this. It's hard to do. And this is a segue to a question I wanted to ask. So it took probably a long time for you to show real success, real progress, real like success. [1:30:11] this is gonna work [1:30:14] First of all, how long was that period of just like, this is probably not going to work to, oh wow, maybe this is going to work? And along the same lines. [1:30:23] How does Atlassian slash... What have you learned about how to protect... [1:30:27] this, Pixar people call it an ugly baby. Like when an idea is new, it's an ugly baby. People don't want it. It's just like get rid of this thing. Man, that sounds mean to say, but that's the way they talk about it. That's the term in creativity.

[1:30:43] That's a good one. How do you protect that? Because that's the biggest challenge I think a lot of companies have is just like, it's been six months. No one wants this. We're going to kill it. How do you protect it? So how long did it take for it to show success? And what have you learned about [1:30:57] that's [1:30:57] Yeah, so basically internal comms is everything there. And the way I saw my job as a large part as being very clear on where we were, on what we were learning, and how fast we were learning, how fast we were moving. [1:31:11] being super honest every step of the way, and not try to make shit up, and try to make it look bigger than it is, more successful than it is. On the contrary, be very clear about what we're testing, where we're in testing it. [1:31:22] Doing that for data, doing that with personal customer stories. [1:31:27] because we all can relate, it goes to relate to the heart and to the mind. [1:31:31] So that's what I always try to weave into comms that I then send weekly. So we've got this product internally called Atlas, [1:31:39] which have a project on Atlas, people can subscribe to this project. And then weekly you send a tweet-sized update about your project. I was using that as a platform to communicate internally about this product. And there were actually hundreds of people who ended up subscribing to this thing. [1:31:54] Every week, when we were at the stage where we were trying to get the first version out to customers, it was a weekly demo of the product and everything that we built. [1:32:02] Show the momentum. [1:32:04] as much as possible. Now, we're saving features for one week to the next just to, when I knew we were going to be on vacation, for example, just to have something to show this, this train that keeps moving, it keeps moving, you don't want to get in front of it.

[1:32:17] But then what I needed to do is to balance that out, [1:32:21] with all the customer side of things. So when we started to put it in front of customers, then it was snippets from customer conversations. No one is going to read a research report that takes 30 minutes to read. Everyone is happy to watch a three-minute snippet with four customers talking about something. [1:32:35] So I was using that a lot every week by posting those out there and then sharing them widely on Slack to go, this is what we learned. This is what this customer is facing in terms of problem with Jira. This is how we're solving it. This is them talking about it, that kind of stuff. [1:32:48] So I was... [1:32:49] publishing that there and then sending that everywhere on Slack. Those kinds of things are what give people a sense of velocity and speed. [1:32:59] And no one wants to fuck with a high speed train. You don't get in front of it. [1:33:02] It's...that doesn't help, and you're going to look bad by doing that. So basically that ended up buying us the thing that we needed to get to out of this...I don't know how you call it, the ugly baby phase? Ugly baby phase. [1:33:16] So basically, it helped us get out of these phase where we don't have anything to show for yet, because what we're showing is based on the learnings we're trying to get, and we're trying to do that with. [1:33:26] Here are some numbers. [1:33:27] Here's some demos, here's some user snippets, and doing that every week. Because people can consume bite-sized contents. [1:33:35] content every week, they just struggle with [1:33:38] the stuff where you come in three, four months later and go, this is what we have to show [1:33:42] Bye. [1:33:43] How long was that period before I got out of this ugly baby phase for you? When did people start to get like, oh, wow, this might work?

