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

25:58And then if you try, if you think you can use the same thing on the next thing, find ways to validate it. Find ways to test it. Don't just go and build on those assumptions. That's the main thing I I got out of this audio basically. Yeah, for the stuff I did after. How would you do that? How would you go about and test it? Is it user research? Is it the PMs talking the potential users? What would you have done there? For example, when we started your product discovery, which is, so maybe I should introduce this for a second. It's a product for product managers, which is mainly used for prioritization and road mapping.

26:33So people use Jira to plan and track work when it's committed. We wanted to create a space before that. So people can debate priorities between with everyone that should be involved in that prioritization process. Whether it be the developers, designers, so people in the product team, all people outside of it, customer success, six people, support, leadership, and so on and so forth. So when we started that, we thought, okay, the product managers are already in Gira, you know what we can reach them. Right? So we'll create the tool and then we'll distribute it from Gira. We could have gone down the path of building that and then started to start onto distributed instead.

27:16We did things like before we brought the single line of code, put an ad inside Gira newsletter going, hey, we've got this thing for product managers coming up. And then we had a website that before we had any line of good written 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 that's from the we solve. I think it was in two weeks. We got more than 3000 signups to that waitlist. So we're like, okay, cool. Velidation of demands are we are talking to people who are interested and we can reach them.

27:52That's one example of the things that I tried later just to make sure that we validate the hypothesis that we've got much earlier on in the game basically and not after, and not once it's today. That's an awesome, very tactical example. Yeah, most of those are like, none of what I'm going to talk about today is revolutionary. A lot of it is just a trend to apply like asking the right question at the right time and trying to go by whatever means to answer it. Really? Any other lessons from the hip -jack experience before we shift to a different product. I've got two. I'm going to do them quickly.

28:29The first one is competitive myopia. Don't fall for it. At some point, the Slack was really gaining ground and getting ground and capturing more of the mind share and everyone on Twitter was always loving them. Even when they had outages, they were getting congratulated. This is what led but the love was so strong and the way we tend to reverse 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 competitor was doing, which I think is really, really bad because that's when we lost basically what made HipChat successful so far, which is to serve some users really well.

29:15And instead, we ended up not fast following based on what the competitor was doing, which It's super bad because you can pet it like if you think of what they do as a nice bird, like the top side, what comes out of the water is what they've shipped in terms of features, but it's based on all these stuff that they've built in terms of research and understanding of their customer base and everything else. And 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 got that. And now whenever I work, I tend to try and ignore competition, other than watching key like every three months or so, seeing what came out.

29:54If 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. Because it just, you can't compare, the market is huge. There are hundreds of thousands of companies out there. Not everyone has the same needs. We serve a particular set of segments. We would do better learning from them to then expand to the others than watching West Competition is doing. And this is advice to give to your teams, just like ignore the competition, maybe pay attention, big announcements and things like that.

30:26We always see in the Slack channels team sharing, okay, they just did this with AI, they just did that, so it keeps coming up and I, and so we often have discussions to go back, okay, to get, let's watch again, what the, the user interviews that we did over the past three weeks. Let's watch them all together now and remember who we're building this for. So there's a lot of trying to anchor back on what we know and how basically building our own journey on it. And I think it's much richer for everyone to be involved. I love that. So you're finding that when there's a big announcement and everyone's like, oh my god, look with slacks doing, you're looking at 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.

31:08And 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 wrong run and we don't always need to be first and shinier. 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 the lightest when we solve these problems for them. And so we that's the stuff we should be obsessing about. I love that. And you said you had one more lesson from this experience. Yeah, the last one startups have the benefit of starving. Right, we're a big company. We can throw a lot of resources that something that we're excited about.

31:46So this notion of where we really chat was coupled with where we're really 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 takes spots that you've got. It's an editor that can be open full screen and it's a conference editor With everything that you can do there. It's built as a platform component, which is amazing when the platform is there when you start building the product Where it's really difficult is when we try to do the two at the same time. So I think that part If I were to work on hip -shack again and say I was leading that thing I would have that's the part I would go, okay, let's uh, we need to win This the problem space first And if the platform is there, let's use it.

32:34If it's not there, we'll hack it, test it, iterate on it with customers, and then whatever is good there, let's platformize it later. But that's where you see the, what makes us super powerful as a bigger company can also slow us down and make us focus on the wrong assumptions. So in that case, I think we thought we would win. Interestingly, I think we were convinced that we could actually, we had a great chat that is marked. And at the same time, we thought that we could tackle the rewrite and we could tackle the platformization. All these things were necessary. But all of them at the same time was probably too much to bite.

33:15Now, I'm saying that, but today, the editor you see in Confluence started with what we did in HipChat back then. So I would say that in terms of code, purely in terms of code, But 70 % of what we wrote for each ad is probably stealing the ad's impact from today. But for a new bet, local optima, how is really bad? Yeah, I'm just thinking about the fact that Atlassian could have had this $30 billion business if this worked out. And I could see why people would be frustrated that it didn't work out. So thank you for sharing that story. Let's talk about status page. another journey that you were a part of that also didn't quite work out the way folks had hoped.

33:59Are there a recession continues? Talk about what that product was and what happened there. Yes, so this one is actually a success story but became a success story after I was gone. It's more like a story of big companies complete the wrong run 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 going to talk about here are my own challenges working through it for something that ended up being very successful in the end so But I felt as a failure personally back then so status page at some point so Gerai is used by developers And back then, I think it was back in 2016 or even before that 2015, everyone was moving to the cloud, everyone was adopting DevOps, UBL did your remit, so basically developers would implement the software and then they would put it to production and after they put it to production they don't throw it over the world to operations people, it's the same developers will operate the software introduction, they go on call, Yaddiada.

35:12So back then I did market research and to see whether Atlassian should play there, whether we had a crack at going after all the jobs around IT operations. So Jar was basically Jar software to build software, could we have Jar for operations, so for operating this software. And so I did market research from a few companies that were doing super interesting things there, like PG -Duty, Obstini, Nurellic, Big Panda was a small starter doing lots of cool stuff there and status page. Now I discovered status page and found their offering super interesting. In that Atlassian is not an operations like we don't really build like super deep operations tooling, but we focus on a lot is the collaborative aspects around everything.

36:02And when I was watching team's in incidents, I realized that there's a lot of chicken without a head syndrome, headless chicken, yeah people running around like bunch of headless chicken. She hits the fan and then what you see is teams just scrambling and there everything gets mixed up altogether in trying to fix the problem straight away but at the same time questioning what happened, arguing over why we got there, your boss is being in you to go hey what's going on, I've been hearing that the app is down, we're losing money, customers are emailing you and asking you what's going on, your support channels get blown up, say people are worried because their customers are calling them, so basically, tons of being like a super stressful experience for everyone.

