Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery)
Tanguy Kursong, a 10-year veteran at Atlassian, shares candid insights on the unique challenges and lessons learned from building zero-to-one products within a large company, including successes like Jira Product Discovery and the struggles of HipChat and Status Page.
Deep Dive Analysis
12 Topic Outline
Introduction to Tanguy Crusson and 0 to 1 Challenges
Advantages and Difficulties of Innovating at Atlassian
The HipChat Story: Successes, Failures, and Lessons Learned
Lessons from HipChat: Competitive Myopia and Platformization
Statuspage: Market Research, Acquisition, and Integration Challenges
The Importance of Articulating 'Why Now' for New Bets
Atlassian's Point A Internal Incubator Program
Jira Product Discovery: Success, Pain, and Lessons Learned
Protecting 'Ugly Babies' and Breaking Rules Without Breaking Trust
The Lighthouse Users Program for Customer Feedback
Balancing Innovation with Personal Well-Being
Lightning Round: Books, Interview Questions, and Freediving
6 Key Concepts
Competitive Myopia
This is the tendency to become overly focused on competitors' actions, leading a product team to react to their features rather than staying true to their own product's core value and understanding their specific user base's needs. It can cause a company to lose sight of what made its product successful.
Don't Eat Your Own Bullshit
This concept refers to the danger of successful companies assuming that past playbooks or assumptions about what made them successful will automatically apply to new markets or products. It emphasizes the need to validate these assumptions for each new venture, even if they worked before.
Why Now
When pitching new product ideas, it's crucial to articulate not just the opportunity, but also the urgent reason why the company must act on it immediately. This 'why now' creates a sense of urgency and helps secure investment over other potential opportunities.
Safety Funnel
A strategy for early-stage product development where the number of users exposed to an unpolished product is intentionally limited. This prevents widespread negative experiences, allowing the team to iterate and prove the product's value before a broader release, thus protecting the company's reputation.
Lighthouse Users Program
A structured approach to engaging a small, carefully selected group of customers (e.g., 10, then 100, then 1,000) for new product development. This program aims to build deep empathy within the product team by having engineers, designers, and PMs directly interact with these users, ensuring the product solves real problems before scaling.
Ugly Baby Phase
This term describes the early stage of a new idea or product when it is unpolished, unproven, and often met with skepticism or resistance from within the organization. It requires protection and nurturing to allow it to develop and demonstrate its potential before being judged by established metrics.
9 Questions Answered
Large companies often have a very high bar for success (e.g., aiming for $100M businesses), tend to over-invest resources, and apply metrics designed for established products to early-stage bets, which can stifle innovation and make it challenging for new ventures to prove their worth.
Atlassian's assumption that its successful playbook of bottom-up adoption from tech/IT users would work in the communication market was flawed. Slack successfully targeted and gained strong adoption from business users, a segment HipChat underestimated and didn't adequately validate.
The primary challenge lies in the 'people' aspect and culture shock, as the acquired startup team loses autonomy, faces new internal processes (hiring, performance reviews, long-term roadmaps), and experiences constant interruptions from other teams, leading to a significant slowdown before potential acceleration.
Beyond highlighting a huge opportunity, it's critical to articulate a strong 'why now' – explaining why the opportunity is perishable and must be pursued immediately. This creates a sense of urgency and helps secure commitment, preventing ideas from being indefinitely shelved.
By positioning the new bet as highly likely to fail, teams can create a sense of scarcity and deter over-investment or interference from the rest of the company. This allows them to 'hack shit together' and break established rules to test concepts quickly without breaking trust.
Teams can adopt an 'incubate, iterate, integrate' approach, building and experimenting with new experiences detached from the core product. These are initially exposed only to a small number of 'Lighthouse Users' before being refined and eventually integrated into the main product.
By recruiting a small group of 'Lighthouse Users' (e.g., 10) and having the entire product team (PMs, designers, engineers) directly engage with them over months. This direct exposure to user context and problems fosters empathy and drives the team to solve real issues.
Through consistent, transparent internal communication, such as weekly tweet-sized updates, demos, and 3-minute video snippets of customer feedback. This demonstrates velocity, learning, and progress, creating a perception of a 'high-speed train' that shouldn't be interfered with.
Freediving is the sport of swimming underwater on a single breath, often to significant depths or distances. A surprising fact is that most people are much more naturally gifted at it than they think, with many capable of holding their breath for 2-3 minutes and diving 20 meters deep after minimal training.
16 Actionable Insights
1. Silo New Product Teams
Disconnect new product teams from the core business as much as possible, even breaking established rules, to allow them the autonomy and speed needed to test and iterate quickly without being bogged down by existing processes or expectations.
2. Set Expectation of Failure
When starting new internal products, explicitly remind everyone that failure is the most likely outcome (e.g., 70% chance it won’t exist in six months) to prevent over-investment and allow the team to hack things together quickly without adhering strictly to all company standards.
