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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/23bffcb96e806964

I've been in the product management team at AtlasChem for roughly 10 years now. I worked on Hipchat and Stride. And more recently, I started Gear Product Discovery. Why is it so hard to start new products, go zero to one with a large companies? The company has a tendency to overinvest. Startups have the benefit of starving. And so you need to create scarsity, like what we try to do.
Please remind everyone things are gonna 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. I only need the rest of the company to go away. So we could get the autonomy to test the things that we needed, but it's 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 gonna 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 fuck with a high speed train.

Today my guest is Tongi Kursong.
This is a really unique and important episode.
Because we get into something you don't hear much on podcasts like this.
The real talk challenges of trying to innovate.
and build zero to one at a large company like Atlassian.
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 product called Status Page, and most recently Jira product discovery.
Which is one of the fastest growing products in Atlassian history, the Tongi led from idea to launch.
We go through each of these stories and Tongi shares what went wrong, what went right.
And everything that he's learned about creating space for innovation within a larger 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.
With that, I bring you Tongi Crissong.

Tongi, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Thank you very much for welcoming me here, uh Lenny. I'm super actually super proud to be uh
On this podcast, I've been a huge fan.
Whenever I get the chance that isn't to you when I drive somewhere, so
Yeah.
What we're gonna be talking about in this episode is we're gonna 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 ten years at this point. And Atlassian has I don't know, like over a dozen different product lines at this point, something like that.
And
I know a lot of people come to you asking for advice on how to build zero to one within a large company.
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.
Yeah, so so like you said, I've been in the product management team at Atlas Hem for roughly ten years now.
And I've been
Working mainly on bootstrapping
You think.
So it was initially a joint to start the clouder ecosystem.
So developers can build apps uh on top of the Atlassian platform and
sell them on the Atlassian marketplace.
I worked on hip chat and stride.
Uh, Hipchet was well known straight less, so
Uh we're trying to win the enterprise communications market.
uh before Slack and Microsoft Teams uh came about.
I did leave a business case to invest more in IT operations, got nowhere with it, then we acquired
старе спейч об чині
Uh and something I tried to do with didn't
quite get off the ground.
Uh and more recently I uh started Jarpod Discovery.
Which was part of our internal incubator for
Two to three years.
And came out of the incubator and generally available uh a year ago.
So my track record at Atlaskan has been uh
Fifty fifty, uh at best. Uh
GRP Discovery is actually my first
What I would call біk success.
Yeah.
Uh that one works.
But it was hard.
And
All the ones that I worked on before.
Were really hard to
And that's the kind of stuff that really bothered me for a super long time and uh
The good thing is working on a product for product managers, I got to talk to a lot of product managers and
Across all sorts of industries in uh the past uh three to four years.
And I realise that fifty fifty is actually not that bad. Awesome, and I know there's gonna be a lot of real talk in this conversation. I'm excited to share and hear all these stories.
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Just broadly, why is it so hard in your experience to start
New products go zero to one within large companies. What have you seen are kind of the biggest
Challenges and hurdles.
Generally.
Yeah, so on the opportunity side, so Atlasian
Uh three hundred thousand customers.
We play in a whole bunch of different markets.
Everything in the collaboration space.
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
B
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.
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
We're not starving like a smaller company, so we can actually afford to
Try to play somewhere.
To do some bets to have some some of them fail.
And some of them succeed.
So that's amazing.
Now
Our customers I said three hundred thousand that
The good the thing that I um admire the most about the Atlasian business model is
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. So there's a
massive distribution potential that comes with that.
when I worked on GiraPod Discovery I didn't start with, Okay, I'm gonna need to start finding
product managers and it's gonna be hard to find them. No, they were already all using Jira.
Atlassian is a company that has a relatively deep
Organization hierarchy?
Uh but relatively flat decision making.
So it's more like um imagine a
a network of key decision makers across the
organization, it doesn't really matter the job title or whether you
uh a manager of people are not like the decisions are made by people who who who drive change.
So there's a lot of empowerment that comes from that.
Ah, but also it's a mix of top down, bottom up
Happiness.
А це.
And so it can feel really chaotic at first.
But once you know how to navigate it uh navigate it, it's actually pretty easy to
Go try to go after something that you care about.
And of course we're a big company.
So there's lots of ways we can get that.
Uh corporate development, research, analysts.
That we can talk to whenever we want to explore something.
Thousands of customers at
Yeah, I just have to post something in the current community group.
And get hundreds of people applying to talk to me.
More that you do next.
So that's
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 three hundred thousand 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 uh
Customer segments that use all these different version uh product lines of Atlassian's just like
All of the opportunity.
Possible.
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. We're gonna everything we're gonna build is gonna have just go
It's gonna grow like crazy'cause we have everything we need.
But still it doesn't work out. And that's why I think what we're gonna talk about is gonna be so important.
It's gonna be a little bit of therapy for me.
Uh hopefully some people out there could go Okay, it's not just me having a hard time, like it's uh
Can happen.
Yeah. And companies like Atlassian too. So yeah, let's talk about the challenges.
Yeah, for that um
So
You want to start a new thing.
This thing is gonna take time.
And
You it's 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.
The thing inside Atlassian is that the power for success is
Super high.
For a new bet.
Like if you come in and you create a product and it's got a hundred customers, it's gonna be
It's gonna look cute.
Right. So remember we s we you know, we have startups and enterprises, we have self service and sales, we've got like we've got all these motions that are in place for our bigger products.
A one hundred million dollar business.
is a good start.
Basically.
In most companies out there, like a hundred million dollar business is a home rep.
For us it's not like that. It's what we're we're trying to build businesses that
But grow really big and and keep growing big over time.
No.
Evaluating success?
Can look very different.
Between early stage
And established products.
And so for a long time at Atlassian
We were treating
Everything a little bit equally.
In that the metrics for success were the same, so for example things like math the active users
Is is the way that you for a for a long time we looked at you go, is that
Probably being successful or not, and
But if you're um
Building on quote unquote internal startup.
Your monthly active user
number should look very low for quite some time.
Up until you know that your product is ready to serve.
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 gonna try it and then they're gonna
Chairman, it's gonna be
Take forever to cling then back.
So
That
Makes it
pretty challenging to
Try and start new things.
Unless we've got the 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.
We we started getting there more recently with the start of point A, which was our internal incubator program, which is
Well, my latest that was successful.
The ones before didn't have that and I s really struggled.
uh 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 Hip Chat, which you mentioned, there's Status Page.
And then there's the product you're working on now, Jero Product Discovery.
Uh so with hip chat.
Funny story. I loved hip chat. I was a huge user of hip chat at my starter back in the day. I can never forget the billboard that y'all put out, uh, promoting hip chat, where is this like
And it just said
Why you no use hip chat?
And I thought that was the funniest thing. And uh the product was so delightful. There's just all these little emojis in there and
And the idea with Hipchat for Atlassian was basically to become the slack killer, right?
That was the vision.
Ah you just you just killed me. We're working way before Slack.
Okay. So first mover advantage, amazing product. And it was an ac it was an acquisition for it last year and what went wrong with HipChat? What did you learn?
Uh okay. Yeah. Yeah, uh it's gonna stop right there. Uh me and everyone else from the heap chat team, I can tell you. Okay, so yes, uh heap chat was an acquisition uh
Team of twenty people or so. It was Slack before Slack was there.
Great traction and lots of it was a darling with startups.
It was a new way to collaborate back then.
There were a few of these.
smaller apps that were trying to
Uh to to do this thing. I I remember actually joining Atlas Yan.
And I came from
Before that I was working with financial services banks and and stuff like that.
And uh we will be meeting to talk about stuff or
you know, 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 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 over text.
You know, it might s seem a bit cute to the people who have been uh
Born in the Slackworld.
Uh, but it was a major change back then. Yeah, I remember that. I remember that. Like I was in the same office with my team and we're using hip chat to chat and it felt strange now. Now it's like completely normal.
It's just normal. And um Hipchet was one of the first uh to move there.
Snap.
Came out of nowhere.
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
Hipchat was left relatively alone for a while inside of Nassian to
You know, you're doing something good, so keep do keep going.
Keep going after it.
Uh but with Snack we now had to
Try.
To go bigger.
So we started this thing called Hipchat Go Big.
That was the name of the project. And then if it's hip chat next gen, there was a few different
Anyway, go big.
I love it. Go big. But it was really a good big. Like lots of new developers, uh lots of new
Product managers, designers, like
The full company behind this this product.
Family.
We try to grow it very aggressively for a product that was
That did not change that fast before it had reached like
Good product market feed already.
Hundreds of thousands of users.
On a daily basis, and all of a sudden like you get
A lot of people who want to make changes to it.
to compete against this new threat.
The platform was not so ready for so many people to
Work on it. And so we got to the inevitable
Okay, it is too much tech tact, we can't do much about it, so we made the decision to rewrite it.
So there's lots of literature around there around should you do rewrite, should you not do rewrite.
Uh you ask me now, I tell you never.
Never do a rewrite and people still do it. Never do a rewrite. And there's a good there's good reasons for that.
But basically we did that.
And out of it came out actually a new product called Stripe, which was initially
couldn't put hip chat next channel.
The problem is that
The product was great, but by the time we were done
Yeah, Slack was just
Miles ahead of us.
At that point, Microsoft launched Teams.
And I don't know if you remember this moment where uh Slack put an ad in the I think it was the New York Times
Copying the Apple versus Microsoft thing from
Uh ages before
Going, uh you know, welcome to the game, uh welcome to the party, we're welcome you competitors competitors and stuff like that, and like Slack code.
pretty much destroyed by by teams. We saw it coming because it was like Microsoft distribution advantage.
Everyone in the office is going to get it.
They're getting it for free as part of Office. It was d unbundled, I think, like a few months ago. Which is ironic because in theory, uh Atlassian also has that same advantage.
W right. Like you have all these products, you could bundle.
We we are going to talk about that actually in a minute. Because that's one of the
That was our um
What helped us?
What how we thought we would win and it was how I
Think we lost. Amazing. Um so anyway, this all happened and in the end we executed the market, we sold, keep chat.
and stride two Slack and basically exited the enterprise communications market.
Just to c double down that you sold that to Slack and now Salesforce basically, that's the
The word ended. That's uh I don't know if people know that.
Yeah, it was uh actually
It was noticed by the market.
In that as soon as we did that
Our stock price went up.