36:48And what status page was offering is something seemingly super simple, which is well, what you should have is a status page 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 photo 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 into a trust support because they know you're on it. It's going to be a trust with them because basically you are honest in your open in your communication with them. They are more likely to empathize with your position and be supported as opposed to, you know, that stuff is done again.

37:28So there was just so many benefits of that. I'm gonna say a quick, share a quick story while you're on this topic. Yeah, of course. Funny enough, back 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 I was deep into the space So when I saw status page back in the day and it last seen working I was like I love this and actually chatted with the founders a bit because they were fans of that work I was doing back in the day completely unrelated to anything else.

38:11I've done in my life But I was really passionate about this very strange topic and 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 an amazing topic And so anyway, there's so many fascinating things about this particular domain, but back then, so our funds status page, and we invited a few of those companies to work with us for a week to go, hey, so we're last year and we're basically the collaboration for everything that happens for development teams. What food and experience look like that takes the goods everything together, and where Gura could actually help you get the right information to the right team so they can act on it.

38:51And so we did a week of hackathon in San Francisco altogether. So people from New Relic, Starter's page and a few other companies. And out of that came really interesting concepts. And there was pretty something there. And I was like, okay, I should start to work on a business case for at least then for basically IT to slash operations. Now, big companies like Atlassian, we've got money. So in every strategy that we've got, so we've got cash in the bank, we always look at, should we build, should we buy, should we partner? Our acquisitions can be really powerful to accelerate you there. We've got quite a few success stories there, we can't remember how many we did, but Trello is one of the good examples of that for example.

39:41So we decided to buy a status page, and I was running the integration of the status page business inside the Adler's own 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 ended up being really successful. What are some lessons from the pain? My learnings from it were on the acquisition side. So the company we've got clash 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 were not as easy as I would have thought.

40:17The 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, 20, 30 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. The time you stop owning all the decisions. So the CEO, 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 be used from the platform that we've got.

41:04So there's a lot of decisions that you're able to make on the day -to -day basis that are a state queue, start to a state queue. Big companies look much further out in the future. So a class year end would look at the long game. And so I remember with status page on the first join, we asked about the red maps and they were like, well, for the next three months we're working on that and for the following three months we're thinking about potentially exo -wide LZ. And so when we're like, okay, so what's the free plan? They're like, what do you mean the free of plan? Like, I don't know, we'll survive, I guess, which is the, you know, what startups do.

41:42And they were like very pencil ideas about the future, but not to the extent of what a big company would expect. And so that's a really big culture shock. And what you end up with as well, and that's for companies we're looking to get acquired that are buying other companies. Before you had a startup and everyone was one team, depending on how the buying company is organized, you might land with silos from within your team. So the way Atlassian is organized is like many advertising companies. We've got a product organization. We've got an engineering organization. We've got a marketing organization, design organization.

42:20And they each hold up for a different leader, which may then roll up to the same person. But still, by and large, different organizations that are then assembled into squads and the squads operate together. There are rituals that are part of the squad and there are rituals that ladder up to where you are in terms of crafts. I do remember how daunting it was for the status page team when they joined to understand how to mitigate that. If I want to hire a new designer, I'm not talking to the status page CEO anymore. I need to talk to the head of design for this area, which has pretty much nothing to do with the status page using this up until the acquisition.

43:03So that's, that is the things that people told me when I started working on the integration, which is, hey, remember, I mean, you don't know yet, but integrations are mostly about people. They're not about technology as a mature product vision or, like, all of that stuff is the easy stuff. They're half -parties to people. and I didn't quite understand at first and I really got it by the end of it. So because what we tell those companies is we can accelerate by buying, but in reality they are going to be faced with more internal processes around like how they manage staff, performance reviews, these concept of engineering allocation, revenue forecasts, OKas, long -term red maps, all that stuff comes in very new to them.

43:46So one part of the company top downses, we bought you because you are successful, keep doing what you're doing. While many other teams without meaning to, basically end up like constantly interacting so that the right processes are followed. So that the right things are done. That's a really interesting point that like one group is keep doing what you're doing. We don't want it. We only view 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 still the things that you used to be able to focus 90 % of your time working on your product and all of a sudden all of that stuff may seem parasitical but comes in an interruptual the time and often the new joiners, they don't know that they basically are not only being acquired, they're being hired by the company.

44:35So 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 worked great. Standard Spage ended up being a huge success inside a classian, but when I was there, I basically worked through the difficult parts of it. It's not as simple as people making. So what are wanting, if you're planning to do acquisitions, like make sure you factor out of that in and think about the integration plans to compensate for these aspects.

45:08So you don't expect a business to join and keep running at exactly the same base because that'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 acquisitions that we did.

45:40One is we buy the company and we keep the product running and then we try to integrate it with our tech stack. And then the other acquisition is we buy the company and then we kind of rebuild on our platform. Or we buy what is huge synergy with our platform. And so I would call that the Frankenstack. Otherwise, which is you get one tech stack, here one tech stack there and they count quite talk to each other. identity is different, integrating is different. It looks like a patchwork of products and that's not what our customer is one for us. So the next time I try, personally, it's I would treat it like hiring over treating it like buying business only.

46:20So there would be a huge component, which is to both educate and tease out what it means to actually hire a team inside the company. At the same time, I'm saying that because I don't want to do a big one. The next one I want to do is relatively small, find a company that has amazing products that we can bring in as a tracking, shut down the product, rebuild it on our platform, and so it's basically the equivalent of a Mac with higher. And because basically what we're buying is the acceleration of our roadmap. We could try and form a team to do what they did, but they've been successful. So they know what they're doing.

46:58We could probably get there one year faster, So 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 my learnings from it were basically that, yeah, it needs to be treated like hiring. And what I would like to do next time is more doing it like that. What about in the case of HIP chat, where it feels like that was, it was sound like a mistake to rebuild the thing? Is there like for this kind of start up, don't rebuild for this kind of start up start again. Do you have a thought of like how you separate those two?

47:36There's actually a big difference. Okay, there's a big difference, which is in one case what you try to do is, so when you rebuild you've got a successful business. You've got hundreds of thousands of customers, for example, and you're trying to rebuild the same thing or a different thing but for the same customers that have got expectations about your current product. 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.

