Atlassian

Lenny's Podcast · Jun 16

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

With 300,000 customers, it is not starving, so it must create scarcity to run new bets like a startup. Its Point A incubator uses four stages (Wonder, Explore, Make, Impact) with six-pager gates, and about 100 pitches produced three products. A waitlist page with no code drew over 3,000 signups in two weeks. It reached 8,000 customers a year after launch with strong CSAT, using a Lighthouse Users program that grew from 10 to 100 to 1,000 customers, and is among Atlassian's fastest growing products.

Tips

• Remind the company that failure is the most likely outcome▶ 1:00:15A seven-person team tested prototypes with customers the following week instead of negotiating six-month plans with platform teams.
• Gate new bets in named stages with a six-pager review▶ 1:04:15About 100 pitches went through, three products came out, and Tanguy's team was once sent back from alpha to beta and got more time.
• Break the internal rules that block testing, without breaking trust▶ 1:09:20His team was the fastest of the early Point A bets, partly because the time zone distance meant others did not engage to stop them.
• Judge early bets by learning milestones, not monthly active users▶ 11:51Atlassian sets a $100 million business as the goal for a new bet, and a bet that reaches it takes years; Jira Product Discovery had three years of alpha and beta.
• Validate demand before writing code with a newsletter ad and waitlist▶ 27:18More than 3000 signups to the waitlist in about two weeks, before any code existed.
• Show a small number of users progressive exposure with a safety funnel▶ 1:22:17Jira Product Discovery worked with a small set of customers first and only expanded once it was proven.
• Run a Lighthouse Users program with 10, 100, then 1,000 customers▶ 1:23:57Used for Jira Product Discovery, which later reached 8,000 customers with strong CSAT.
• Put 10 named customers in front of the whole product team▶ 1:28:59Engineers would stop a planning meeting to say a customer they spoke to struggled with something else and should be fixed first.
• Send weekly demos and customer snippets to protect an early product▶ 1:31:58A dogfood version within two months, first lighthouse user at five months, six months in alpha, then a beta of close to a year, all without being cancelled.
• Incubate a new product beside the core, then integrate it back▶ 1:17:48Jira Product Discovery is now in its integration phase with Jira.

Lenny's Podcast · Feb 4

Lessons from Atlassian | Megan Cook (Head of Product, Jira)

Runs new product ideas through gated stages (wonder, explore, make, impact, scale) with small teams and a go or no-go check at each. It runs remote-first as 'product team anywhere', with PM onsites and full-team weeks, and research shows meetups lift connection and productivity about 30%. Used by 75% of Fortune 500 companies and has 125,000 customers. The CSAT usability push began with about 40 people, used platform team shepherds, shipped dark mode, and a template change touched four products. Fewer than half of Jira Software users are developers. Started because non-developer teams cobbled together their own Jira setups and struggled with them. That demand signaled the need for something focused on use cases outside software teams. Came from the internal pitch program after PM Tammy Carson saw PMs had nowhere to shape ideas, since anything in Jira was expected to ship. It went through the staged rollout and started with early partners already using Jira Software. Bundles regular status updates into an email so teams can read them asynchronously instead of holding status meetings. It also went through the gated new product rollout. It is the latest product to go through Atlassian's staged new product process. Holds decisions, strategies and kickoffs so people can revisit assumptions and hypotheses a year later.

Tips

• Gate new product bets in stages with small teams▶ 51:51Jira Product Discovery, Atlas and Compass all went through this staged rollout.
• Run an internal pitch program and shield new products from big-product process▶ 51:31Jira Product Discovery came out of the internal innovation program.
• Meet in person about three times a year▶ 17:24Connection and productivity both improve by about 30% for months, so around three gatherings a year works on average.
• Keep meetings for solving problems and move status updates async▶ 22:06
• Use recorded video to work across time zones▶ 23:30A report in France and Megan exchanged quick videos for a while instead of meeting.
• Have senior leaders share failure stories at team onsites▶ 11:26
• Start small with a hypothesis to win investment▶ 43:08The CSAT usability effort began with about 40 people. It shipped dark mode, and a customer called one change the best quality of life improvement in a long time.
• Involve affected stakeholders early and keep returning with updates▶ 25:36For a Jira change to templates and onboarding that touched four products built on the platform, she went to each product's team early and kept returning as the work developed.
• Give a platform team a shepherd instead of aligning roadmaps▶ 41:00This gave about 40 people working on the usability push with early, impactful changes.
• Justify unglamorous usability work with survey verbatims and revenue links▶ 40:41Usability was one of the core reasons for low CSAT at Jira, and the revenue connection helped secure investment.
• Show the pain with designs and customer video▶ 42:34The new experience was shown to cut something like 20 clicks, which helped win the investment.
• Treat non-core teams hacking your product as a signal for a new product▶ 48:16Jira launched in 2003 as a humble bug tracker and now has 15 products around it at Atlassian.