[1:33:49] Honestly, we had something dog-fooding within two months. [1:33:53] In the hands of the first Lighthouse user within five months, [1:33:58] we iterated on the alpha for maybe six months. [1:34:02] We then enter the beta that lasted close to a year [1:34:06] So, [1:34:07] I think at every... [1:34:08] every step of the way, [1:34:10] people could see [1:34:13] Thank you. [1:34:13] us going somewhere. And I think initially they judged not the outcome, they judged the team a lot more than the outcome. [1:34:22] So there's all this talk of founder market fit. And I think really that's what you need to be teasing out, which is, is it the right team going after the right problems? [1:34:30] And then if they can answer yes in ways that you haven't thought about asking, [1:34:35] consistently week over week, it's enough. And I think that's where we were. [1:34:38] up until the stage where we were able to give something to customers. The first Lighthouse user was five months in, so... [1:34:44] It didn't even matter whether it looked good or not, because people could see, OK, that's what... Oh, there's something there. [1:34:49] Right? So I'm not sure that this one precise moment where it happened. However, there was this one moment where we were like, "Okay, that's it. [1:34:57] We're ready to go GA. [1:34:58] And one of the founders, Mike, went, "No, you're not. That thing is ugly. I do not want to look at it. It needs to, you know, level up with the rest of the Atlassian design standards." [1:35:12] Our customers have expectations from us on that front like your stuff is functional [1:35:17] but it's way too early. And so we went and fixed it, took us two, three months, and then we were okay to go. But, you know, because we had point A,

[1:35:28] because we had this expectation set that it would take a while to get there and because we were able to show progress every week, [1:35:35] We basically didn't really feel that moment where we don't know what to do with this because it's too early. [1:35:41] This design improvement phase, what I'm visualizing is you're this pirate that has to invite it to a nice dinner and you have to start cleaning up, you have to start looking good and enter society. It makes a lot of sense. Also what you're describing makes me think again of this concept of it's your job to keep the flame alive and help it spread within the organization. So you have this idea and you're just like keep momentum going, keep the flame growing by sharing constant updates, sharing progress. [1:36:08] making it very easy to consume with little snippets and videos. So there's a lot of great advice here. [1:36:13] So, timeline-wise, interestingly, what I'm hearing is it basically took a year from idea to alpha, something like that. [1:36:20] is that is that roughly right like seven months no five months to a first alpha one customer okay uh we stayed in alpha for like six months [1:36:29] Okay, got it. So through alpha about a year total. [1:36:34] Many people hearing this on the one hand would be like, of course, Atlassian has all these resources. They're going to spend a year on this idea that who knows is going to work out so easy for them. [1:36:42] I imagine there was much pain and suffering and challenge along the way that [1:36:47] that happen that makes it not so easy? Is there something you could share about just like the struggle to actually make this real just as a way to kind of wrap up conversation, go back to therapy if there's anything you want to share? [1:36:57] Yeah, basically, it's pretty much what we talked about earlier with lots of processes that, you know, we're not changing yet because we're at the very beginning of point A. And people still wanting us to chime in on the things that were important for their part of the organization where they...

[1:37:16] where we would play a part later if we become successful. [1:37:20] None of that stuff was just solved once and for all. It was just a constant [1:37:24] process to play with that, but I think we managed to get out of these things pretty gracefully in the end. And I think we gained some level of admiration for some teams from that, and some found it a bit [1:37:37] It's always interesting to see someone breaking the rules and getting away with it and [1:37:40] And I think it inspired some of the other founders to try and [1:37:44] and and do that which was which was pretty cool to see it's actually something i [1:37:48] I'd love to see more hearing back from the customers I've been talking to about this in their company. A lot of them feel [1:37:55] So forget yet. Bye. [1:37:57] the current processes and they don't feel like they can break the chains. And so that's the... I'm hoping it inspires a few more teams to give it a go, really. There's clearly more I want to learn about Point A and how other companies do this incubation stuff. So this is a really good inspiration to dig deeper into those sorts of programs. [1:38:17] We've covered a lot of ground. We've talked about things that have worked and haven't worked, all kinds of therapy and pain, but also things that help you succeed and build amazing products. Is there anything else you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? [1:38:32] Yeah, it's a bit... I would try to balance the point I just gave, which is it's hard, so someone has to try. [1:38:39] and always feel like you can push. [1:38:42] I'd like to balance that a bit with... [1:38:46] Be careful for yourself as well and make sure that you're doing this in an environment that's