48:09It's delaying takeoff. Like it's like, yeah, we did a trial run, the plane landed. Okay, cool, switch to another plane, take a I forget. Got it. I love that. Any other key insights and lessons from this experience before we get to share a product discovery? One last one. And then I'm going to stop with the therapy session. No, this is a lot more fun. I know. I got to keep it going. And I got to rack up the bill on this therapy session. Which is a, remember I mentioned I was working on a business case for basically going bigger in IT operations. And so there was status pages part of it, but there was a lot of stuff that I wanted to be able to do inside GRR, and then a whole bunch of other products to basically do a big in that area, IT operations, before GRR service management, which is a very successful product, we've got around that.

48:58Before it was, it was really entering that part of the market. Everyone was excited. It was before we had an incubator internally. And so I was trying to pitch it like, that let's build a new product that's centered around that thing. It's on -gerar and it integrates with these tools that we discussed, and we can put in status -bridge there, and that's actually how we could accelerate them as well, and so on and so forth. Everyone was excited for it, made sense, lots of encouragement. I pitched it to every level of the organization from business leaders to the CTO that we have at the time to the CEOs.

49:35No one said no. No one said yes. For months. For months I was in this limbo of, I think 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? Like, when do I stop pushing? Because at some point I'm sure I'm going to stop pissing people off. when he was like, well, basically when you lose the passion for it, keep going. I'll tell 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 there was in, but basically I, at some point, I basically gave up.

50:25What happened 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 the topic and the fact that Atlassian being Atlassian we invest in so many markets we have many opportunities like this that sit on a shelf. Someone did the analysis, someone created a business taste, that thing makes sense. There may not be a trigger for the wine 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 do we have to do this now versus in the years time, in two years time?

51:08And the next team that came in afterwards did a much better job at that. But for me, that's, that was a great learning, which is what great work can get part in Celebi. And yeah, that's just what happens, which is we, because we have so many opportunities and there's many companies out there that are probably faced with that. Doesn't mean that we have to go after all of them. And so, but it does make sense to explore them and then this like went to pull the trigger and the. That rational food sense of urgency needs to be there. It needs to be built into the big space. This reminds me of my chat with Mehika, who does similar work at Figma, where she works a lot of zero to one stuff.

51:48And 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. How to do that is make it clear why this is... I think of it as why is it perishable? Why is this opportunity perishable? Why is it going to disappear if we don't act on it now? And you could think of it as why do we have to do this now? know, 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 huge learning from me.

52:17I wasted months on it, but like with every failure, learning came out of it in the painful way. So, you know, product managers often buy us towards 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, with customers. And so, being idle, waiting for a confirmation is not a great spot to be, but sometimes you need to recognize when you're there and it's good to step back. This episode is brought to you by Coda, and I mean that literally. I use Coda every day to help me plan each episode of this very podcast. It's where I keep my content calendar, my guest research, and also the questions that I plan to ask each guest.

52:55Also during the recording itself, I have a Coda page up to remind myself what I want to talk about. Coda is an all -in -one platform that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps to help you and your team get more done. Now is the perfect time to get started with Coda, especially its extensive planning capabilities. With Coda, you can stay aligned and ship faster by managing your planning cycles in one location. You can set and measure OKRs with full visibility across teams and stakeholders. You can map dependencies, create progress visualizations, and identify risk areas. Plus, you can access hundreds of pressure tested templates for everything from roadmap strategy to final decision making, to PRDs.

53:36If you want a platform that empowers your team to strategize, plan, and track goals together, you can get started with Coda today for free. And if you want to see for yourself by product teams at high growth companies like Pinterest, Figma, and Qualtrics, run on Coda, take advantage of this special limited time offer just for startups. Head over to coda .io slash Lenny to sign up and get $1 ,000 in credit. that's coda .io slash Lenny to sign up and get $1 ,000 in credit. Coda .io slash Lenny. Let's try to summarize some of the biggest lessons so far that you've shared before we get to product discovery.

54:13So a few things I noted here, just like how to be successful building zero to one at a large company. One is be very clear, are there users you're going to be building this new product to? 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, you shared and so you could rewind if you want to get the actual details of when it makes sense to go into the other.

54:47Sometimes it doesn't make sense. Re -write, just keep what you're doing and focus on the user problems and don't slow down. 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, be it clear why it has to happen now. Is there anything else that comes to mind as I try to summarize some of the advice so far? Now that seems like a good one. The main one I'm getting also out of this is like if you try to start new things, it's gonna be coming from your drive and your passion.

55:20and that's what pushes stuff forward. So don't give up. Because I try really hard people getting to what that worked. So that's, I guess that's probably a testament for its possible. And a testament to your grit and a desire to make something work. So on that note, let's talk about your 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.

56:00So one let's talk to the good stuff Before we go back into therapy the one So the good stuff here is Atlassian at that point had Recognized we are innovating in our big successful products or or by doing acquisitions, we have to correct that and start building new products ourselves as well. There was a huge push from the founders to grow, we need to restart that. Out of it came point A, which was an internal incubator program that was meant to fix that. The way they framed it was that innovation is like a muscle. Unless you exercise it, it becomes weak. What we have to do now is to work on it again.

56:42Out of that came point A and java for discovery, was one of the, I think it was one of the hundred pitches that went through that innovation program. There were a hundred pitches and out of it came out three products that basically went through all the different stages of it. And so it started with Geopold discovery was actually made possible because of that. And because we're inside Atlassian. So we started with a lot of, I could take time to focus on this stuff with nothing else to do It was a full -time job because of this incubator. I was able to form a team easier because it was budget -advocating.

57:20I 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 losing your job, basically. We were able to tap into all the research that was done by our research. And inside Steam Internally, we were able to have the corporate development team working with us, I met with probably 20 companies that played in things around product management before forming a view that, hey, maybe we should play that.

57:54And all those teams are waiting to talk to us because our class can be 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 the product management markets? this was all part of the point a structure. So the point a structure was basically so not all of it was formulated in pointer remember pointer back then was created alongside the pets the first pets that went through it and an hour was one bit a spot of that so we kind of forged the 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 because everyone knew the new the company priorities and the new products were top company priorities.

58:41And so Atlassian playing the long game had decided that it was okay to invest in these bets and to reassessment every three to six months to understand whether we should put more chips in it. And so the second logical 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, JJJ, about the discovery started four years ago, with some research I was alone back then and then we were three. The first line of code was written three years before we launched officially as generally available, which means that for three years we were in alpha, dock footing, alpha, or beta, and able to do that with the full support of the company.

59:30So that's something which is when I mention the long game, I mean it. It's something that's very hard to get in those companies out there and still the thing that I, when people ask me, how to stop incubators, think about it with when you're going to get your dollars 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, so we launched a year ago, fast forward to today, we've got 8 ,000 customers. Amazing CSAT, great traction. It's one of the fastest growing products in that lesson history, which is great.

