Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira)
Megan Cook, Head of Product for Jira at Atlassian, discusses fostering psychological safety and play on teams, effective remote work strategies, securing buy-in for ideas, Atlassian's approach to launching 15 product lines, and staying ahead in the market.
Deep Dive Analysis
9 Topic Outline
Creating Psychological Safety and Space for Play on Teams
Tactical Advice for Effective Remote Work
Strategies for Getting Buy-in on Ideas and Projects
The Importance of 'Fighting the Good Fight' and Investing in CSAT
Atlassian's Approach to Launching New Product Lines
How Jira Maintains its Market Leadership and Innovates
Learning from a Missed Product Opportunity
The 'Fight Club' Protocol for Conflict Resolution
Lightning Round: Books, TV, Interview Questions, and Life Lessons
6 Key Concepts
Psychological Safety
A state where team members feel comfortable speaking up, sharing rough ideas, and giving feedback without fear of negative repercussions, fostering open discussions and innovation. It's crucial for preventing ideas from becoming painfully polished and for encouraging bolder, more innovative thinking.
The Opposite of Play is Fear
A mental model suggesting that when fear dominates a team environment, it stifles creativity, openness to new ideas, and the ability to achieve a 'flow state' where progress and innovation thrive. Recognizing fear as the antithesis of play helps leaders address underlying issues impacting team performance and innovation.
Team Anywhere
Atlassian's approach to remote work, emphasizing that employees can choose where they work daily, viewing flexibility as a fundamental human need rather than a perk, and focusing on productivity regardless of location. This approach aims to empower individuals and enhance work-life balance.
Buy-in as a Journey
The perspective that gaining support for ideas is an ongoing process of partnership and iteration, rather than a single event where a perfect proposal is presented for approval. It involves early engagement with stakeholders, incorporating their feedback, and building advocacy over time.
Show, Don't Tell
A mantra for communicating product ideas and impact, advocating for visual demonstrations (e.g., designs, customer videos) to evoke emotional understanding and excitement, rather than just verbal explanations. This approach helps stakeholders viscerally grasp the problem and the proposed solution's value.
Gated Product Development Process (Wonder, Explore, Make, Impact, Scale)
A structured, multi-stage framework for evaluating and investing in new product ideas, allowing for rapid iteration and validation at each step before committing significant resources. This process helps minimize risk and ensures that investment scales with proven potential and market fit.
6 Questions Answered
Product teams can foster psychological safety by creating peer feedback groups for early-stage work, holding regular offsites for connection and skill-building, and encouraging senior leaders to share stories of failure to normalize risk-taking and learning.
Effective strategies include intentionally scheduling in-person team gatherings a few times a year, blocking out dedicated 'deep work' time on calendars, replacing status update meetings with asynchronous documentation, and utilizing audio/video recordings for casual, clear communication.
Gaining buy-in is a journey that involves partnering early with all affected stakeholders, approaching proposals with an open mind focused on the problem, clearly stating hypotheses and facts, and setting up meetings by articulating what is needed from the group.
Atlassian identifies new product lines by observing strong signals from existing customers using their products in unexpected ways or through internal innovation programs, and then uses a gated process (Wonder, Explore, Make, Impact, Scale) to validate and iterate on ideas with small teams.
Jira stays ahead by obsessing over customer feedback through various rituals (weekly emails, research shareouts, community forums), fostering a culture of innovation with hackathons and dedicated AI teams, investing in both core and future businesses, and being agile enough to make significant company-wide shifts.
A key lesson is to always think bigger and ask how a successful feature or idea could be '10x' broader, applied to more users or products, or scaled into a foundational service, rather than limiting its potential to the initial use case.
26 Actionable Insights
1. Schedule Intentional Conflict
Implement a weekly 30-minute ‘Fight Club’ meeting with key leaders (e.g., engineering, design) to proactively address conflicts. This prevents issues from escalating, fosters a problem-solving mindset, and strengthens working relationships by tackling disagreements early.