[1:38:50] that's ready to welcome it. [1:38:53] As I mentioned, I work at Atlassian now for the past 10 years. Before that, I used to work in banks. [1:38:59] in heavily regulated industries, in a whole bunch of different areas where that kind of stuff was not okay. And I could have tried to push, it would have not gone well at all. [1:39:14] So, I think there is, I'm deeply convinced by the fact that, [1:39:19] We don't need so much top-down leadership. What we need is a lot of autonomous leaders, regardless of their position within the ARC, able to push for change, fighting for the right things. But you need to do that in an environment that's safe for you to do so. And if it's not, I think it's okay to consider alternatives. So in other words, don't feel like you're trapped [1:39:39] You only have one work life, do it in places where you [1:39:43] you really believe you can do amazing work and surrounded by people that you're excited to work with. [1:39:48] Otherwise, I've been there before where it's possible to become cynical. [1:39:52] by the weight of the things that are not possible, and ending up doubting your own ability to do stuff, really. So it's a bit of a balance of push for the right things, but also watch after yourself, [1:40:05] And if the environment is not right, it's okay to change. [1:40:08] This is a really hot topic and common question in product management and imagine other functions in product of just how much... [1:40:16] can actually change as an IC at a company. I hear all this advice about making change, changing culture, incubating stuff, innovating.

[1:40:24] How much can you actually make an impact versus... [1:40:26] Nothing's going to change. I should go work somewhere else. Do you have any advice there? It sounds like basically you're saying, [1:40:33] there's oftentimes you have no impact on how the business and culture is going to work and you [1:40:37] probably should go find a company like Atlassian that has learned how to [1:40:41] incubate and innovate and think differently. [1:40:43] Yeah, this one is a… I'm not sure how to answer that really, because I've worked with, consulted, work for close to 50 companies. [1:40:53] Atlassian is the first company [1:40:55] I joined where I was like at home from day one, challenged in the right way, but [1:41:02] Fuck, I can really choose my battles and go after them. [1:41:06] and things are hard but but it's okay so i joined it last year the sample is like that but but yeah it's uh i would just go not settle for established work because uh you cannot be the only sane person [1:41:21] in a room. [1:41:22] at some point you will go insane, the environment will permeate on you. You are not this entity that is absolutely permeable to everything that happens around you. Everything around you will affect you and will change you. [1:41:34] As a person, I really believe that. [1:41:36] And so you need to surround yourself with people and environments that can [1:41:40] help bring out the best in you. Otherwise, you can turn back. And I myself have been cynical in the past working in environments that were cynical. And I then decided it's not me. I do not want it to be me. It was me back then. I do not want it to be me. So yeah, that's my only advice, which is have the courage to

[1:42:00] to ask yourself those questions. [1:42:02] Because otherwise, it might change you in ways you don't want to. [1:42:06] Amazing advice, really important advice. [1:42:10] With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? I am. [1:42:15] Looking forward to it. [1:42:17] All right, here we go. First question: What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? [1:42:22] Yeah, the first one was a book that was recommended to me by Scott Farquhar, founder of Atlassian, [1:42:29] who, a method for hiring, [1:42:32] is basically a book about how to do the thing that I, for a while, was really bad at. [1:42:37] which is [1:42:38] try to interview to understand who's going to be a good person, not a good person to join your team. [1:42:43] Second one, so that's one book about work, two other books that are not about work. I highly recommend reading "Hacking's Odyssey". [1:42:52] It's the story of a Syrian refugee moving out of Syria, trying to move into Europe. We hear a lot of these stats and numbers about people trying to cross the Med Sea, or basically become refugees in other countries, and it's very easy to look at it complacently, up until you meet a personal story. And this personal story of Hakim, that was told very beautifully by this illustrator, is well worth a read on that front. [1:43:18] The last one is a book that I'm not sure has been translated from French. It's called "Vivre avec la Terre", "To live with the Earth". And it's about how we could build a different agricultural system