1:00:09So what was hard though? The first one was reminding everyone that failure is the most likely outcome. And I will die on that hill to explain to people when they want to stop things internally, frame it like that. remind everyone there is a two like 70 % chance number completely pulled out a thinner that whatever you're working on is not going to exist in six months. We are trying to launch a new product and turn new markets. Our goal is to get to a hundred million dollar businesses. 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 to remember that because otherwise the company has a tendency to over invest not the company top down, parts of the company have the tendency to and try to help.

1:01:07So for example here we want to build this, if you want we could change the 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 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 going to fail so that we could basically buy the opportunity to have 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 GERA target architecture.

1:01:53But we're going to test these with customers and see if the concepts make sense, if the prototypes make sense, whether 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 commit too much to this yet. Don't worry by giving solid resources. Why do you think that's so important? Because that's, I don't think most companies position new incubations that way.

1:02:27Why do you think that's so effective and more effective? Yeah, so the thing that we're trying to do when starting new products is to basically emulate a startup in an environment that is not hungry. Like, it's not starving. And so you need to create scarcity. like 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 to know whether this thing is even going to work on it. We could not go into a planning session for the next six months to negotiate something with a platform service.

1:03:02So we can be on the feature to then test with users. I was like, now we're revealing this component and we're testing this with customers next week. It's not perfect, it's not perfect. And so that helped us a lot. But otherwise, there's always this tendency of the process that works for everything else is going to work for this. And we leave it to keep reminding them, hey, we might not exist in six months. Do you really care that much about this process right now? The product might not exist anymore. The process goes away usually. So it's basically a trick to keep everyone else within the org away and not worry about what you're building.

1:03:36Because you just tell them, don't worry. This is not going to work out. We're just going to try this thing just to see. So it's not like for your team to be like, this is probably not going to work out. I imagine the team is like, oh, we got to make this work. It's such a good idea. It's more to like as a trick to keep the org from swallowing you up and pushing you around. So there's a part of that, but there's also really a need from like, we need to respect our clients' dollars here. And if we don't know whether this thing is going to work, I do not want to drag a team of 50 people into this.

1:04:04I want to know that this thing is worth the investment of a team of 50 people. So it's a bit of both actually. Now, it's of course easier said than done. And so that's for again, point A helped. We had four stages called Ronda Explorer make an impact, where in the first stage it was all about proving that there was a problem area we could go into. There was a market. We could answer very clearly, articulate what, less engine move there. We could articulate why now, that stuff that struggled with before, and having enough data to validate all those games. Explore was about exploring solutions, which doesn't mean build it and throw it out there and see what sticks.

1:04:46It's about if you get 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 geopolitics discovery, because we were not building, we didn't need any new technology, it was many new UX and new workflows. we basically validated the route that we figure out, with figmas in dozens of zooms. But it's basically coming back saying, here's how those companies are framing it. Here's their problems, here's how this thing would be solving it for them. So that's part of Xplore, which is validating that it's worth investing in in terms of solution.

1:05:22We don't only have a direct problem with 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 Atlassians business and keep monitoring it from there. And it turns into a real business from that point onwards. But everyone in Atlassian knew 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 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.

1:06:06Which means that now every time we go in a conversation with other teams and we mentioned it's where in Wanda or in Explore, they know where to expect. When we go to someone in the leadership team and we say, want to go from explore to make, they know they're going to ask for budget. right, because they need developers now. So all that vocabulary and clear expectations set for every stage of the process really helped us to facilitate all the conversations that we had with everyone in the organization and really protected us again from all those basic teams that felt like they had to chime in. Now, we're in explore.

1:06:42We don't have anything ready to, that's been validated. Like, let'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 get a whole podcast just on the structure of pointing in how you all do this, but just one question. What does the gate look like when you move from explore to make make impact? Is there like a group of people that sit in a room and decide, thumbs up, thumbs down, how does that would decision work? Yeah, so we basically write the six pages that looks at all the different aspects of all the questions that we want to answer.

1:07:17And then we are in a meeting with point A stakeholders and the founders of Atlassian. And everyone reads that page for about 15 minutes. And then question answers, comments, and all of that. By the end of this meeting, we know whether we are clear to go to the next stage. We got booted back one time when we were like, hey, we're ready to go into, anyway, from alpha to beta as part of MIG. And I was like, no, you're not. And I was like, no, we're not. And so we stayed and we basically got more time than what we had was initially allocated to us. But basically the founders and the leadership of point A, as well as heads from the different lines of businesses that are at last year, were participating in those sessions.

1:08:01Which, that is super cool. Basically 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 bets that we did, it might be let's roll this thing into something else. So for example, on your whiteboards product, which I say product, whiteboards feature, out of Confluence, initially came out of point A 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 100 of these that the founders go to for all these incubations or did they come join later down the funnel?

1:08:45It's not the full hundred of them. Basically, there's a first, and I'm saying a hundred, it's over a few different quarters of teams coming in and coaching. Yeah, yeah, but not for the initial stage of entering. It's usually when they've been accepted. 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 as the most likely outcome is the one thing I would stand behind in everything because I've seen before what happens when we get to completely set it's going to work. Like lessons from the previous things I was talking about.

1:09:19So this one is really key. Second one, this one is much harder, 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 for new beds. So you need like the trick here is for me has been to, the way I pictured it is, I've got a bunch of chips. Since I joined my class, I've been at community chips. And those chips are social capital.

1:10:03Yeah, it's like trust I've built with the founders with the different business leaders with succeeding on stuff all failing and Explaining why and trying to do better next time and like all that stuff gave me 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 so I was said if I Fit works it works if he doesn't work and probably out of here, but I'm going to go out in see if I see something that's not gonna work I'm gonna say it when I'm going to do it and And so I was, I knew I was going to put myself in tough conversations, because people are here to protect things that need to be protected.

1:10:40They 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 here and on. This is what, this is how it works in engineering. I mean, engineers are the biggest part of our workforce, right? that's where all the, this should get stopped because engineers work on it. And what I needed was to be able to hire the right team, only principle levels, people who have a lot of internal credits so that they can commit to any team's repo, no questions asked. People who are not looking for the next promotion, but they want to make a splash.

1:11:18And when that's not possible, I wanted to be able to hire contractors to fill in the gaps and stuff like that. And I was like, a lot of the rules that I need to be able to break is basically in engineering. So I decided not to have an engineering leader in the June and to do it myself. So I was the product leader and the engineering leader. I was technically enough to be able to have these conversations. But mainly I was just working with amazing engineers who just could self -try 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.