Which was um I think it was sixty dollars back then and it it it went up to seventy. Oh wow.
Um
I mean that really sucked for us.
The team working on it.
It's like
So first no one tells you but failure
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, uh on on the team because we had spent
Years. Uh for my for for my part it was three years, but uh the people who were before that on the chat was longer than that.
Obsessing over it.
Obsessing over every detail, every customer conversation, every solution, should we rewrite, should we dish it, should we let?
So many intense conversations.
And from one day to the next, it didn't matter.
Animal?
We had worked on something
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.
And the market the next day went, Oh, you're stopping doing what you're doing?
Awesome.
Yes, then my brother's to your stuff price.
So uh yeah, but uh
There's a personal side to the all the stories for us. Uh there was uh a bit like the seven stages of grief after we shut up some chat. How long was that period of of mourning and stages for you and the team?
It lasted a few months, so
When the decision I was not part of the decision making team for shutting down ClipChat.
I was one of the product managers on the team leading one of the three
Pers
And I got brought in I think it was
A month or two.
A month before it was announced to the team to go hate on the
By the way, just so you know, uh Hip Chat is no law and now your mission is to find
A new mission for the team.
After that.
And
I we basically spend the next um
Two three months trying to make sure that the squads were created to
Fully owned.
What they do there.
to make sure that they are the ones talking to the customers, they are the ones
trying to like come up with strategies, trying to come up with solutions and
And everything in that area.
As long as it was people interacting with Atlassian products.
On other surfaces?
Everything was pair game. And so it was a
There was a it there was a lot of uh ups and downs and everything. We did I think it took about two, three months before we got back to a new rhythm rhythm.
And uh some people like
When we talk about it like we're still
Scared by it, basically.
So what are some lessons from that experience?
Yeah, so the m the main one that's um
I personally got from this and it's back to the
Hypothesis that you talked about which
We have all these successful products we can expand into this one.
Which is I and I caught it, but it's just myself, right? Don't eat your own bullshit.
Which is uh
A mix of two things, uh
Uh we've got uh company value.
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 the that truth.
And we don't hide stuff from each other, we share with everyone. We are open by default.
So that's one of the values.
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 I've noticed that uh sometimes there are things
That we do
Well, we tend to bівstaff.
Because it's worked for us before.
And we cannot have this
Assumption that it's gonna keep working for us forever.
And the founders keep telling us like what
Took us here won't take us there.
That's uh kind of a 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
It's successful.
Because of X, but X is not validated.
So th that's why we go back to
This the topic we've got today, which is
Why is doing this in a successful company harder sometimes?
Well a fasten was successful with a playbook.
And the playbook was
We've got
People in
Like developers or tech or IT.
They choose at classified apps.
They love them?
They start to recommend them to people in the business.
And we start to see adoption
Like bottom up adoption across the company before people decide to standardize on Atlassian.
And
We made the bet that
We can
Apply this playbook.
to this market.
Which is basically we can find people to use Jira
Introduce hip chat.
And then people would go into hip chat first in in tech teams and then it would expand into business teams.
And it will go world to world, basically, from that.
The thing is we didn't
In my opinion.
Do enough to
Validate that assumption.
Ready enough?
And we did a lot of work.
A lot of work.
Even
On other things, even when faced
With
signals that this might not work.
I do remember talking with a lot of customers who were like, Well, we've got the the the the the IT is on is on heat chat.
But the business prefers slack.
And then we started to see those businesses
Choosing Slack.
Which is the
Initially it was like the developers try things and they like it and then everyone starts to adopt.
In that case the
Slack managed to create a very strong fan base.
In roles that were not
Take an IT.
It was the moment where the consumerization of apps
That trend was starting to get really high.
Sluck really wrote that.
And they focus everything in their experience to
Catch that the gamified onboarding
They focused a lot more on the look and feel.
They they try to make it pleasant more than functional to use.
Uh there's a lot of stuff that we uh that we learned since then from from what they did. We have missed that.
And the the part that
That's that
I took personally from that.
Is that there's a lot of assumptions
In what made us successful, it doesn't mean that it's gonna work.
Just I understand what you're saying, which it 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 needed. They cat check checked all the checkboxes.
But it turned out
In the Slack case, those are the users that ended up having the most influence over what tool they adopted.
So I'd actually phrase it more as both were going after the users.
Atlassian was going after the users in tech teams.
Slack was going after the users and business teams.
And in both cases what happened was a bottom up adoption.
And uh the people on the other side, the business will like prefers like the the developers, they prefer the hip chat.
Like we did a lot of work I
in the strings I was I was working on, we're integrating with every developer tooling out there.
To make sure that
Everything every tool that they use goes into a hip chat.
And from Had back to those tools.
And basically they can do a lot of work by seeing an activity stream
In heap chat.
Business?

Not so
You know, excited by this.
Emoji.
A lot of other things that may
At at some point I I remember we're thinking those things were trivial.
No, they were not trade you.
It was just like a different uh approach for using the tool.
uh by a different set of users that we did not
Talk enough to the lesson here, don't underestimate the challenge you'll have.
Uh
Convincing a new segment to buy your thing.
You may think they're close or similar, but they m they're probably not.
Yeah, the that's uh that's one of them. The other one is
What you
What took you here, who's not going to take you there.
And so go back and try to explain why.
You are successful today?
And then if you try
If you think you can use the same thing on the next thing.
Find ways to validate it.
Fang ways to test it.
Don't just go and build on those assumptions.
That's that's the main thing I
I I got out of this ordeal, basically. Um
Uh.
Yeah, for the stuff I did after. Well, how would you do that? How would you go about and test it? Is it use research? Is it the PMs talking to potential users? What do you th what would you have done there?
For example, when we started the European discovery, which is um so maybe I should introduce this for a second, it's uh
It's it's a product for product managers.
Which is mainly used for prioritization and road mapping.
So uh
People use Jira.
True.
Plan and track.
Work when it's committed?
We wanted to create a space before that.
So people can debate parties.
Between
with everyone that should be involved in that prioritization process.
Whether it be the developers, designers,
Uh so people in the product team or people outside of it, customer success.
Uh series people, support, leadership, and so on and so forth.
So
When we started that, we thought okay.
The product managers are already in general.
You know what? We can reach them.
Right? So we'll create the tool and then we'll distribute it from Jira.
We could have gone down the path of
building that and then start it to starting to distribute it instead.
We did things like before we wrote a single line of code.
Put an ad inside um a Jira newsletter going, Hey
We've got this thing for product managers coming up.
And then we had a
A a a website?
That's
Before we had any any line of code reading that said, Hey, product managers
Your job is hard.
We want to help.
Put your name here if you want to join us on the journey, that kind of thing.
And we that's probably s we solve. I think it was in two weeks we got more than three thousand sign ups to that wait list.
So we're like okay, cool. Validation of demand. So we are talking to
Piople who are
Interesting and we can reach
Then that's one example of the things
That's a tried later.
Just to make sure that uh
We
Are
We validate the hypothesis that we've got much earlier on in the game, basically.
And not after and not when it once it's too late. Awesome. That's an awesome very tactical example.
Yeah, most of those are like n none of what I'm going to talk about today is
Revolutionary
A lot of it is just the trend you're playing like
Asking the right question at the right time and trying
To go by whatever means to answer it.
Ready.
Any other lessons from uh the hip chat experience before we shift to a different product?
I've got two.
I'm gonna do them uh quickly. The first one is
Competitive Mayo?
Don't fall for it.
Uh
Th there are
At some point, you know, the stack was really
Gaining round and getting round and
Capturing more of the mind share and
Everyone on Twitter was always loving them, even when they had outrages they were getting
Congratulated. I was like, this is fucking mad. But like the love was so strong.
And the way we tended to revert back is to our functional side of the brain going, Okay.
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
uh competitor was doing, which I think is really, really bad because that's when
We lost basically all
What made hip chat successful so far.
Which is to serve
Some users really will.
And instead we we ended up
Not fast following based on what your competitor was doing, which is super bad because
Your competitor, like if you think of what they do as an iceberg, like the
the the top side what comes out of the water is what the the ship in terms of features
But it's based on all this stuff that they've built in terms of research.
An understanding of their customer base.
And and everything else.
So you're just seeing the manifestation of
what they were thinking maybe a year ago.
Based on what they're shipping now.
So but we we got that and uh
Now I whenever I work I I tend to try and ignore competition
Other than watching key like every three months or so, seeing what came out.
If there's anything we should be worried about, afraid of
Stuff like that, but
We did just try to disconnect all the creative process and the research process from what competitors do.
'Cause it it just
You 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 explain to the others than watching West Competition is is doing. And this is advice you give to your teams, just like ignore the competition, maybe pay attention at big announcements and things like that.
We always seen the Slack channels um
Team sharing, okay, they just did this with AI, they just did that. So it it keeps coming up and I
And and so we often have discussions to go back, okay, to
Okay.
Let's watch again.
What the
the the user interviews that we did over the past uh three weeks.
Let's watch them all together now.
And remember who we're building this for.
So there's a lot of uh trying to anchor back on
What we know and and how
Basically building our own journey.
And I think it's much richer for everyone to be involved in.
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.
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
First and shinier.
We we need to make sure that
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 we we that's the
That's the stuff we should be obsessing about.
I love that.
He said he had one more lesson.
From this experience.
Yeah, the last one, uh startups have the benefit of starving.
Hm.
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 revealing the heat chat.
was coupled with were rebuilding chat and
We'll do this on a new platform.
Which is microservices and
Everything that we build can be reused across all the other products.
So the chat textbooks that you've got.
It's an editor?
That can be open full screen and it's a confluence editor.
With everything that you can do there.
The it's built as a platform component, which is amazing when the platform is there when you start building the product.
Where it's really difficult is when you try to do the two at the same time. So I think
That part?
If I
Where to
Work on hip chart again and say I was leading that thing, I would have that's the part I would
Okay, let's um
We need to win
This
the the the problem space first
And if the platform is there, let's use it. If it's not there
We'll
Haki?
Test it?
Iterate on it with customers and then whatever is good there.
Let's platformise it.
Later?
But that's that's where you see the
The the
T.
What makes us
super powerful as a 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.
Interestingly I think we we were were convinced that we could actually we had a a a great job at this market.
And at the same time we thought that we could tackle the the rewrite and we could tackle the
the the platformization, all these things were necessary.
But all of them at the same time?
was um
Probably be too much to bite.
Now I'm saying that, but today
The editor you see in confluence
Started with what we did in
Keep chat.