3. Articulate the ‘Why Now’
When pitching new initiatives, clearly articulate the ‘why now’ – why the opportunity is perishable and requires immediate action – to gain urgency and commitment from leadership, preventing the idea from languishing on a shelf.
4. Protect New Ideas with Comms
Protect ‘ugly baby’ new products by maintaining constant internal communication, sharing weekly bite-sized updates (demos, customer snippets, learnings, data) to build momentum and demonstrate velocity, making it clear the initiative is a ‘high-speed train’ that shouldn’t be interfered with.
5. Direct Customer Feedback Loop
Foster a direct feedback loop where the entire product team (PMs, designers, engineers) regularly interacts with a small group of ‘Lighthouse Users’ to build empathy and drive action, rather than relying solely on formal research reports or surveys.
6. Implement Lighthouse User Program
Implement a ‘Lighthouse Users Program’ with defined stages (e.g., 10, 100, 1,000 users) to limit early exposure, gather qualitative feedback, and set clear, progressive success criteria, preventing premature scaling that could lead to bad experiences and churn.
7. Incubate, Iterate, Integrate
When innovating within a mature product, ‘incubate’ new features or products on the side, ‘iterate’ on them with a specific audience until they are proven, and then ‘integrate’ them back into the main product, rather than forcing early integration.
8. Validate Past Success Assumptions
Avoid assuming past success playbooks will automatically work for new ventures; instead, actively validate assumptions about new markets or customer segments to ensure they hold true for the current initiative.
9. Avoid Competitive Myopia
Avoid competitive myopia by primarily focusing on understanding and solving your target users’ problems, rather than constantly reacting to competitor’s features, as this can lead to losing focus on what makes your product unique and valuable.
10. Prioritize People in Acquisitions
When acquiring companies, prioritize the human and cultural integration, understanding that the acquired team will face significant culture shock and process changes, which can cause a slowdown before acceleration.
11. Acquisition as Acquihire
For smaller acquisitions, treat it as a ‘hire’ (acquihire) by integrating the team and rebuilding their successful product on your existing platform, rather than trying to maintain a separate ‘Frankenstack,’ to accelerate your roadmap efficiently.
12. Avoid Product Rewrites
Avoid full product rewrites, as they often lead to significant delays and competitive disadvantages; focus instead on iterative improvements.
13. Create Scarcity for New Bets
To emulate a startup within a large company, create scarcity by reminding everyone that new initiatives are likely to fail, which helps buy autonomy and avoid over-investment from the broader organization.
14. Keep it About the Work
When facing self-doubt or imposter syndrome, refocus on the work itself, as engaging with the tasks at hand can provide clarity and reveal a path forward.
15. Don’t Take Yourself Seriously
Adopt a perspective that in the grand scheme, individual importance is fleeting, which helps in not taking oneself too seriously and encourages giving one’s best effort without excessive self-doubt.
16. Choose a Supportive Environment
Ensure your work environment supports pushing for change and innovation; if it’s not safe or welcoming, consider seeking alternatives to avoid becoming cynical and doubting your abilities.
7 Key Quotes
Never do a rewrite.
Tanguy Crusson
Don't eat your own bullshit.
Tanguy Crusson
Failure is the most likely outcome.
Tanguy Crusson
No one wants to fight with a high-speed train.
Tanguy Crusson
Keep it about the work.
Tanguy Crusson
Remember that in a hundred years, we'll all be dead and forgotten. So don't take yourself too seriously.
Tanguy Crusson
Everyone is much more gifted at it than they think.
Tanguy Crusson
2 Protocols
Atlassian's Four-Phase Approach to Launching New Products (Point A Program)
Tanguy Crusson- **Wonder**: Prove a problem area exists, identify a viable market, clearly articulate why Atlassian should enter it, and establish a strong 'why now' with validating data.
- **Explore**: Investigate potential solutions, which involves getting customers to confirm that proposed solutions (often through prototypes or Figma designs) would effectively address their identified problems.
- **Make**: Build the product in iterative stages, starting with an alpha version, then progressing to a beta, focusing on development and refinement.
- **Impact**: Launch the product as Generally Available (GA), then continuously monitor its impact on Atlassian's business and work to grow it into a sustainable, successful venture.
Lighthouse Users Program for New Product Development
Tanguy Crusson- **Stage 1 (10 users)**: Work with 10 carefully selected customers, clearly explaining why they serve as proxies for the broader target audience. Focus on proving that the product effectively solves their core problems through deep qualitative feedback.
- **Stage 2 (100 users)**: Recruit more customers (up to 100) to test different variations and scenarios. This stage aims to ensure the core solution caters to a wider range of needs while still providing hands-on support and gathering detailed feedback.
- **Stage 3 (1,000 users)**: Scale the user base to 1,000, with a focus on making the product self-service. This involves addressing usability issues and reducing the need for extensive onboarding or direct support.
- **Graduation**: Once the product successfully navigates these stages and meets defined success criteria, it is considered ready for a broader release to the general market.