1:11:55They were able to hack their way around rebuilding services and whatnot. We are now not in the position where we need to do stuff like that. At that time, I needed to take a position like that. So we could actually go and move fast with basically the equivalent of being a startup inside the LASM. That's not comfortable to do stuff like that. And I would not recommend that in many environments. Atlasian was very forgiving throughout the whole thing. It doesn't mean that it didn't grow great on that. That was not simple. One of them rose, for example, with one of the roses. At that time, we didn't want to have a footprint in Europe back then for more engineering teams.

1:12:39It's different today, but back then, it was like that. I was 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 heard contractors, lots of contractors when we started to run lots because we're not a big team but contractors to build this stuff. And again contractors don't fall into the same rules as the rest of engineering staff. So basically all the rules around you need to contribute to, for example, the engineering team could say for one day to the next leadership could say you need to invest 15 % of your time in reliability.

1:13:15And for us it's like We're not there yet. We don't even have a prototype at. Yeah, but that's the company rule. All right, again, no engineering manager and contractors boom, one of these rules of light. So it was people who were looking at it from the outside were like, wow, dude, you're a, are you sure you're okay with all this? And it felt super uncomfortable, but we have the support of the leadership from it. It's just a tough transition for a classian from the, we only invest in the big ones or acquisitions to let's invest in that move that's. This is a crazy story you're telling me. So you were leading this team.

1:13:49You had, you hired a team of contractors to build this product. You're in a whole different country from the rest of it last year basically. And the whole idea here was just to do stuff that wouldn't be necessarily allowed at the last year. They wouldn't let you work this way. And you found that to, to make the thing you needed to make and the thing that you were, like better your career on, it sounded like I just had, you're just going to be this pirate working on this thing in France. And it worked out. So the point of emoji and Atlassian is a pirate flight. I would not be anyone. There were quite a few of us working on new beds basically operating like that.

1:14:29Each questioning different rules, 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 claim the space to work with users to test prototypes, open -to -let works, And you know, progressively get to a system to let to a product that's going to be enough to not right so we never intended to break the rules, which is the things that we were going to choose the ones that were 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.

1:15:12And so like you're talking about doing all this stuff, yeah, but remember that we've got this, we've got this okay, our thing, we've got this vision for Gera that we're building like you need to participate in all this. And so I was in Europe going, fine, scheduling at your time. And teams were like, oh, I think a lot of teams were like, we don't care enough about this. Because the Tharlingass is 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 deserve it 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.

1:15:58And 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 a classian. Right, but at first we just needed to blaze our way through. So that's what we did. So it sounds like one of the biggest lessons and things that work well for something like this is a super silo sort of team as much as you can disconnect from the core business and let them just do what you think you need to do. And you've seen you've interviewed Megan on the show before and you are listening again to the way she pitch point A and yes that's exactly what came out of what you were saying which is we gave the space for those teams to be able to do this with a lot of And that was the outcome of all that work basically, which is the problem was then set up.

1:16:51So new teams could do it and fitting within the watershed basically. And I think people hear that like, yeah, okay, of course, new incubation, silo separate, they do their own thing. It's like people hear that and it's like, and they try to do that. But I imagine it's not actually what they need to do. And what I'm hearing is like, you went to the like a 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 one that I'm most passionate about is how we work with customers is very different in a superly stagebed versus to what you do in a very established product like Jura.

1:17:35So the first part is how can we innovate in a way that doesn't fuck up existing customers. Jira 120 ,000 customers, Atlassian 300 ,000 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, Atlassian? So what we need is to create this area, where we could experiment that's away from Jira, why 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 I Ways from many years ago now. We was basically talking about innovating in a successful material product and talked about three stages of incubate, iterate, integrate.

1:18:27And as part of that, he gave the examples of Instagram, Twitter and four square. Where basically he was explaining, you know, at the beginning, for example, Instagram was a feed that was chronological. And then the team started to experiment with the popular tab that was on the side that was not integrated into the core of the product that everyone uses. They iterated on that for a while, that became the Explore tab, and then the Explore tab became the main feed. The feed is not chronological anymore. It's based on your interest. And that part really resonated with me. Well, I was like, you know what?

1:19:01We're going to try to apply that to Jira, which is we're going to be able to get it 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 that would work for the audience for going after. Our audience is product managers, they have no patients, no patients for speeders, continue to be visual, they need to be able to quickly move things around to visualize the potential options that got on their roadmats 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 the stakeholders to have discussions around that.

1:19:38It can be bogged down into the details, it can go into very, very deep trees, it needs to be an era of space where you feel like you can breathe and have creative conversations. And Geraz UI was not exactly known for that. And in fact, most of the product managers that talk to were like, I don't want to do this in Geraz. It's too strict, there's too many workflows, it's owned by IT, LILLA. And so we said, that's fine. We're going to experiment with an experience that's going to be detached from JOR still on the same platform. And that's what we did, basically. And so this concept of in -cubate by working on something on the site iterate until you've got it right, and then integrate it back into the main product to something I would definitely do again.

1:20:23We can't really in the middle of the integration phase for JOR put a discovery. So the lesson there is don't 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. It 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 us, if it was the US, it was good enough for the product managers, we would not have done that. And we would have a hard time justifying it.

1:21:01But because it was not, we basically gave ourselves the standard to be able to do it. The second one was something I read from, so still in Don't Fack existing customers, something I read from a site from ReForge that talk about the safety funnel. Where so they have this thing where the typical growth funnel goes from acquisition all the way to revenue and there's a whole bunch of different stations between your goal is to maximize the number of people who go through this form of success footing. And I was trying to explain to people what we were trying to do with your app or the discovery and I was trying to put a name on it.

1:21:34It was we're going to 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 a very common sense but that's basically what we decided to do instead of the Atlassian way which was more, hey, we measure our success based on, for example, at that time, I think it was still before all those projects monthly active users. If that was a measure of success, we would have been pushed very quickly to go and expose it to as many people as we could. We didn't want to do that because they would have a bad experience, would have been very hard to claim them back afterwards.

1:22:11So someone in Refog put the name on safety funnel. So the safety funnel is amazing. People don't understand that you basically put a hard stop and you limit the number of people who have bad experiences. And you do that for a while, even if you can prove it's amazing and then you invite more people. So we did another that. So we basically created that pocket away from Jira to reimagine what Jira could be for product managers. And we only exposed that to a very small number of customers at first. So that's don't fuck existing customers. First principle. And the reason that's important just to put a point there is the business will start to get upset if you're making many customers upset.