So
I would say that in terms of code, purely in terms of code.
Seventy percent of what we wrote for Hipchat is is is probably still in the Atlason platform today.
But for a new bet, local optima?
That was really bad.
Yeah, I've just thinking about the fact that Atlassian could have had this thirty billion dollar business.
if this worked out and I could see why people would be frustrated that it didn't work out.
So thank you for sharing that story.
Let's talk about status page.
Another uh 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 and what happened there.
Yeah, so this one is actually a success story, uh, but became a success story after I was gone. It's more the that's more like a story of uh big companies can play the long run, uh and for you individually
Inside that process it might
Look like a loss and you might feel like you're going around
Going nowhere.
Yet the company stays on the opportunity for long enough to make it happen.
So what we're gonna talk about here are my own challenges.
Working through it?
Uh for something that ended up being very successful in the end. So
But I felt as a failure.
Personally back then.
So uh speech at some point
So Jira is used by developers.
And back then
It was I think it was back in twenty sixteen.
Or even before that twenty fifteen.
Everyone was moving to the cloud.
Everyone was adopting DevOps.
You Bill did you run it?
So basically developers would implement the software.
And then they would put it to production.
And after they put it into production, they don't
Throw it over the wall to
Operations people, it's the same developers who operate the software in production, they go on call.
Yada yada.
So back then I did market research and to
To see whether Atlassian should play there.
Whether we had a a crack at going after
All the jobs are on IT operations.
So Java was
Basically just software to build software? Could we have
Gera 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 Page Duty, Opscini.
You read it?
Big Panda was a small startup doing lots of uh
Cool stuff there and status page.
Now I discovered Status page and found their uh offering super interesting.
In that Atlasian is
and not an operations.
Like we don't
really beard like super deep operations tooling, what we focus on a lot is the collaborative aspects around
Around everything.
And when I was watching teams in incidents
I realise that there's a lot of um
Chicken without a head syndrome. Headless chicken? Yeah. People running around like a bunch of headless chicken.
She hit the fan.
Um
And then what you see is teams just
scrambling and there everything gets mixed up all together.
In uh trying to fix the problem straight away.
Uh, but at the same time questioning what happened, arguing over why we got there.
The
Your 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
Meaning you
And and asking you what's going when your your support channels get blown up.
Speople are worried because their customers are calling them.
So basically it ends up being like a super stressful experience for everyone.
And what Standard Stage was offering is something seemingly super simple, which is well.
What you should have is a status page.
Well for your services and you tell your customers about it and you can subscribe to your status page.
Over there you've got your services.
And for those services.
You can
Publish an incident whenever there is one.
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.
It's going to build trust with them.
Because uh basically you are honest in your open in your communication with them.
They're more likely to empathize with your position and be supportive.
As opposed to, you know, ah that stuff is done again.
So there was just there were just so many benefits o of that. I'm gonna say a quick share a quick story while you're on this topic.
Funny enough.
Back uh decade
A decade ago I used to work at a website performance monitoring company.
And I started a blog called Transparent Uptime.
And my whole
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 gonna return. It was like a whole thing I was really obsessed with.
And uh I was deep into the space. So uh when I saw status page back in the day and the last scene working, I was like, I love this. And I actually
Chatter with the founders a bit,'cause they were fans of that work I was doing back in the day.
Completely unrelated to anything else I've done in my life.
Uh but I was really passionate about this very strange topic and uh
And I love that companies are embracing it.
It's an amazing like I really loved diving deep into it for a few years. Like it's it's an amazing topic.
And so anyway th there's so many fascinating things about this uh this particular domain, but
Back then so find status page.
And I uh
We invited a few of those companies to work with us for a week to go, Hey
So we're lesbian, we're uh
Basically the collaboration hub for everything that happens for
They've got in teams.
What would an experience look like that takes?
That puts everything together.
And where Jira could actually help you get the right information to the right team so they can act on it.
And so we did a week of uh hackathon in uh San Francisco all together.
So people from
New relic.
Status page and and and a few and a few other companies.
Uh and out of that came really interesting concepts.
And there there was really something there, and I was like
Okay, we sh I should start to work on a business case for
At last then for
Basically IT food slash operations.
Now
Big companies like Atlassian, they we've got money.
So in every strategy strategy that we've got, so we've got cash in the bank.
We always look at
Shall we build?
Should we buy?
Should we partner?
Acquisitions can be really powerful to accelerate you. We've got quite a few success stories there.
Can't remember how many we did, but
Uh Trello is one of the of the of the good examples of that, for example.
So we decided to buy um
Status page and I was running the integration of the status page business inside the Atlason business.
Thanks for sharing all that context. What are some of the things that you learned from going through this experience? 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 uh learnings from it were on the uh acquisition side, so
Big company, we've got cash.
We can
buy a company, it will make us go faster.
Is not always the case.
In my case, there were quite a few things that
Didn't uh
We're not
As easy as I would have thought. The first one is the culture shock.
of a startup that joins your company.
So
Imagine you're a startup, you've got, I don't know, twenty, thirty staff or something.
And things are going well and you're in full control of your destiny.
And then a company buys you to accelerate you.
But then you stop owning all the decisions.
So they see you.
Maybe you become a product person.
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
Working in marketing.
There are decisions that are made.
above your head, for example, portfolio fit.
Which
should be part of
Your product?
Which is things that we should reuse from the platform that we've got.
So there's a lot of decisions that you're able to make on a day to day basis that are
Escape you. Start to escape you.
Big companies look
Much further out in the future.
Classian would look at uh
The long game.
And so
I remember with Status Fage when they first joined, we're asked about the roadmaps and they were like, Well
For the next three months we're working on that.
And
For the following frameworks we're thinking about
Potentially X or Y or Z.
And so when we're like, Okay, so what's the free plan? They're like
What do you mean that we are blind?
Make.
I don't know. We'll survive, I guess. Which is the you know what startups do.
And uh they were like very uh penciled ideas about the future, but not
to the extent of what a a big company would expect.
And so that's a that's a really big uh c culture shock.
And what you end up with as well, and that's uh
for companies looking to get acquired out there.
Oh buying other companies.
Yeah.
Before you had a startup and everyone was one team.
Depending on how your the buying company is organized.
You might land with silos from within your team.
So the way Atlassian is organised 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 coins operate together, but they are rituals.
That are parts of the
The the the squad?
And there are rituals that
Uh
ladder up to uh where you are in terms of craft.
I do remember
Uh how daunting it was for the Status Space team when they joined you.
Understand how to navigate that.
If I want to
Hire a new designer.
I'm not
talking to the satisfaction are
I need to talk to the head of design for this area.
Which
H
Pretty much nothing to do with the status page business up until the acquisition.
So that's um
That's
Is the the things that people told me when I started working on the integration, which is hey, remember
You I mean you don't know yet, but integrations are mostly about people.
They're not about
technology as much or product vision or
Like all of that stuff is the easy stuff. The hard part is the people.
And I didn't quite understand at first and then I I really got it.
Uh by by the end of it.
So because what we tell those companies is we um can accelerate by buying
But in reality they are going to be faced with more internal processes
around like how they manage stuff, performance reviews.
This concept of engineering allocation, revenue forecasts.
Okay.
Long term roadmaps, all that stuff.
Comes in.
Very new to them.
So one part of the company
Top down says
We bought you because you are successful, keep doing what you're doing.
Why many other teams without meaning to
Basically I'm not like
Constantly interrupting.
So that the right processes are followed. That's a really interesting point. That like one group is
Keep doing what you're doing. We don't want we don't leave you alone. You're the experts.
And then other people that are like on the ground actually building it, like hey
Build with this component.
Hey, we need this process, we need this document. And it's and it's um it's the the things that you used to be able to to focus ninety percent of your time working on your product and all of a sudden like all of that stuff.
may seem parasitical, but comes in and interrupts you all the time and the
Often the new joiners they they don't know
That's the PD clear.
not only being hired, uh been acquired, but being hired by the company.
So they basically are joining a different
company with different sets of rituals, with a different culture with
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. Standards page.
Ended up being a huge success inside the classroom, but
So when I was there I basically worked through the difficult parts of it.
Well ways like it's not as simple as people may think. So what a warning if you're planning to do acquisitions like
Make sure you factor all of that in.
And think about the actual uh integration plans to
True, true.
To compensate for these aspects.
So you don't expect the business to join and keep running at exactly the same pace.
'Cause there's going to be a big slowdown.
before it accelerates again.
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.
One aspect that I'm going to talk about to then then go there, but
One aspect we didn't talk about, which is we bought a product, how does that product fit with the rest?
And so for
We had different types of