2. Cultivate Peer Feedback Groups
Divide your PM team into small, diverse peer groups (including different leadership levels) that meet every two weeks. Encourage bringing rough drafts for feedback to build trust, model constructive criticism, and normalize showing early-stage work.
3. Prioritize Intentional In-Person Connection
For remote teams, bring people together intentionally (e.g., 3-4 times a year for a week-long ‘festival’ for the whole team, or every six months for PMs). This boosts connection and productivity by approximately 30% for months, especially when combined with fun activities, strategy discussions, and craft workshops.
4. Block Dedicated Deep Work Time
Sync leadership calendars to block long stretches (3-4 hours, twice a week) for uninterrupted deep work. This protects time for creative tasks and allows flexibility to address unexpected urgent issues without constant interruptions.
5. Eliminate Status Update Meetings
Transform meetings into problem-solving sessions by moving status updates to asynchronous communication (e.g., using a tool like Atlas). This frees up valuable meeting time for deeper discussions and protects individual deep work blocks.
6. Use Audio/Video for Async Communication
Utilize quick, casual audio and video recordings (e.g., Loom) for explanations, feedback, and document overviews, especially across different time zones. This helps convey tone, clarifies complex information, and acts as a new, efficient document type.
7. Partner Early for Buy-in
Identify all key stakeholders (cross-functional partners, executives) who might be impacted by or have a valuable perspective on your idea. Involve them early in the development process and continuously seek their feedback to build partnerships and gain advocates.
8. Adopt an Open, Hypothesis-Driven Mindset
When seeking buy-in, present your ideas with a mindset of solving a core problem or opportunity, clearly stating your hypotheses and known facts. Be open to adjusting the solution based on feedback, which builds credibility and trust.
9. Set Clear Meeting Intent
Before any buy-in or decision-making meeting, explicitly state what you need from the group (e.g., a decision, specific feedback, or help testing a hypothesis). This guides attendees’ focus and ensures productive discussions.
10. Fight for CSAT/Usability Investment
Champion investment in improving customer satisfaction and product usability, even if it’s not a ‘shiny new feature.’ Highlight how poor usability negatively impacts new customer acquisition and existing customer expansion, using rich customer feedback and data to make your case.
11. Start Small, Build Momentum
For new initiatives or ‘good fights,’ begin with a small investment and a scrappy approach to test your hypothesis. Show early, impactful successes to gain further investment and build momentum for larger changes.
12. Utilize Gated Innovation Process
Implement a multi-stage, gated process (e.g., Wonder, Explore, Make, Impact, Scale) for new product ideas. This allows for quick iteration and validation at each stage, ensuring continued investment only for promising ventures and protecting small teams from large company processes.
13. Think Bigger (10x) with Ideas
When developing a successful feature or product, consistently ask: ‘How can this be pushed further? Can it apply more broadly to other users or products?’ This encourages identifying larger opportunities and foundational services that could significantly impact the business.
14. Model Desired Leadership Behavior
As a product leader, actively teach, present, explain business concepts, and be vulnerable about your own failures. This sets an example for your team, fostering a culture of learning, openness, and continuous improvement.
15. Use the $10 Game for Priorities
Conduct a ‘10 game’ exercise with your manager to list all priorities and allocate ’time’ (dollars) to each. This helps identify if you are overloaded, ensures alignment on what’s most important, and confirms time is spent on high-impact tasks.
16. Document Decisions Rigorously
Maintain thorough documentation of all decisions, strategies, and project kickoffs. This serves as a valuable resource for new team members and allows for future reflection on past assumptions and hypotheses.
17. Bring Thoughtful, Relevant Data
When presenting to executives, focus on bringing only the most key data points that clearly explain the situation. Know your data deeply so you can dive into details if specific questions arise, building credibility and confidence in your plan.
18. Find Low-Cost Collaboration Models
For cross-team initiatives with many dependencies, seek creative ways for other teams to contribute at minimal cost. For example, assign ‘shepherds’ from other teams to review changes without bearing the full development burden, fostering shared ownership.
19. Show, Don’t Just Tell
When presenting ideas, especially for buy-in, use visual aids, designs, and even customer videos (showing pain points and proposed solutions). This creates emotional connection and excitement, making your case more compelling.