1:22:53That would have been it if we had triggered an incident that broke down Giro for millions of users. And first time that I've been okay, I mean by the third time we would have been asked to you know backup and go. Got it. So the advice there is just limit how many people even get exposed to your early, very early product. Even if it's going to hurt your numbers, you don't want to cause people to be like, what the hell are you doing over there, man? It's just off. So, HatchoNumbers is now the interesting one. So, how do you frame success and how do you define metrics when your goal is to be tricky to work with a small number of customers for a super long time?

1:23:26So, that's where what I ended up defining for this is based on a term that was used at Atlassia and that I kind of tried to formalize it into 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 only build the experience for a small number of them. And so there are stages to it. The first stages we work with 10, and we prove that the problems that they had are the things that we solved. And where we spend most of the time for the Lighthouse View, the first 10 Lighthouse users, is to explain why they are the Lighthouse users.

1:24:12Everything that explains why we believe there are a proxy for every customer that we serve afterwards. We then have this stage from 10 to 100, where we sort of recruit more customers, but we're still not in the fully self -service, don't need a lot of onboarding stuff. We're still testing out the value, but we're testing the different variations in the scenarios that people face to make sure that the core solution that we've got can battle for those. There's a lot of different options and different security needs or different, there's a lot of subtleties that you catch between 10 and 100. Then we get to a stage where we're like, you know what, it's good.

1:24:47It solves people's problems, but it's not self -service. We need to explain stuff. We need to work with people on Slack. We need to work with them and answer a lot of support tickets or do a lot of Zoom calls to explain stuff. Now we need to get from 100 to 1000 and by getting there, we basically need to solve all of that. And after that, we graduate. So basically by detailing that and explaining all the success criteria in between, it helps to define success in that in the make phase with 10, 100, 1000. And then people can understand exactly where we are there. And the types of questions are trying to answer.

1:25:21In the 10, we're answering every question with a user snippet 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 wanted our stakeholders to view it, which is it's very qualitative, but have it filled from the user's perspective? It's different when we go from 10 to 100, from 100 to 1000, but for each of those, that's kind of a playbook for how you go from one to the other. That helped us because we could then clean the space to do the right thing. And we will not ask to hit, for example, multi -active users number, or number of customers number, or percentage of users who use this number, because it's very qualitative still when we're at that stage.

1:26:08That is super cool and super interesting, and it's kind of along the lines of the gates, lines with each gate, here's how many users we're looking for, basically sets expectations for what success is, keeps you from having to scale things too early. It's such a cool idea, and you call it Lighthouse users, like the Lighthouse users program. Lighthouse users and there's two sides to it. There's the, we just talked about the stakeholder facing side. The one I love is the team facing side of this, which is I've seen a lot of teams, at least in another companies as the products grow. You tend to leverage a lot more user research, formal user research or CSAT servers.

1:26:48The 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 to create the 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 there's something I've seen, which is. Planet 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.

1:27:36If I know someone that's impacted by climate change, it's going to make me relate a lot more strongly to the concept of of climate change and want to change myself. So sorry for the power of the environment. Now 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, seesat scores, and PS retention will tell you what you need. And so what we do with that is we recruit 10 people and we put these people in front of the whole team, not just the PMs, PM, designer, engineering.

1:28:11We met with on Zoom, we chat, we work with the same ones of a month to build the product, they are 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 to talk with this customer and struggle with this, so I think we should work on that instead and fix 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 product team with product engineers.

1:28:41So there was this thing at Atlassian where we called some engineers, one more like system engineers, some more product engineers. In my opinion, everyone can be a product engineer that just need to be exposed to the right user context and the right user context. But is it? It's 10 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 to solve their problem and you get really huge pride coming back out of it. And it's a kind of seem counterintuitive in a company like a classroom. We are 100 ,000 customers, right?

1:29:18We should be up for them. We can't. Right? We're limited in our ability to make changes that will work for the vast majority. So, matter as one embrace that, embrace that we are indeed biased, that we are indeed reacting based on feelings that want to help or not want to help or reacting strongly to what you've seen. But we are embracing that to try and build the best product possible. And I've actually seen that the outcome is so far on this product, it's worked. 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 with approach.

1:29:58It makes tons of sense to think of it this way. It's just people don't actually do this. It's hard to do. This is a segue to a question I wanted to ask. It took probably a long time for you to show real success, real progress, real like this is going to work. First of all, how long was that period of just like this? This is probably not going to work too. Oh, wow, maybe this is going to work. Along the same lines. How does it lasty and slash what have you learned about how to protect this? Pixar people call it an ugly baby like someone in ideas knew it's a call is an ugly baby people don't want it It's just like every to this thing Man that sounds mean to say but that's the way they talk about it That's the term in creativity How do you how do you protect that because that's the biggest challenge?

1:30:48I think a lot of companies have is just like it's been six months. No one wants this we're going to kill it. How do you protect it? So how long did it take for it to show success? And what have you learned about it? Protect? Yeah, so basically internal comps is everything there. And the way I saw my job as a large part as being very clear on where we were, on what we were learning, on how fast we were learning, how fast we were moving, being super honest every step of the way, not try to make shit up, try to make it to bigger than it is, more successful than it is. on the contrary, be very clear about what we're testing, where we're testing it, doing that for data, doing that with personal customer stories, because we all can relate, it goes to relate to the heart and to the mind.

1:31:32And so that's what I always try to weave into columns that I didn't send weekly. So we've got this product internally called Atlas, which have a project on Atlas, people can subscribe to this project, and then weekly you send a tweet sized update about your project. I was using that as a platform to communicate internally about this product. And there were actually hundreds of people who ended up subscribing to this thing. Every week, when we were at the stage where we were trying to get the first version out to customers, it was a weekly demo of the product and everything that we built. Show the momentum as much as possible.

1:32:05I was even saving features for one week to the next just to, when we're new, we were going to be on vacation, for example, to just to have something to show this train that keeps moving, it keeps moving, you don't want to get in front of it. But then what I needed to do is to balance that out with all the customer -side -of -thing. So when we started to put it in front of customers, then it was snippets from customer conversations. No one is going to read a research report that takes 30 minutes to read. Everyone is happy to watch a three -minute snippet with four customers talking about something.

1:32:35So 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 with Jira. This is how we're solving it. This is them talking about it. That kind of stuff. So I was publishing that there and then sending that everywhere on Slack. Those kinds of things are what give people a sense of velocity and speed. And no one wants to fuck with a high -speed train. You don't get in front of it. It'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, I'll be babyface.