By the company.
and we keep the product running and then we try to integrate it with our state tech.
And then the other acquisition is we
by the company and then we kind of rebuild on our platform.
Oh, we we buy with this huge synergy with our platform.
And so I we call that the Franken Stack.
Otherwise, which is you 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 the
Next time I try.
Personally
It's
I would treat it like herring.
Of the
Treating it like buying uh
Business only. So there would be a huge component.
Which is to both educate and tease out.
What it means to actually hire
The team?
Inside the company.
At the same time I'm saying that because I don't want to do a big one.
Right, the next one I want to do is relatively small.
Find a
Company that does
Amazing product that we can bring in as a tuck in.
Shut down the product.
We build it on our platform.
And so it's basically the equivalent of an acquaintances.
And what because basically what we'll be buying is the acceleration of our roadmap.
We could try and
F form a team to do what they did, but they've been successful.
So
They know what they're doing?
We could probably get there one year faster.
What does that mean for revenue at the scale of Atlassian? If we can
like enter a market one year earlier, it's probably going to pay the acquisition back on its own.
So
That's done.
My learnings from it were basically uh
That's
Yeah, it's it needs to be treated like herring.
And what I would like to do next time.
Is more
Doing it like that.
What about in the case of um Hipchat, where it
Feels like that was
It was sound like a mistake to rebuild the thing. Is there like
For this kind of startup.
Don't rebuild for this kind of startup, start again. Do you have a thought of like how you separate those two? Okay, there's a big difference. Which is in one case.
What you try to do is uh so when you rebuild, you've got a successful business.
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 that have got expectations about your current product.
In the other one is you buy a company that's got
Some traction.
Not too much, so you can shut down the business.
Right, and then rebuild on your platform.
to reach your customer base.
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.
Take off forget.
Got it.
I love that.
Any other key insights and lessons from this experience before we get to
Share product discovery.
One last one, and then I'm gonna stop with the therapy session. We gotta keep it going. I gotta rack up the bill.
On this therapy session.
Which is uh
Remember I mentioned I was working on a business case for uh 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 you they were to do in Side Jira and
And a whole bunch of other products to to basically go big in that area.
IT operations.
before Jura Service Management, which is
Uh
Like the very successful product we've got around that before it was it it was really entering that that part of the market.
Everyone was excited.
It was before we had an incubator internally.
Uh and so I was I was trying to picture it like let's 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 spider speech there and up.
That's actually how we could uh accelerate them as well and and so on and so forth.
Everyone was excited, but it made sense, lots of encouragement.
I pitched it to every level of the organization from
business leaders to the CTO that we had at the time.
To the CEOs.
No one said no.
No one said yes.
For months.
For months I was in this limbo of

Everyone's excited about this, everyone wants this to happen.
But it's not happening.
And so I remember talking about
With my boss at the time going
What's going on?
When do I stop?
Pushing.
'Cause at some point I'm sure I'm gonna start pissing people up and he was like, Well
Basically when you lose the passion for it.
Keep going.
Happened here you.
You feel like it's not worth pushing anymore.
And I remember looking at this advice and going, Wow, that was not helpful at all.
Based on the situation that I was in, but
Basically I
At some point I I basically gave up.
What happens though, and I understood that after because the company ended up going there just a year later.
Was that I misread the appetite and sense of urgency around that topic?
And the fact that Atlassian being Atlassian
We invest in so many markets.
We have many opportunities like this.
That's it on the shelf.
So one g analysis.
Someone created a business space.
That thing makes sense.
There may not be a trigger for the why now.
So we need a very strong trigger for why now.
To go after it.
And I did not do a good enough job at articulating this.
Why now?
Why why do we have to do this now?
versus in a year's time, in two years time.
And the next team that came in afterwards did a much better job at that.
But for me that's that was um a great learning which is about great work
Can get part 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 are there that are probably face, but that's.
Doesn't mean that we have to go after all of them.
And so but it does make sense to explore them.
And then decide when to pull the trigger and
Da
that's rational for the sense of agency needs to be there and it needs to be built into the business space.
This reminds me of my chat with Mahika, who is
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 this is uh I I think of it as why is it perishable.
Why is this opportunity perishable? Why is it gonna disappear if we don't act on it now?
And you could think of it as why do we have to do this now?
It's not just like this is a huge opportunity. It's but we also need to do it right now to give people motivation.
Yeah, that was a that was a huge learning from me. I wasted months on it, but uh like with every failure
Learnings came out of it in the painful way.
So you know product managers are often biased to it's action, or at least that's my case. Like I want you to go and do stuff and
Build stuff and try stuff and
You know, we with customers and so being evil waiting for a confirmation is not a great spot to be, but sometimes you need to recognize when you're there.
And it's good to step back.
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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 gonna be building this new product to?
actually the same users you're already selling to. And it may feel like
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 and you shared. And so you could rewind if you want to get your get the actual details of when it makes sense to go one or the other.
Mm.
Sometimes doesn't make sense we right just
Just keep what you're doing and focus on the user problems and
And don't slow down.
Uh, 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 white now. That's a really good one.
Just like
When you're trying to make a case, make it clear it has to happen now.
Is there anything else that comes to mind as I try to summarise some of the advice so far? No, that seems that seems like a good one.
The main one I'm getting also out of out of this is like the your
If you try to start new things, it's gonna be coming from your drive and your passion and and
And that's what
Pushy stuff.
Forward.
So don't give up.
Uh'cause I I
Okay.
I tried really hard before getting to one that worked.
So that's uh I guess that's probably a testament for it's possible.
And a testament to your uh your grit. And
And uh desire to make something work. So on that note, let's talk about gear 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.
And then also just what
worked. What allowed you to make this work.
So start wherever you want to start. Yeah, cool. Uh so one uh let's start with the good stuff, um, before we go back into therapy.
Uh the some of the good stuff here is Atlasian at that point
had um recognised
We are innovating
In our big
Successful products.
Or by doing acquisitions.
We have to correct that.
and start building new products ourselves as well.
And so there was a huge push from the founders to go
Hey, we need to we need to restart that.
I've it game point eight.
Which was an internal incubator program that was meant to fix that. And the way they framed it was that
Innovation is like a muscle.
Unless you exercise it, it becomes weak.
And what we have to do now is to
Work on it again.
And so
Out of that thing, point A.
And Giaco Discovery was one of the I think it was one of the hundred pitches that went through that in innovation.