20. Obsess Over Customers
Implement rituals to consistently gather and share customer feedback across the entire company (e.g., weekly emails with random feedback, regular research shareouts, in-product feedback, community forums). This keeps everyone focused on customer needs and drives continuous improvement.
21. Foster an Innovation Culture
Encourage internal hackathons, allow anyone to pitch new product ideas, and proactively carve off small teams to explore emerging technologies. This creates an environment where innovation can come from anywhere and keeps the company ahead.
22. Actively Use Your Own Products (Dogfooding)
Ensure internal teams regularly use the products they build. This practice helps uncover problems, identify areas for improvement, and makes the product experience more real for everyone involved.
23. Balance Core & Future Investments
Strategically allocate resources to both improve core business products and seed future businesses or technologies. This ensures stability while also exploring new growth opportunities, even if some don’t pan out.
24. Be Agile and Kill Failures Quickly
Cultivate organizational agility to quickly shift resources in response to market changes or strategic priorities. Be willing to kill off products or features that are not working, reallocating resources to more promising ventures.
25. Maximize Joy in Life
Identify what truly brings you joy and lean into it, or find annoying aspects of life and transform them into enjoyable experiences. This personal philosophy can be applied to both work and personal life to enhance overall satisfaction.
26. Practice Consistently (Surfing)
For learning complex skills like surfing, consistent practice is key. Get out there repeatedly, as many skills require ‘feeling’ them before ‘knowing’ them, and consider finding an accountability buddy to stay motivated.
6 Key Quotes
The opposite of play is fear.
Megan Cook
I personally hate having status updates as a meeting. So I make it really clear that if we're having a meeting, this is to solve a problem. And if it's just a status update, that's fine. But I can read that asynchronously at a time that works for me and so can everybody else in the team if they want to do that.
Megan Cook
I think often when people come to me and they want to ask how to get buy-in, they've got a date in mind. They've got a particular meeting. And they have this idea where they're going to craft this perfect proposal. They're going to present it. And everyone's going to give them a thumbs up. And they win. And that's the wrong attitude, I think, even to start with, to getting buy-in. It's more of a journey.
Megan Cook
I think people can feel like they're not going to be credible, right? That you have to come in, you have to come in confident, you have to come in knowing exactly what that solution is going to be. But I usually find that if you come in there open and you expose your thinking and where you could use some help on perspectives, that actually that builds more credibility.
Megan Cook
I don't think you can beat that Mars rover story, all right?
Lenny Rachitsky
Isn't surfing the most humbling sport that you've ever tried?
Megan Cook
4 Protocols
Peer Feedback Groups
Megan Cook- Divide the PM team into smaller groups.
- Meet every two weeks or so.
- One person brings a rough draft of work (e.g., new experience, strategy, experiment) for review.
- Everyone provides feedback, modeling helpful feedback and fostering a culture of support and trust.
The '$10 Game' for Individual Priorities
Megan Cook- List out all individual priorities.
- Imagine you have $10 to spend, and divide it to represent where you are spending your time across these priorities.
- Use the allocation to identify overload and align on whether time is spent on the most important, business-moving tasks.
Fight Club (for Leadership Conflict Resolution)
Megan Cook- Schedule a 30-minute meeting every week.
- Include key leaders (e.g., product, engineering, and design leaders).
- Enter the meeting with the mindset of having a conflict and solving a hard problem.
- Address disagreements and difficult conversations early to prevent them from growing larger and impacting relationships.
Atlassian's Gated Process for New Product Ideas (Wonder, Explore, Make, Impact, Scale)
Megan Cook- Wonder: A person with an idea pitches it (minimal investment, often just the individual).
- Explore: Add a couple more people to develop a prototype, find interested customers, and outline a clear roadmap.
- Make: Assemble a full (small, ~12 people) team to actually build the product and acquire initial customers.
- Impact: Assess if the product is showing desired impact, gaining traction, and achieving product-market fit.
- Scale: Launch the product broadly, aiming for self-sufficiency in revenue and full market presence, with increased investment.