1:33:14I'll be babyface. So basically, I did it, it helped us get out of these days where we don't have anything to show for yet because what we're showing is based on the learnings we're trying to get and we're trying to do that with. Here's some numbers, here's some demos, here's some user snippets and doing that every week. Because people can consume bite -sized contents content every week, They just struggle with the stuff that way you come in three, four months later and go this is what we have to show for Right How long was that period before I got out of the ugly baby phase for you? When did people start to get like oh wow this might work?

1:33:49Honestly, we had something Doc footing within two months in the hands of the first lighthouse user within five months We iterated on the alpha for maybe six months We then enter the beta that lasted close to a year So I think at every step of the way, people could see us going somewhere. And I think initially they judged not the outcome. They judged the team a lot more than the outcome. So there's all this talk of a founder market fit. But 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 a week of a week, it's enough.

1:34:37And that's, I think that's what we were. I think the stage where we were able to give something to customers, but it felt like how Susa was five months in. So it didn't even matter whether it looked good or not, because people could see, okay, that's what, oh, there's something there, right? So, so I'm not sure if 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 GA. And one of the founders Mike went, no, you're not. That thing is ugly. I do not want to look at it. It needs to, you know, level up with the rest of the Atlassian design standards.

1:35:12Our customers have expectations from us on that front. Like your stuff is functional, but it's way too early. And so we went and fixed it took us two, three months and then we were Okay, to go. But, you know, because we had point A, because we had this expectation set that it would take a while to get there. And because we were able to show progress every week, we basically didn't really feel that moment where we don't know what to do with this because it's too early. This design improvement phase, 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 and become enter society makes a lot of sense.

1:35:54Also 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 within the organization. So you have this idea and you're just like, keep momentum going, keep the flame growing by sharing constant updates, sharing progress, make it very easy to consume with little snippets and videos. So there's a lot of great advice here. So timeline wise, interestingly, what I'm hearing is it basically took a year for my idea to alpha, something like that. Is that roughly right? You're six, seven months, no, five months to a first alpha one customer.

1:36:26Okay. We stayed in alpha for like six months. Okay, got it. So through alpha about a year total. Many people hearing this on the one hand would be like, of course, at last, you know, all these resources, they're gonna spend a year on this idea that who knows is gonna work out. It's so easy for them. Imagine there was much pain and suffering and challenge along the way that that happened 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 kind of wrap up conversation, go back to therapy, if there's anything you want to share?

1:36:58Yeah, basically it's pretty much what we talked about earlier with lots of processes that you know, I want to change it because we're at the very beginning of point A and people still wanting us to chime in on the things that were important for their part of the organization where they, where we would play about later if we become successful. So like, none of that stuff was just solved once and for all. It was just a constant process to play with that. But we, I think we managed to get out of these things pretty gracefully in the end. And I think we gained some level of admiration for some teams from that.

1:37:35And some found it a bit, it's always interesting to see someone breaking the rules and getting away with it. and I think it inspired some of the other founders to try and do that, which was pretty cool to see. It's actually something I'd love to see more hearing back from the customers I've been talking to about this in their company. A lot of them feel suffocated by the current processes and they don't feel like they can break the chains. I'm hoping it inspires a few more teams to give you to go. there's clearly more I want to learn about pointing out how other companies do this incubation stuff so this is a really good inspiration to dig deeper into those sorts of programs.

1:38:17We'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 a very exciting lightning round? Yeah, it's a bit I would try to balance the point that just gave, which is it's hard so someone has to try and always feel like you can push. I'd like to balance that a bit with be careful for yourself as well and make sure that you're doing this in an environment that's pretty that's ready to welcome it.

1:38:53And so as I mentioned I worked at Atlassian now for the past 10 years before that I used to work in banks in heavily regulated industries in a whole of different areas where that kind of stuff was not okay. And I could have tried to push, it would have not gone well at all. So I think there is, I am deeply convinced by the fact that we don't need so much top -down leadership, but we need is a lot of autonomous leaders regardless of their position within the arc able to push for change, fighting for the right things, but you need to do that in an environment that's safe for you to do so. And if it's not, I think it's okay to consider alternatives.

1:39:37So in other words, don't feel like you're trapped, right? You only have one work life, like do it in places where you you really believe you can do amazing work and so write it by people that you're excited to work with. Otherwise, it's been there before where it's possible to become cynical by the weight of the things that are not possible and ending up doubting your own the ability to do stuff free. So it's a bit of a balance of push for the right things. We're also, watch out for 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 and product of just how much can actually change as an IC at a company like I hear all this advice about making change, changing culture, incubating stuff, innovating.

1:40:23How much can you actually make an impact versus nothing's gonna change? I should go work somewhere else. Do you have any advice there just like it sounds like basically you're saying There's oftentimes you have no impact on how the business and culture is gonna work And you probably should go find a company like Atlassian that has learned how to incubate and innovate and thank you Friendly. Yeah, this one is a I'm not sure how to answer that really because I've worked with consulted work for close to 50 companies At Lassien is the first company I joined where I was at home from day one, challenged in the right way, but I can really choose my battles and go after them and things are hard, but it's okay.

1:41:09So I joined Lassien. I'm not a strong, I'm not a strong, but I would just not set up for stabbing school because You cannot be the only sane person in a room. At some point, you will go insane. The environment will permeate on you. You are not this entity that is absolutely permeable to everything that happens around you. Everything around you will affect you and will change you as a person. I really believe that. And so you need to surround yourself with people and environments that can help bring out the best in you. Otherwise, you can't turn bad. 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.

1:41:52It was me back then. I do not want it to be me. So yeah, that's my only advice which is Have the courage to To ask yourself those questions Because otherwise you can you 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. All right, 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 Scott Fatqua, founder of Atlassian Cofonda. who a method for hiring is basically a book about how to do the thing that I for a while it 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.

1:42:44Second one so that's one book about work two other books that are not about what highly recommend reading Hakim's Odyssey. 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 metsy are 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 king that was told very beautifully by this illustrator is well worth read on that front. The last one is a book that I'm not sure has been translated from French, it's called Vive avec la Terre to live with the Earth.

1:43:27And it's about how we could build a different agricultural system to the one that we have today that might have better ways to feed us into the future. When the doesn't require large monoculture of vegetables that might not be as sustainable, they managed to create really efficient structure and very small passes of land with a lot of species working together to control and not need the use of any pesticides and stuff like that. They've been always surrounded by teams of researchers from the thing it's really in reality. It's one of the French research centers. I've got really amazing results, but I don't think many know that this stuff exists and that it could actually be used out there.