Were a hundred pitches and out of it came out.
Three
Alex.
But
Basically went through all the different stages of it.
Ah, and so uh it started with Girapa the discovery was actually made
Possible because of that.
And because we're inside Atlasian. So we started with a lot of
I could take time.
to focus on this stuff with nothing else to do. It it it was a full time job because of this incubator.
I was able to form a team easier because there was budget allocated.
I was able to form a team that was not worried about losing their job.
Because the program was made so that the
Basically, technically speaking, you would borrow people from other departments
If that thing doesn't work out, they go back to your department.
So there's no fear of group losing your job.
Basically.
We were able to tap into all the research that was done by our research and insights team internally.
We were able to have the co corporate development team working with us. I met with
Probably twenty companies that played in
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.
Because Atlassian he's a big player in this market.
And so there's always the opportunity of
Integrating, being bought.
Partnering, that kind of stuff.
I was able to meet with analysts.
To say hey, so what do you think about
You know, the product management markets.
This was all part of the point A.
uh structure. So the point A structure was basically um 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 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 the crags to go in and ask for help.
From everyone and everyone knew it was important.
'Cause everyone knew the knew the company priorities.
And the new products were
Top company priority.
And so Atlassian playing the long game, I decided that it was okay to invest in these bets and to
We assess them in every three to six months to understand whether we should put more
More more chips in it.
Right.
And so the psychological safety of everyone's job was safe.
coupled with access to all the resources from the company
That part was just invaluable.
to the success of what JPD is today.
So
To give you a bit of context, Jerry Jarp on the discovery.
started four years ago with some research. I was alone back then and then we were
Free?
The first line of code was written.
Um
Three years before we
Um
launched officially as uh generally available.
Which means that for three years we were in alpha
Dog fooding alpha
Oh beta?
and able to do that with the full support of the company.
Right, so that's something which is like when I mention the long game, I mean it. It's something that's very hard to get.
Most companies out there and
Still the thing that I
When people ask me about how to stop
Incubators.
Tak.
Think about it with when you're gonna get your daughter back.
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.
So anyway we so we launched a year ago uh fast forward
Uh to today we've got eight thousand customers.
Amazing C Sat.
Great traction. It's one of the fastest growing products in Atlassian history.
Which is great. So what was hard though, uh the first one was uh
Reminding everyone that failure is the most likely outcome.
And I will die on that hill.
to explain to people when they want to start things internally.
Frame it like that.
Remind everyone.
There's a tooth
Like seventy percent chance.
Number completely put out of pulled out of thin air.
That whatever you're working on is not going to exist in six months.
We are trying to
launch a new product, enter a new market. Our goal is to
Get to a hundred million dollar businesses.
Right. So
There's not that many of them out there.
We have tried and we have failed at a few of them at Atlassian.
And so remember that. And it's super important.
Should we remember that? Do we remember that? Because otherwise
The company
has a tendency to
Over invest. Not the not the company top down.
Parts of the company.
Have the tendency to tr come
And try to help.
So for example here we want to build this. Oh if you want we could change this service to be able to do XYZ for you.
No.
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
Otherwise
Yes, you get the help.
But the help always comes with condition.
And the condition is usually things slow down.
Right. So what we try to do is remember remind everyone
Things are gonna fail.
So that we could basically buy the opportunity
To hack shit together.
That is not going to scale.
That is not going to respect our design guidelines.
That is not going to
Fit with the Gira target architecture.
But we're going to test this with customers and see.
If the the
Concepts make sense, if the prototypes make sense, but then they get value out of those.
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.
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 about giving us all these resources.
Why do you think that's so important?'Cause that's
I don't think most companies position new incubations that way. Why why do you think that's so effective and more effective? Yeah, the so the the the thing that we're trying to do when starting new products is to to basically emulate a startup in an environment that is not hungry.
Like this not starving.
And so you need to create scarcity, like do we
What I want to do with my team is to make sure that they 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.
Two
To know whether this thing is even going to work or not.
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 was like no.
We're rebuilding this component.
And we're testing this with customers next week. It's not perfect, it's not perfect.
And so that 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.
Well 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 uh keep everyone else within the org uh away.
and not uh worry about what you're building'cause they're you just tell them, Don't worry, this is not gonna work out.
We're just gonna try this thing just just to see.
So it's not like for your team to be like, this is probably not gonna work out. I imagine the team is like, Oh, we gotta make this work. It's such a good idea.
It's more to like as a trick to keep the orc from swallowing you up and pushing you around. So this there's a part of that, but there's also um really a need from like if we need to respect Atlas can't dollars here.
And if we don't know whether this thing is going to work, I do not want to drag a team of fifty people into this.
I want to know that this thing is worth the investment of a team of fifty people.
So it's it's a bit it's a bit of both, actually.
Now it's
It's of course easier said than done, and so that's for again point A helped. We had four stages.
Called Wonder, Explore, Make an Impact.
Where in the first stage it was all about proving
But there was a problem area we could go into, there was a market.
We could answer very clearly, articulate why Atlasin should move there. We could articulate why now.
That's stuck that I've struggled with before.
And have enough data to validate
All those claims.
Explore was about exploring solutions, which doesn't mean
build it and and throw it out there and see what sticks. It's about
If you get like a bunch of customers
Raising a problem
Can you get them to play back that the solution would address their problem?
And so in the case of General Product Discovery
Because we were not building we didn't need any new technology, it was mainly new UX.
Uh and new workflows.
We basically validated a lot that question, but
With Figmas in in like
dozens of um uh 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 very dating that
It's worth investing in in terms of solution. We don't only have the right problem, we've got the right 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
Actually ready to go GA.
And now let's see the impact it has on Atlassian's business and keep
uh monitoring it uh from there and it it turns into a real business.
From that.
Point onwards.
New these four stages.
Wonder.
Explore.
Make.
Impact.
Whenever we were talking with teams, we were telling them we're currently in
Explore.
And we started doing that with the
The full bet itself.
Then we started doing that to talk about the different
features that we were working on or problem areas we were going after.
Which means that now every time we go into conversation with other teams and we mention it's we're in Wanda or we're in Explorer, they know what to expect.
When we go to a um 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 protecting us
Protecting us again.
From uh all those
Basically teams that feel like they had to chime in.
No, we're in explore!
We don't have anything
Ready to that's been validated. Like
It's not
have opinions about how the architecture is done before we have validated.
That customers want something.
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
Move from
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 work? Yeah, so we basically write the um six page job.
That's um
Looks at all the different aspects of all the questions that we want to answer.
And then uh we are in a meeting with the point A stakeholders and the founders of Atlassian.
And everyone reads that page.
For about fifteen 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 boot it back um uh one time.
when we were like, Hey, we're ready to go into anywhere from alpha to beta as part of make.
No, I 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
And the leadership of point A, as well as heads from the different lines of businesses at Atlassian?
We're participating.
uh in those um uh sessions.
Which That is super cool. Visibility all the way up.
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 uh that we did, or it might be let's let's roll this thing into something else.
Mm. So for example on your whiteboard product.
Which I say product.
White bot's feature, out of confidence.
Initially came out of point eight.
Uh and was
eventually rolled into confluence instead because portfolio fit made more sense there.
That's so interesting. So you said there's like a hundred projects that went through point A, so there's kind of this funnel and there's these
Is there a meeting for all one hundred of these that the founders go to for all these incubations, or is the or do they come join later down the funnel? Uh it's not not the full hundred of them. Basically there's a first uh and I'm saying a hundred, it's over a few different quarters of teams coming in and
But not n not for the initial stage of entering Pant.
It's usually when uh when they've been accepted. Yeah.
I interrupted you and took us on a tangent. You were sharing essentially
The things that went well and how this
All came together.
So failure is the most likely outcome is the one thing I would stand behind in in everything because
I've seen before what happens when we get too complacent with it's gonna work.
Right, lessons from the previous things I was talking about. So this one are really key. Second one, this one is much harder.
Ah, which is
If you're starting something like this.
Your teams will need to break a lot of rules.
That are established.
But they need to be able to do that without breaking the trust.
Of everyone in the organization.
The rules were created to support the business.
at the stage where it was successful.
And they just
It just so happens that they might not work.
From Ubets.
So
You need
Like the the the the the trick here is
For me has been to the the way I pictured it is I've got a bunch of chips.
Since I joined McClassian, I've been accumulating chips.
And those people like social capital. Yeah, it's like trust I've built with the founders, with the
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 uh like you say capital.
I've got these chips and I decided on this bet.
You know what?
I'm gonna go all in.
Right, Timas and if I
If it works, it works. If it doesn't work, I'm probably out of here, but I'm going to go on.
So if I see something that's not gonna work
I'm gonna say it.
We're not going to do it.
And so I was
I knew I was going to put myself in in tough
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
One example, breaking rules without breaking trust, where it was tricky.
We have a lot of rules in a company like a Class Canon.
This is what um
This is how it works in engineering. I mean engineers are the biggest part of our workforce, right? That's where
Uh all the
Um that
This g shit gets done because engineers work on it.
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.
People who are not looking for the next promotion, but they're want they want to make a splash.
And when that's not possible, I want you to be able to hire contractors.
to fill in the gaps and and stuff like that.
And I was like a lot of the rules that I need to be able to break
He's basically in engineering.
So I decided not to have an engineering leader in the gym.
And to do it myself.
So I was the product leader?
And the engineering needle.
I was technical enough to be able to have these conversations.
But mainly I was just working with amazing engineers who just could self direct themselves.
So they were able to make changes in areas that were not owned by them.
They were able to do changes that do not respect any of our standards.
They were able to hack their way around rebuilding services and what and whatnot.
We are now not in the position where we need to do stuff like that.
But at that time I needed to take a position like that.
So uh we could actually go and move fast.
with basically the equivalent of being a startup inside Atlasia.
That's not comfortable.
To do stuff like that.
And I would not recommend that in uh
Many environments?
Uh Atlassian was very forgiving.
Throughout the whole thing.
Doesn't mean that it I didn't
Grow great on on that.
Uh that was uh not simple. One of them rules, for example, was uh one of the rules is
At that time we didn't want to have a footprint in Europe.
Back then.
For more engineering teams.
It's different today, but back then it was like that. Like shit.
I'm based in France.
I'm trying to stop this stuff.
I don't want to move to the US or move back to Australia just for this right now.
So I hire 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, so
Basically all the um
uh rules around you need to contribute to
Uh for example
The engineering team could say for one day to the next, leadership could say, You need to invest fifteen percent of your time in reliability.
And for us it's like we're we're not we're not there yet. We don't even have a prototype out. Yeah, but that's the company will
All right. Again, no engineering manager and contractors, boom, one of these rules are blind.
So it was um
People who were looking at it from the outside were like wow, dude, you're uh
Are you sure you're a cow?
All this?
And it it felt
Super uncomfortable.
But we have the support of of leadership from it.
It's just a tough transition for Atlassian from the we only invest in the the big ones or acquisitions.
So let's invest in in in make new bets.
This is a crazy story you're telling me. So you were
You are leading this team.
You had
You hired a team of contractors to build this product.
You're in a whole different uh country from the rest of Atlasing, basically.
Uh
And the whole idea here was just to do stuff that wouldn't be necessarily allowed at Elastian. They wouldn't let you work this way. And you found that to do to make the thing you needed to make
And the thing that you were sp like betting your career on, it sounded like. Uh I just had you're just gonna be this pirate working on this thing in uh in France.
And it worked out.
So the um the point A uh emoji and Atlas is a pirate flag.
Mm.
I was not the only one. There were quite a few of us uh working on new beds, basically operating like that.
Each question in different roles.
The end goal was not to question the rules.
The end goal was to get to the stuff that we needed to do.
Which is we just need to clean the space to work with users to test prototypes.
Up until it works.
And you know, progressively get to a uh sustain to like to a product that's going to be enough to launch, right?
So we never intended to break the the rules.
Which is the things that we were going to choose the ones
that we're going to work to support us in this mission and say no to the others.
You mentioned Europe.
At the time
A lot of other
Point A founders were struggling.
with the fact that they were operating from the mothership in Sydney.
Because they're still with everyone else.
And so like you're talking about doing all this stuff, yeah, but remember that like
We've got this, we've got this OKR thing, we've got this vision for GR that we're building, like you need to participate in all this.
And so
I was in Europe going.
Fine, schedule it in at your own time.