[1:43:32] to the one that we have today that might have better ways to feed us into the future, when the... that doesn't require large monoculture of vegetables that might not be as sustainable. They managed to create like really, really... a really efficient structure on very small parts of land, with a lot of species working together to control and not need the use of any pesticides and stuff like that. [1:44:02] I think it's called INRIA, it's one of the French research centers, have got really amazing results, but I don't think many know that this stuff exists and that it could actually be used out there, and I think that's a shame. I think this is the first book that someone's recommended that's only in a different language, but it may not be translated. It might be translated, I hope it is. It's pretty thick though, and it's very technical. So I've read the principles a bit, and I got lost in all the technical aspects of growing free. Okay. I love it. [1:44:28] So let's ask your favorite interview question. What's your favorite interview question? Yeah, so I struggled a lot with interviewing and I've read all the standard interview questions there is out there and I've heard them in your podcast as well. [1:44:39] There is one that came from this book. [1:44:42] that Scott Farquhar also told me was working really well for him. [1:44:45] is when people describe an experience, [1:44:48] You ask them the name of the person that they worked with back then, and you ask them. So, when I call this person, [1:44:57] After our call, [1:44:59] What do you think they're going to say about that? [1:45:01] And apparently, this does something, and I've seen it happen, where people are unable to project and invent on the spot.

[1:45:10] something from the lens of another person talking about them? [1:45:16] And so they might be able to talk about, I did this, I did that, I did that. So when I talk, who was your boss? My boss. So when I ask this person, what do you think they're going to say? Well, actually, and I was only doing a part of it or, or maybe you shouldn't call them because X, Y, Z. That part makes people all of a sudden go out of this scripted version they give of themselves. [1:45:39] and become more real for a second, and you get a bit of the authenticity [1:45:44] coming out, which often is very hard to get to for me in interview questions. And I've seen it happen. I find that very funny to do now because people get really uneasy for a second and then you get to something real. [1:45:56] That is genius. Makes so much sense. Makes me wonder how I can integrate this tip into my podcast interviews. Really good tip. Next question. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? [1:46:07] Yeah, it's got nothing to do with tech. I'm kitesurfing a lot at the moment, and I came across hydrofoils, which is basically these things where there's like an airplane, [1:46:22] plane underneath you on a mast which is connected to a board. You're on the board with your kites and you basically just fly over the water. And that's, that invention is just brilliant. It's relatively easy to learn. And I can spend basically parts of my weekend flying over water in as much as a breeze of wind because there's actually zero friction between the board and the water. So that's technically speaking, I think it's genius the way they created that inspiring themselves from airplanes.

[1:46:52] Is that the thing that Zuck was writing with his sunscreen? [1:46:56] With the flag, or is that something else? I don't know if you saw the photo. Don't worry about it. I like that you say it's relatively easy to learn, even though there's a kite on you, pulling you in the water on this thing that's above the water. I don't know if I believe you. Yeah, I mean, there's sports and crafts that are difficult to learn. [1:47:15] This one you can get comfortable in 18 months to two years, which is really short [1:47:23] Just a couple years, okay, I like your bar for and we're gonna ask a question along these lines But before we get there do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in worker in life? Maybe share with friends and family? [1:47:36] I've got two, one for work and one for everything in life. The one for work is initially a quote from Obama. I can't remember the exact quote, I'm going to paraphrase. [1:47:46] But it's keeping them under work. [1:47:48] So there's going to be moments in your career where you don't feel valued and you wonder, like, "Am I doing the right thing? Am I being recognized? Am I valued? Am I at the right place?" [1:47:59] And whenever that happens, a lot of parasitic thoughts may come in. You may face imposter syndrome and stuff like that. Happens to me super regularly. And whenever that happens, what I do is I remind myself. [1:48:12] Keep it about the work. [1:48:14] Because as long as you make it about the work, there's always work to be done. [1:48:18] And there's always a path that emerges from that work. It's a bit of the same of this thing in yoga where once you're committed,