1:44:13And I think that's a shame. I used the first book that sounds recommended that's only in a different language that may not be translated. My bitch instinctive, I hope it is. It's pretty thick though and it's very technical. So I've read the principles, but then I've got lost in all the technical aspects of growing. Okay. I love it. So let's ask your favorite interview question. What's your favorite interview question? Yeah, so I struggled a lot with interviewing and I've read all the standard interview questions. There is out there and I've heard them in your podcast as well. There is one that came from this book that Scott Fakwell also told me was working really well for him.

1:44:44is when people describe an experience, you ask them the name of the person that they worked with back then and you ask them. So when I call this person after I call, what do you think they're gonna say about that? And apparently this does something and I've seen it happen, where people are enabled to project an event on the spot, something from the lens of another person talking about them. And so they might be able to talk about IDDs, I did that, I did that. So when I talk, who was your boss, my boss? So when I ask this person, what do you think they're going to say? Well, actually, and I was only eating a part of it or maybe you shouldn't call them because expisions, that's part makes people out of a certain go out of this scripted the give of themselves and become more real for a second and you get a bit of the authenticity coming out which often is very hard to get to for me in interview questions and I've seen it happen.

1:45:50I found it very funny to do now because people 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. But next question, do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? Yeah, it's got nothing to do with that. I'm kind of talking a lot at the moment and I came across hydrofoils, which is basically these things where there's like an airplane plane underneath you on a mast, which is connected to a board. You're on the board with your kite, and you basically just fly over the water.

1:46:30And that invention is just brilliant. It's relatively easy to learn. And I can spend basically parts of my weekend flying over water as much as a breeze of wind because it's actually a fissure of friction between the board and the water. So that's the technique speaking, I think, is genius. The way they created that, inspiring themselves for their plates. Is that the thing that Zach was writing with his sunscreen with a flag? Or is that something else? I don't know if you saw that photo. 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.

1:47:09I don't know if I believe you. Yeah, I mean, there's spots and crafts that are difficult to learn. This one you can get comfortable in 18 months to two years, which is really short. It's probably what I think I've done before. Just a couple years. Okay. I like your bar for... I'm gonna ask a question along these lines. But before we get there, do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in worker and life, maybe share with friends and family? I've got two one for work and one for everything in life. The one for work is initially a quote from Obama, completely the exact quote I'm going to paraphrase.

1:47:46But let's keep it about the work. So there's going to be moments in your career, in your way you don't feel valued, and you wonder like, am I doing the right thing? Am I being recognized? I'm valued, I'm at the right place. And whenever that happens, a lot of parasitic thoughts may come in. You may face imposter syndrome and stuff like that. Happens to me super regularly. And whenever that happens, what I do is I remind myself, keep it about the work. Because as long as you make it about the work, it's always work to be done. And it's always a path that emerges from that work. It's a bit of the same of this good thing in yoga I was once you committed.

1:48:26Good things would happen. Well that's exactly what I've seen and that's helped me every time. I reread this quote whenever I need these moments of turmoil around me. Now when I face those moments I also remind myself of the other one which I invented but it's not, I don't think I'm the only one who has invented that one which is remembered that in a hundred years we'll all be dead and forgotten. So don't take yourself to seriously. you're not that important. You're probably not that important. As important as you think for the people that you are arguing with. And that's also the beauty in all things, which is it has an end.

1:49:05In the end, it probably doesn't matter. So, minus will give it your best shot. And that's what the existentialist back in France, many generations ago were talking about. This one is close to Al -Darcan Musa thesis. Yes, right? If it doesn't make sense, matters will go for it. Really good points, really good lessons, really good models. Final question. You were ranked number four worldwide in a form of free diving. First of all, can you briefly describe what is free diving and then can you share one thing that might surprise someone about the sport and the skill? Yeah, so yes, that's my claim to fame.

1:49:46I was ranked number four in basically the distance you can swim in a swimming pool without fins with 167 meters, which is 550 feet and underwater underwater breaststroke I went further with the motofine the thing you see back there, but breaststroke was was one meter away from the French record and Ranking them before worldwide that year the one and most product is I actually went with 300 feet underwater deep came back in one piece and I really enjoyed the whole thing so 300 feet that's like 192 meters oh geez like I'm trying to imagine and what that is like compared to like a statue of liberty or something like that but I'll look that look that up later I look after buildings the one like buildings I can be as little as are 20, 30 meters and can go super higher.

1:50:4390 meters is pretty high. Yeah, last time I looked at the building like that. I was looking for which one it was, but it's pretty high. So it's tech -borne breath, go down, touch the bottom, bottom plate on the rope, and then come back up. One thing that makes it price 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 asked them, hey, what's up? How long do you think you can be on the water? and they turn something like 30 seconds, maybe a minute. How deep do you think can you go? Maybe five meters.

1:51:15At the end of a weekend, most people were able to hold their breath for two to three minutes and to go to 20 meters deep. So it's one of those things where it looks absolutely impressive and crazy and amazing. And in fact, for maturity gifted, to it, there's a lot of physical changes that happen when we dive, that make it possible. But I think it's fascinating a little we know about our bodies. I'm looking up how what is 300 feet compared to real life objects on perplexity. So what is 300 feet compared to real life objects? And here we go, 300 feet. The length of a football field. Okay, yeah, that's not should have realized that.

1:51:56Close to the length of a Boeing 737. Yeah, you need to look at it spread to get some perspective. Yeah, and I'm a footballer. I'm wondering that's right. Oh my God. I am, but I love your advice that people can do much better at the skilled than they think. Yeah, it's, it will be then it everyone from kids to adults are really amazing at it actually. Tonguey, we've covered so much ground. I think this is going to help a lot of people that are trying to get better at free diving, but also at building zero to one within large companies. I am so thankful that you made time for this and you shared so many of this real talk and as you call it therapy.

1:52:37Two final questions, working folks find you online if they want to reach out and maybe follow up on some of the stuff you talked about and how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn if you know how to, you don't need to know how to pronounce my name, just thinking how to write it. I'm not super active on social media have to be honest, I'm very much in the trenches building this product. So I don't do much in terms of networking to be fair. But if you are using this product, for example, and you have ideas for how we can improve it for you, or you'd like to share some stories about how it's helped you or how it's not helping you, I'd love to connect because I spend a large part of my days talking to users responding to support tickets and stuff like that.

1:53:19Yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Lenny. It's been amazing and I hope some of my gibberish is useful to people. Definitely not gibberish, I think it's going to help a lot of people. And with that, let's you go. Bye everyone. Bye bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast dot com.

1:53:58See you in the next episode!