And um teams were like
Oh, we like.
I don't I I think a lot of teams like we we don't
Care enough about this.
Because they're telling us 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.
And so there was a lot of the early
success that we had in being able to move super fast that came from
Being so far.
That
People just
Did not engage.
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.
Right, but at first we just needed to blaze our way through.
So that's uh that's what we did.

Lessons and things that work well for something like this as 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.
And you've seen you've interviewed Megan.
On the show before.
And you
I listened again to the way she pitched point A, and yes.
That's exactly what I'm
Came out of what she was saying, which is
We we gave the space for those tools to be able to do this with a lot of autonomy.
And that was the outcome of all the of all that work, basically, which is the
D
the the the program was then set up so new teams could do it.
With uh and fitting within the motor sheet, basically.
And I think people hear that like, yeah, okay, of course. News incubation, silo, separate, they do their own thing. It's a like people hear that and it's like
And they try to do that.
But I imagine
It's not actually
what it what they need to do. And what I'm hearing is like
You went to like a pretty far extreme of making that happen. Not like
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 um the the the one that I'm most passionate about is how we work with customers is very different in um
super early stage back versus to what you do in a very established product like Jira.
So
The
The first part is
How can we
Innovate in a way that doesn't fuck up existing customers.
Girom a hundred and twenty thousand customers, Atlassian three hundred thousand customers.
We can't just go in there, start experimenting.
Breathing a whole bunch of shit that's millions of people experience and go, What are you doing, Atlasia?
So what we needed is to create this
Area where we could experiment.
That's
The way
From Gira while being inside Jira. That part was a bit tough.
It's possible to do.
In fact, I came across an article from Ben Ways
No, sorry, no our ways.
From um
It's it's from many years ago now.
We were basically talking about innovating in a successful mature product.
And talked about three stages of incubate, iterate, integrate.
And as part of that he gave the examples of uh Instagram, Twitter and and Foursquare.
Uh well basically he was explaining, you know, at the beginning, for example, uh Instagram was a feed that was
Chronological.
And then uh the team started to experiment with a 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.
Then we can the explore tab.
And then the explore tab.
became the main feed. The feed is not chronological anymore.
It's based on your interests.
And I that that thought.
really resonated with me.
Well I was like, you know what? We're going to try to apply that to Jira.
Which is we're going to be a little bit in general.
But we're going to kind of
Extract ourselves from the
A lot of the core components of the core base.
To rebuild the UX?
At food work.
for the audience for going after.
Our audience is product managers, they have no patients no patients for spinners.
Things need to be visual.
They need to be able to quickly move things around to visualise
Da
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 be bogged down into the details, it can go into very, very deep trees.
It needs to be an air of space.
But you feel like you can breathe and
Have uh like creative conversations.
And Jura's UI was not exactly known for that.
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.
Yeah, y'all.
And so we said, That's fine, we're going to experiment
With an experience.
That's going to be detached from Gira.
Still on the same platform.
And that's what we did.
Basically.
And so this this concept of uh in
Incubate by
working on something on the side, iterate until you've got it right and then integrate it back
into the main product is something I would definitely do again.
We're currently in the middle of the integration phase for
Yeah for the discovery.
So the lesson there is don't don't s force yourself to be a part of the broader product initially.
First figure out what it can be if it's its own thing.
And then eventually you can integrate.
Depends who you're doing it for and the problems that they've got. Don't feel limited by your platform.
To answer.
The
Core things that are necessary for your product to work.
Basically.
So if the platform is good enough for
For us, if it was the UX was good enough for the product managers, we would not have done that.
And we we would have a have a hard time justifying it, but because it was not.
We basically give ourselves the
Uh the stand to be able to do it.
The second one was something I read from so Stealing Don't Fuck Existing Customers, something I read from uh a slide from Reforge.
The talk about the safety funnel.
Where so they have this thing where the
Typical growth funnel goes from uh you know acquisition all the way to
Revenue and there's a whole bunch of different uh stages in between. Your goal is to maximise the number of people who go through
This one successfully.
And I I was trying to explain to people
What we were trying to do with JiraPodd Discovery and I was struggling to put the name on it.
It was
We're gonna work with a few
Small number of customers.
Up until it's right for them.
And then we're going to expose it to progressively more people.
And I know it's it's very common sense, but that's basically what we decided to do. Instead of the Atlassian
way which was more hey, we s measure our success based on
For example, at that time, I think it was still before the 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 of they would have a bad experience.
Would have been very hard to claim them back.
Afterwards.
So someone in Reforge put the name on Safety Funnel.
So the safety funerary is amazing.
People don't understand that.
You basically put a hot stop.
And you limit the number of people who have bad experiences.
And you do that for a while.
Ebbens if you can prove it's amazing.
And then you invite more people.
So we did a none of that.
So
We basically created that
Pocket away from Jira to
reimagine what your could be for product managers.
And we only expose that to a very small number of customers at first.
So that's don't fuck existing customers.
First, um
Uh principle.
And the reason that's important just to
But a point there is the business will start to get upset if you're
Making many customers upset.
That broke down GRF for millions of users?
And first time might have been okay? I mean by the third time.
We would have been asked to, you know, back up and go home.
Got it. So the advice there is just limit how many people you even get exposed to your early, very early product.
Even if it's gonna hurt your numbers.
You don't want to cause people to be like, What the hell are you doing over there, man?
Uh-huh. So Hurt Your Numbers is now the interesting one. So how do you frame success and how do you define metrics?
Mm when you go in it's easier to work with a small number of customers for a super long time.
So that's where what uh I did up
Defining for this.
Is based on a term that was used at Atlasia, but I kind of tried to formalise it.
If something could refer something that everyone could refer to.
which is the Lighthouse Users Program.
And so the principle for it is it's a program, so it's an official thing.
We have
Hundreds of thousands of customers at Atlassian.
But we will only build the experience for a small number of them.
And so there are stages to it.
The first stage is we work with ten.
And we prove.
That's
The problems that they had?
Are the things that we sold.
And where we spend most of the time.
for the lighthouse the first ten lighthouse users.
is to explain why they are the lighthouse users.
Everything that explains why we believe.
Now a proxy
For every custom that we serve afterwards.
We then have the stage from ten to a hundred.
Where we so we recruit more customers, but we're still not in the um fully self-service, don't need a lot of onboarding stuff. We're still testing out the value, but we're testing the different
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
uh different security needs or different
There's a lot of subtleties that you catch between ten and a hundred.
Then we get to a stage where we're like, You know what? It's good.
It solves people's problems, but it's not self service, because you need to explain stuff.
We need to work with people on stack.
We need to work with them and and answer a lot of support tickets or
Do a lot of zoom calls to explain stuff. Now we need to
Get from a hundred to a thousand.
And by for by g 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
It helps to define success.
In that in the make phase we've got ten one hundred one thousand.
And then people can understand exactly where we're at there and the types of questions we're trying to answer.
In the ten we're answering every question with a user
Snipet
Of a video call.
With them
either talking about their problem and solution, but
Showing the product and how they solve.
With it?
That's how we want it.
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 ten to a hundred, from a hundred to a thousand, but for each of those that's there's kind of a playbook for how you go from
From one to the other.
That
helped us because we could then clean the space to do the right thing.
And we were not asked to hit, for example, a monthly active user's number.
On number of customers number or percentage of users who use this number because it's very qualitative still.
uh when we're uh at that stage.
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 uses and the there's two sides to it. There's the uh we just talked about the
Stakeholder facing side.
The one I'm
I love is the the team facing side of this.
Which is I I've seen a lot of teams uh
Atlasin and other companies as the products grow
You tend to leverage a lot more user research.
Formal user research or CSAT service.
And
The way I call it it's hiding behind research.
And not
Being close enough to the ground with customers?
And what I want to do in the teams I work with is is to create a direct
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 uh there's a
It's something I've seen which is
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.
Do we change anything?
Not enough.
What makes people
Want to
change and actually gives them a trigger to change.
I've seen
is a lot more empathizing with
individual people's
Experience.
If I know someone that's impacted by climate change
It's gonna make me relate a lot more strongly.
to the concept.
of climate change and want to
Change myself.
So
Sorry for the power note here. No, that's such a good example. Such a good way of making that point very clear of 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.
We'll tell you what you need.
So what we do with that is we recruit
Fan people.
And we put these people in front of the whole team, not just the peers.
PM Designer Engineering.
We met meet on Zoom.
We chat.
We work with the same ones over months to build a product. They're with us on Slack.
We have regular things.
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
This customer has struggled 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 the 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 Atlasian where we called
Some
Uh, engineers were more like system engineers, some were more product engineers.
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?
Ten customers, you know my name.
You know that context.
You know their problems.
You can empathize with it.
This empathy makes you want to act to change
Your product.
Two
solve their problem and you get really huge pride.
Coming back.
I don't.
And it's it can seem counterintuitive in a company like Atlassian.
We hundred thousand customers.
Right? We should build for them, but you can't.
Right, 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
That we are
Indeed, reacting based on feelings
Like wanting to help or not wanting to help or
Reacting strongly to what you've seen.
But we are embracing that to to to try and
and build the best product possible, and I've actually seen that the outcome
Is
So far on this product it's it's worked.
Like, if you actually think about this from the perspective of how would a startup approach this, this is exactly how a company would
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
Uh this is gonna work.
First of all, how long was that period of just like this we have no this is probably not gonna work to you? Oh wow, maybe this is gonna work and along the same lines.
How does it Lasian slash what have you learned about how to protect
This uh the Pixar people call it an ugly baby.
Like s when an idea is new, it's an call it's an ugly baby, people don't want it. It's just like get rid of this thing. Uh man, that sounds mean to say, but that's the way they talk about it. That's the term in uh creativity. Um how do you
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 gonna kill it.
How do you protect it? So how long did it take for it to show success? And how do you what have you learned about how to protect
Yeah, uh so basically internal comms is everything there.
And uh the way I would I saw my job as a large part as
being very clear on where we were, on what we were learning, on how fast we were learning, half us we were moving.
Being super honest.
every step of the way not try to make shit up, don't try to make it look big bigger than it is.
more successful than it is. On the contrary, be very clear about what we're testing.
But we're testing it.
Doing that for data?
Doing that with
Personal customer stories.
'Cause we all can relate it goes to relate to the heart and to the mind.
So
And and so that's what I I always try to weave into comms that I don't send weekly.
So we've got this product internally called Atlas.
which have a project on Atlas, people can subscribe to this project.
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.
Every week.
For when we were at a stage where we were trying to get a
the first version out to customers, it was a weekly demo of the product and everything that we built.
Show the momentum.
As much as possible. I was saving features for one week to the next just to
when when I knew we were going to be on vacation, for example, to just to have
Something to show this.
The string that keeps moving, it keeps moving, you don't want to get in front of it.
But then what uh I needed to do is to balance that out.
with all the customer side of things. So when we started to put it in front of customers, then it was slippets from customer conversations. No one is going to read a
Research report that takes thirty minutes to read.
Everyone is happy to watch a three minute snippet.
With
Four customers talking about something.
So I was using that a lot every week.
By posting those out there and then sharing them widely on Slide to go, This is what we learned.
This is what this customer is facing in terms of problem.
But you're out, this is how we're solving it.
This is them talking about it.
That kind of stuff.
So I was I was
Publishing that that that there and then sending that everywhere on Slack.
Those kinds of things?
А ват гепос влосить and спіл.
And no one wants to fuck with a high speed train. You don't get in front of it.
That's
That doesn't help.
And you're going to look bad by doing that.
So basically that ended up
Buying us the time that we needed to get to out of this
I don't know how you got it the uggy baby face?
Make my baby face.
Uh so basically it ended up uh it helped us get out of this phase where we don't have anything to show for yet.
Because what we're showing
It's based on the learnings we're trying to get.
And we're trying to do that with
Here's some numbers.
Here's some demos.
Here's some user snippets.
Uh and and doing that every week.
'Cause people can consume bite sized contents.
Content every week.
The just struggle with
the stuff that where you come in three, four months later and go, This is what we have to chauffeur.
Right.
How long was that period of before I got out of this ugly baby phase for you? When did people start to get like, Oh wow, this might work?
Honestly.
We had something
Dog fooding within two months.
In the hands of
Uh the first lighthouse user within five months.
Uh
Oui.
Iterated on the alpha for maybe six months.
We then entered a beta that lasted close to a year.
So
I think at every
Every
Tap of the way.
People could see
Us going somewhere?
And I think initially they judged not the outcome.
They judge the team a lot more than the outcome.
So there's all this talk of uh Funder Market Fit.
I think really that's what
you need to be teasing out, which is is it the right team going after the right problems?
And then if they can answer yes in ways that you haven't thought about asking.
Consistently, week over week, it's it's enough. And that's I think that's where we were.
Up until the stage where we were able to give something to customers, but
The first lighthouse user was five months in, so
It didn't even matter whether it looked good or not.
'Cause people could see okay, that's what
Oh, there's something there.
Right.
So so I'm not sure there there's one precise moment where it happened, however
There was this one moment where we were like, Okay, that's it.
We're ready to go G A.
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.
Our customers have expectations from us on that frontlake.
Your stuff is functional.
But it's way too early.
And so we went and fixed it.