[1:48:26] Good things would happen. [1:48:28] But that's exactly what I've seen and that's helped me every time. I reread this quote whenever I need these moments of turmoil around me. Now when I face those moments, I also remind myself of the other one which I invented, [1:48:44] I don't think I'm the only one who has invented that one, which is remember that in a hundred years, we'll all be dead and forgotten. [1:48:50] So don't take yourself too seriously. [1:48:53] You're not that important. [1:48:55] You're probably not as important as you think for the people that you are arguing with. And that's also the beauty in all things, which is it has an end. [1:49:05] In the end, it probably doesn't matter, so might as well give it your best shot. [1:49:08] And that's what the existentialist back in France, many generations ago, we're talking about. This one is close to Albert Canemus' [1:49:17] thesis, right? If it doesn't make sense, might as well [1:49:21] Go for it. [1:49:23] Really good points, really good lessons, really good mottos. Final question. [1:49:28] You were ranked number four worldwide in a form of freediving. [1:49:34] First of all, can you briefly describe what is freediving? And then can you share one thing that might surprise someone about this sport and this skill? [1:49:42] Yeah, so yes, that's my claim to fame. I was ranked number four in basically the distance. You can swim in a swimming pool without fins. [1:49:52] with 167 meters, which is 550 feet.

[1:49:57] And underwater. Underwater, breaststroke. I went further with the monofin, the thing you see back there. But breaststroke was one meter away from the French record, and ranking them before worldwide that year. The one I'm most proud of is I actually went to 300 feet underwater deep. [1:50:15] came back in one piece, [1:50:17] I really enjoyed the whole thing. 300 feet. That's like a hundred... [1:50:23] 92 meters. [1:50:25] Oh, jeez. I'm trying to imagine what that is like compared to a Statue of Liberty or something like that, but I'll look that up later. I look at buildings where I'm... buildings can be as little as 20, 30 meters and can go super high. Oh my God. But 90 meters is pretty high. Last time I looked at a building like that, I was wondering which one it was, but it's pretty high. So it's take one breath, go down. [1:50:50] touch the bottom, bottom plate on the rope, and then come back up. One thing that may surprise people with this is that everyone is much more gifted at it than they think. So I used to give courses on the weekend. [1:51:02] for freediving. And most people, when I ask them, "Hey, how long do you think you can be underwater?" And they tell me something like 30 seconds, maybe a minute. "How deep do you think can you go?" "Maybe five meters." At the end of a weekend, most people were able to hold their breath for two to three minutes. [1:51:20] and to go to 20 meters deep. [1:51:22] So, it's one of those things where it looks absolutely impressive and crazy and amazing. And in fact, when Max really gifted to it, there's a lot of physiological changes that happen when we dive that make it possible.

[1:51:35] It's fascinating and little we know about our bodies. [1:51:37] I'm looking up how, what is 300 feet compared to... [1:51:43] real life objects on perplexity. So what is 300 feet compared to real life objects? [1:51:50] And here we go, 300 feet. [1:51:51] The length of a football field. Okay, yeah. I should have realized that. Close to the length of a Boeing... [1:51:57] 7:37. [1:52:00] Yeah, you need to look at it this way to get some perspective. Yeah, and a football field. People are wondering about that. Jesus Christ. Oh, my God. But I love your advice that people can do much better at this field than they think. [1:52:13] Yeah, it's a, it will be, then it, [1:52:16] Everyone from kids to adults are really amazing at it actually. [1:52:20] Tongi, we've covered so much ground. I think this is going to help a lot of people that are trying to get better at free diving, but also at building zero to one within large companies. I am so thankful that you made time for this and that you shared some into this real talk and as you call it therapy. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and maybe follow up on some of the stuff you talked about? And how can listeners be useful to you? [1:52:44] Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn if you know how to... you don't need to know how to pronounce my name, just need to know how to write it. I'm not super active on social media, to be honest, I'm very much in the trenches. [1:52:55] building this product. So I don't do much in terms of networking, to be fair. [1:53:01] But if you are using this product, for example, and you have ideas for how we can improve it for you, or we'd like to share some stories about how that's helped you or how it's not helping you, I'd love to connect because I spend...

[1:53:14] A large part of my day is talking to users, responding to support tickets and stuff like that. So, yeah. Amazing. Tongi, thank you so much for being here. [1:53:23] Thank you Lenny. Honestly, it's been amazing and I hope some of the my gibberish is [1:53:30] It's useful to people. Definitely not gibberish. I think it's going to help a lot of people. And with that, I'll let you go. [1:53:36] Bye, everyone. [1:53:37] Bye-bye.