Lenny's Podcast · Apr 30

How to achieve hypergrowth in your business and career | Carilu Dietrich (Atlassian)

Put its sales budget into R&D at two to three times the usual share, took almost no outside money, and grew from $100M to $500M and an IPO. Its bundled landings slowed self-serve conversion, so it went back to landing with a single product. SEO was its top marketing motion, and paid search brought 15 to 25 percent of leads.

Tips

• Put sales and marketing dollars into product and engineering instead▶ 37:25A 2020 chart showed Atlassian with the lowest sales and marketing spend and the highest product spend of its peers, years after the early days.
• Delay net-new sales prospecting and sell first to existing customers▶ 38:45At Airtable and Miro, salespeople engaged only after a threshold of users was already paying on credit cards, sometimes 20 to 40 people at an account.
• Land with a single product instead of a bundle in product-led growth▶ 56:21A single-product buy like Jira can happen in seven days; adding products takes more days and produces fewer conversions.
• Test everything, including bundles, rather than trusting pundits▶ 57:09Testing is how Atlassian learned bundled lands slowed product-led growth.
• Drive word of mouth with expert people, content and community▶ 32:10Mixing customers and prospects at events gave better events than separate salesy prospect events.
• Fund brand advertising only after the product is excellent▶ 20:37Carilu has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on awareness campaigns across Oracle and Atlassian.
• Choose a high-momentum company early in your career▶ 9:38She reached Atlassian through a former executive from her first company.

Lenny's Podcast · Feb 27

An inside look at X’s Community Notes | Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter

The Community Notes team uses Jira only to coordinate with other teams, and runs its own work from a single Google Doc.

Tips

• Replace OKRs and Jira with a single running Google Doc▶ 45:05They once tried Asana but spent more meeting time grooming irrelevant backlog than discussing priorities.

Lenny's Podcast · Jan 30

Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product)

In a survey of newsletter readers, switching from Jira to Linear was the top answer by far, and Jira users name Linear as the tool they would move to if IT allowed.

Lenny's Podcast · Jan 19

10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey)

A community lead there advised starting with agency or partner communities rather than a user community, saving Miro months. Contractors from Atlassian are named as good advisors.

Tips

• Assume your growth problem is not unique and borrow existing patterns▶ 34:30When standing up community at Miro, a call with an Atlassian community lead showed she should start with agency and partner communities, not a user community, saving six to eight months.
• Hire advisors for your growth team instead of figuring everything out alone▶ 1:02:40

Lenny's Podcast · Dec 29

Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO at Confluent)

Shaun built its first B2B growth team around 2012 and spent six years there. It had about 80,000 customers when he left and now has 300,000, which makes it hard to attack. Described alongside Workday and Salesforce as forms on databases that are very hard to clone because of the years of evolved workflows. Shaun ran Jira Agile at Atlassian.

Tips

• Build B2B growth in phases: prove it, systematize it, then embed it▶ 48:08Shaun built the first B2B growth team at Atlassian around 2012.
• Combine PLG and enterprise sales so each feeds the other▶ 53:15Atlassian had roughly 80,000 customers when Shaun left, and now has about 300,000; a competitor winning 1,000 barely dents that.
• Choose each job to fill a skills gap, like a bingo card▶ 56:45Shaun moved from Atlassian (no sales force, 80,000 customers) to Metromile (consumer insurance) to Salesforce and MuleSoft (distribution machine, back-end IT software).
• Expect AI to strengthen incumbent SaaS, because the moat is business rules▶ 27:46Salesforce could not list how software is sold inside it without reading the code of its own instance.

Lenny's Podcast · Jan 25

Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market

It is a B2B exception where freemium works, but even this product-led company eventually built a sales team to win enterprise deals.

Tips

• Use product-led growth for land and expand, not to cross the chasm▶ 1:11:55Every product-led company, including Atlassian, eventually builds a sales team to win enterprise deals.

Lenny's Podcast · Sep 14

Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform)

It is moving from high-frequency niche (Jira for developers) toward high-frequency everyone with Confluence. It spends roughly 10 to 20 points less on marketing than comparable competitors thanks to virality.

Tips

• Map your product on workflow breadth and frequency to predict where to win▶ 6:58Typeform is trying to move from low frequency to high frequency niche by focusing on marketers and salespeople.
• Make virality a source of marketing savings by building a product people share▶ 55:50Atlassian spends maybe 10 to 20 percentage points less on marketing than equivalent competitors.

Lenny's Podcast · Apr 20

An inside look at how Miro builds product | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)

Miro uses Jira for tickets and roadmaps, and new Miro updates support Jira program boards for dependency mapping and program increment planning.

Lenny's Podcast · Dec 15

Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)

It had a sales organization it just didn't call one, and priced its product breathtakingly low.

Lenny's Podcast · Oct 27

Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp)

Atlassian is an example of opinionated software that found an agile best practice with no technology behind it and built for it.

Tips

• Build opinionated software by finding a process with no technology or a better way▶ 47:50Greenhouse enforced a specific way to create a pipeline and build an interview kit, making recruiting more transparent and less biased.

Lenny's Podcast · Sep 22

Why product-led growth is the future | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Surveymonkey)

It closes $200K deals self-serve, which shows that self-serve deals keep growing in size.