Uh okay to go.
But uh yeah no I I because we have point A.
Because we had
This uh expectation said that it would take a while to get there.
And because we were able to show progress every week.
We basically d didn't really feel that moment where
We don't not know what to do with this because it's too early.
This uh design improvement phase m what I'm visualizing is you're this pirate that has to invite it to like a nice
dinner and you have to start cleaning up. You have to start looking good and become enter society.
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 through in 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.
Making very easy to consume with little snippets and videos.
So there's a lot of great advice here.
So uh
Timeline wise, interestingly, what I'm hearing is it basically took a year from idea to alpha, something like that.
Is that is that roughly right?
Uh first Alpha One Castle Law.
Okay. Uh we stayed in Alpha for like six months.
Okay, got it. So f uh through alpha about a year total.
Many people hearing this on the one hand would be like, Of course Atlassian has all these resources. They're gonna spend a year on this idea that who knows is gonna work out if so easy for them.
I imagine there was much pain and suffering and challenge along the way.
That uh
that happen that makes it not so easy. Is there something you could share by just like the struggle?
to actually make this real just as a way to kinda wrap up.
Conversation go back to therapy if there's anything you want to share.
Yeah, basically it's
Mm.
Pretty much what we talked about.
Um earlier with
Lots of processes that
You know, I will not change yet because we're at the very beginning of point A.
And uh people still wanting a wanting us to chime in on the
things that were important for their part of the organization where they
where we would play a part later if we become successful. So
Like none of that stuff was just solved.
Once and for all it was just a constant
Process two.
To play with that, but we
I think we managed to get up at these things pretty gracefully, uh, in the end. And
I think we gained some level of admiration for some teams from that.
And some find it a bit
It's always interesting to see someone breaking the rules and getting away with it and
And I think it inspired some of the other founders to try and
And and and do that, which was which was pretty cool to see. It's actually something I
I'd love to see more
Um hearing back from
The customers I've been talking to about this in their company, I don't have them feel
So for K
Bye.
the current processes and and they don't feel like they can
Break the chains?
And so that's the
I'm hoping it it inspires a few.
You know, a few more teams to give it a go.
Ready.
There's clearly more I want to learn about pointing how other companies do this incubation stuff, so this is a really good inspiration to dig deeper into
Those sorts of programs.
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.
Yeah, this it's a bit I I would try to balance the point I just gave, which is it's hard, so someone has to try.
And always feel like you can push.
I I'd like to balance that a bit with um
Be careful for yourself as well and
And make sure that you're doing this in an environment that's really
That's that's ready to welcome it.
And I so
As I mentioned, I worked at Atlassian now for the past ten years. Before that I used to work in banks
In uh
heavily regulated industries in
A whole bunch of different areas where
That kind of stuff was not
Okay.
And uh
I could have tried to push.
It would have not gone well at all.
So I think there is
I I'm deeply convinced by
The fact that
We don't need
So much top down leadership. What we need is a lot of autonomous leaders.
Regardless of their position within the orc.
able to push for change, fighting for the right things.
But you need to do that in an environment that's that's safe for you to do so.
Uh and if it's not, I think it's okay to consider alternatives. So in other words, don't feel like you're trapped.
Right. Uh you only have one work life, like do it in places where you
You you really believe you can do amazing work and surrounded by
People that you're excited to work with.
Uh otherwise it's I've been there before where it's possible to become cynical.
Bye.
The weight of the things that are not possible?
And uh ending up uh doubting your own ability to do stuff, really.
So uh it's a bit of a balance of
Push for the right things.
But also, watch up to yourself.
And if the environment is not right, it's okay to change.
This is a really hot topic and common question in product management and
Imagine other functions in product of just
How much
can actually change as an I see at a company like
I hear all this advice about making change, changing culture, incubating stuff, innovating.
How much can you actually make an impact versus
Nothing's gonna change. I should go f work somewhere else.
Do you have any advice there, just like it sounds like basically you're saying
There's often times you have no impact on how the business and culture is gonna work and you
probably should go find a company like Atlassian.
That does learn how to
incubate and innovate and think differently.
Yeah, this one is a
I'm not sure how to answer that, really.
Because I've
Worked with, consulted.
Work for
Close to fifty companies?
Atlassian is the first company.
I joined.
Where
I was like at home.
From day one.
Challenge in the right way, but
Fuck, every I I can really choose my battles and go after them and
And things are hard, but
But it's okay, so I
Join it Lasian. I would just go not not set up for status quo because I I you cannot be the only
Same person.
In a room.
At some point you will go insane. The environment will permanent on you. You are not
This entity that is absolutely permeable to everything that happens around you.
Like everything around you will affect you and will change you.
As a person. I really believe that.
And so you need to surround yourself
With people
And environments that can
How 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.
To be me. So
Yeah, that's uh my only advice, which is
Have the courage to
To ask yourself those questions.
'Cause otherwise you can you you it it might change you in ways you don't want to.
Amazing advice. Really important advice.
With that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
I am.
Looking forward to it.
Alright, here we go. First question. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?
Yeah, the first one was a book that was recommended to me by uh Scott Farqua, founder of Atlassian co founder.
Who a method for hiring
Is uh basically a book about
how to do the thing that I for a while was really bad at.
Which is
Try to interview
To understand who's going to be a good person, not a good person to join your team.
Uh second one, so that's one book about work, uh two other books that are not about work.
Uh highly recommend reading Hakim's Odyssey.
Uh 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 Met Sea?
are uh 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 A kim that was told very beautifully by this uh illustrator.
Is is well worth a read on that front.
The last one is a book that I'm not sure has been translated.
Uh uh from French.
It's called Vivre avec la Terre to live with the earth.
And it's about uh how we could build a different agricultural system

That might have better ways
To feed us
Into the future.
Uh when the the the
That doesn't require large monoculture of of of of uh vegetables that might not be as sustainable. They manage to create like
really, really uh a really efficient structure on very small passes of land.
With a lot of species working together.
to control and and not need the use of any pesticides and stuff like that. They've been always surrounded by teams of researchers from the uh
I think it's called In R it's uh one of the French research centers.
I've got 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 uh someone's recommended that's only in a different language. It's pretty thick though and it's very technical. So I've I've read the principles bit and I got lost in all the technical aspects of growing fruit.
Yeah.
So let's ask your favorite interview question. What's your favorite interview question? Yeah, so I struggled a lot with um interviewing and I I've I've read all the standard interview questions there is out there and I've heard them in your podcast as well.
There is one uh that came from this book.
That Scott Farqu also told me was working really well for him.
Is when people
Describe an experience.
You ask them the name of the person?
That's they uh what with
But then
And you ask them.
So when I call this person
After all cool.
What do you think they're gonna say about that?
And apparently this does something and I've seen it happen, where people are unable
True.
Project and invent on the spot.
Something
From the lens of another person talking about them?
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 was so when I ask this person, what do you think they're gonna say
Well actually and the
I was only a part of it or
Or and maybe you shouldn't call them because X by Z that
But makes people all of a sudden go out of this scripted
version they give of themselves.
And become more
Real for a second?
And you get a bit of the authenticity
coming out which uh often is very hard to get to.
for me in in interview questions and I've seen it happen it I find that very funny to do now because people are
Get really uneasy for a second and then you get to something real.
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?
Yeah, it's got nothing with tech.
Uh nothing to do with that. I uh I'm paid surfing a lot at the moment and I
Came across hydrophones?
Uh, which is basically these things where

Airplane.
Plain underneath you?
On a mast which is connected to a board, you're on the board with your kit and you basically just
Fly over the the water.
And that's uh
That invention is just brilliant.
It's relatively easy to learn.
And I I
Can spend basically parts of my weekend flying over water.
in as much as a breeze of wind because there's absolutely 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 Airplane.
Is that the thing that Zuck was uh writing with his sunscreen?
With the flag, or is that something else? I don't know if you saw that photo.
Don't worry about it. Uh 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. Uh I don't know if I believe you. Yeah, I mean there's um there's uh spots and crafts that are difficult to learn.
Uh this one uh you can get
Comfortable in eighteen months to two years, which is really short. Uh done before. 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 work or in life, maybe share with friends and family?
I've got two, one for work and one for everything in life.
Uh the one from for work is uh initially a quote from Obama. Can't remember the exact quote, I'm going to paraphrase.
But it's keep it about the work.
So there's going to be moments in your career, in your
Well you'll
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?
And whenever that happens a lot of parasitic
Thoughts may come in, you may uh face imposter syndrome and stuff like that.
Happens to me super regularly.
And whenever that happens, what I do is I remind myself
Keep it about the work.
Because as long as you make it about the work.
There's always work to be done.
And there's always a path that emerges
From that work.
A bit of the same of this uh
The goodest thing in yoga where once you're committed
Good things would happen.
But that's exactly what I've what I've seen, uh and that's helped me every time. It's I re read this quote, Whenever I'm in these moments of turmoil.
Around me.
Now
When I
face those moments I also remind myself of the other one which I invented but it's not um
Uh 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.
So uh don't take yourself too seriously.
You're not that important.
Uh you're probably not that important. As important as you think for the people
Uh that you are arguing with
And
That's also the beauty in all things, which is it has an end.
In the end it probably doesn't matter, so might as well give it you give it your best shot.
And that's uh
But the existentialist back in France, uh
Many generations ago we're talking about uh this one is ki close to Albert Calmus, uh
uh piezes.
Right? If it doesn't make sense, might as well.
Go for it.
Mm-hmm.
Really good points, really good lessons, really good motto.
Final question.
You were ranked.
Uh number four worldwide
In a form of free diving.
First of all, can you d briefly describe what is free diving and then can you share one thing that might surprise someone about this sport?
And the skill.
Yeah, so uh
Yes, that's my claim to fain.
Uh I was ranked number four in basically the distance you can swim in a swimming pool.
Without things?
uh with uh a hundred and sixty seven meters which is five hundred and fifty feet.
Underwater.
Underwater, Breathstroke.
I went further with the monofin, the thing you see back there.
Uh but uh breaststroke was uh was one meter away from the French record.
Uh and uh ranking number forward like that here.
Uh the one I'm most proud of is I actually went to three hundred seat.
Underwater, deep.
Came back in one piece.
Uh and I really enjoyed the the whole thing so three hundred feet. That's like a

Ninety two meters.
Oh jeez. Like I'm trying to imagine in what that is like compared to like a Statue of Liberty or something like that, but I I'll
Looked up.
Look that up later.
Like buildings are can be as little as uh
Twenty, thirty meters and
Can go super higher, but ninety meters is pretty high. Yeah, last time I looked at the building like that, I was can't remember which one it was, but it is pretty high. So it's take one breath.
Go down.
Touch the button.
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?
For free diving?
And most people when I ask them, Hey, what's uh
How long do you think it can be underwater?
Uh and they tell me something like thirty seconds, maybe a minute.
How deep do you think can you can you go?
Uh maybe five meters?
At the end of the weekend.
Most people
We're able to hold their breath for two to three minutes.
And to go to twenty meters deep.
So it's one of those things where it looks absolutely
Impressive and crazy and amazing.
And in fact for maturally gifted.
To it, there's a lot of physiological changes that happen when we dive.
Make it possible, but I think it's
It's fascinating how little we know about our bodies.
I'm looking up how what is three hundred feet?
Compare to uh
Real life objects.
On uh
Perplexity. So what is three hundred feet compared to real life objects?
And here we go, three hundred feet.
The length of a football field Okay, yeah. That sh that that's a I should have realized that.
Close to the length of a Boeing.
Seven thirty seven.
Yeah, I'm y you need to look at it this way to get some perspective. Yeah, and that uh
Oh my god. I'm uh so but I love your advice that people can do much better at the skill than they think.
Yeah, it's uh it's we'll be it
Everyone from kids to adults are are really amazing at it, actually.
Tongi, we've covered so much ground. I think this is gonna help a lot of people that are trying to get better at
Uh 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 so many of this
uh real talk and as you call it therapy.
Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they wanna reach out and maybe follow up on some of the stuff you talked about?
And how can listeners be useful to you?
Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn if you know how to uh you don't need to know how to pronounce my name, just need to know how to write it.
Uh I'm not super active on social media, to be honest. I'm very much in the trenches.
Building this product. Uh
So I I don't do much in terms of networking, to be fair.
Uh but if you are
Uh using this product for example and you have uh
uh 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 spent
A large part of my days talking to users, uh responding to support tickets and stuff like that. So
Yeah.
Amazing.
Tonky, thank you so much for being here.
Well I think i it's been amazing and I hope uh some of the
My gibberish um
It's useful to people.
Definitely not gibberish. I think it's gonna help a lot of people.
And with that, I'll let you go.
Bye, everyone.
Bye bye.
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