Hey hey Tanguy - thanks for doing this!

Let’s set the scene a little - when I was at Atlassian, I worked mostly on Jira integrations, so naturally I got caught up in the Jira Product Discovery hype.

It was this early-stage rocket ship that had come out of the Point A (a.k.a New Products) program, with green markers all over the company-wide KR dashboards.

We’ll get into the growth strategy and roadmap stuff later, but I’d love to start at the start by asking something I’ve always wondered:

→ What’s the TLDR on: who, what, where, when, why, how did JPD actually start?

9:16 AM ✓

Thanks for having me Tom 🥂

The TLDR would be this: for a long time at Atlassian, we've innovated mostly through acquisitions (like buying Statuspage to enter the ops market, Trello, Bitbucket, now Loom, etc).

5yrs ago there was this desire to restart internal innovation, so we created Point A - our internal incubator.

~100 teams pitched ideas, and JPD was one of them - it was ultimately the most successful product from that program.

Initially, there was no team. I was based in Europe. So I found a way to create a pocket of airspace where we could innovate and try things that you can't do in the rest of Atlassian. Being in Europe actually helped - no one cared enough to stay up late or wake up early to disagree with us every day. 😄

We were mostly left alone.

There was no real product team to speak of in Europe - so to keep things simple I started the team with contractors because it was the easiest way to try things out without getting into big discussions around expanding Atlassian’s footprint in Europe. If the experiment failed there would be no harm done.

I used it to create startup-like conditions inside a big company: scarcity of resources, too few engineers, limited budget, etc.

We were repeatedly asked if we wanted to accelerate and we said no - other teams that got too big too fast were moving much slower. We kept this up until we had confirmation that we had landed on something pretty special for a small number of customers for which the product would solve very big problems.

And that’s when we started scaling the team and building a product team in Europe.

9:19 AM ✓

Many of our readers work inside large tech companies, and would probably love the idea of securing budget to incubate a new idea.

What do you think made JPD stand out from the other Point A pitches?

9:20 AM ✓

Initially, no one believed in JPD, not even myself.

There were 100s of pitches, and you need to get many things right for something to take off:

• You need to find a market that's big enough for Atlassian.

• It needs to work with our business model, which is self-service as much as possible.

• Customers need to be able to discover, try, and decide to buy on their own before we talk to them, because our sales team doesn’t do outbound and most aren’t dedicated to 1 product.

The Point A program filtered based on a few key questions:

• Is the market there?

• Is it big enough?

• Is it growing?

• Does Atlassian have a right to play?

• Does Atlassian have an unfair advantage?

• Is now the right time?

That narrowed 100s to maybe 20. The second wave of filtering came down to:

• The right founding team?

• Do you have the right founder-market fit?

And that’s where my internal reputation at Atlassian helped. Over the previous years I had worked on a number of projects that got visibility from the Atlassian founders, and that gave me internal recognition.

The way I saw this is that I was building a stack of chips. And when the right opportunity came I’d bet them all on it. That’s what I did for this product. I’m glad I did it this way as I had to make a bunch of unpopular decisions to make JPD successful that would have otherwise not been possible without this internal rep.

9:26 AM ✓

You’re the Head of Product now - were you also the internal founder in those early-stages?

How was the early team architected?

9:42 AM ✓

Yeah - after working on Hipchat and statuspage my manager Steve Goldsmith came to me and said "We really need ideas to go through this incubator. Can you think of one?"

I didn’t have anything so I told him that I’d take an “internal vacation” for 3 months. I had already done that in the past: I’d be working, but away from my team and mostly unreachable, doing research and talking to customers for a while until I found a thread to pull on.

At some point I came across a marketing team in a research paper who said… "Whenever we want to make changes to the website, we go to Trello. We discuss it there, we agree with all the marketing people. And then one of us goes into Jira and creates a ticket. And then we just hope it gets done."

That struck me.

People used to call that "pre-planning" in that world. I started to Google things around that and opened the door to a market I didn't know existed:

‘PM tooling’ or ‘roadmapping’.

After some early user interviews, I realized these were problems customers had been experiencing for the past 10 years.

I pitched to get another PM and a designer to join for exploring solutions. I didn't pick an engineer because there was nothing technical required at that stage.

Eventually we landed on a strong solution, which took a few months, and that’s when I pitched to have 5 engineers join the team. For the longest time we kept things going as a small team - you can do so much and go so fast this way! A lot of today’s JPD was created back then.

Over time it became a bigger thing - today the team’s close to 60!

But I'm still pretty much an internal founder in that I'm very involved in shaping the product, working with designers and engineers and taking on customer feedback rotations.

9:45 AM ✓

Readers would never forgive me if I didn’t ask the early-stage strategy Q:

What did your initial strategy look like for JPD?

How did you build conviction and get buy-in that it should be a separate standalone product (as opposed to a screen/feature in Jira)?

9:51 AM ✓

We started with a very simple strategy: Atlassian has already got the target users - PMs.

We're just going to build specialized functionality for them and charge them for it.

Our second-level strategy was: by starting with PMs then expanding, we're going to help Atlassian access other people who aren't typically in Jira.

Leadership, sales, support, customer success, solution engineering - all the people who talk with customers and lead teams can now collaborate with developers via the product manager.

We're using the PM as a catalyst to bridge the worlds of tech and business, which is an age-old problem for a lot of Atlassian’s customers.

The ‘why now?’ was the wave of companies (not just tech, but all industries) reorienting from managing “projects” to managing “products” off the back end of the ‘agile transformation’ era.

It’s very important for a company like Atlassian: there has to be a wave in the market, because we don’t have an army of consultants to convince you to change how you work - we need markets that are growing fast and then we focus on creating apps that customers can discover, try and buy on their own.

That’s what was happening with product management.

These problems required a dedicated tool for conducting specific workflows, and giving PMs agency to frame conversations and align stakeholders.

By focusing on these unmet needs, for users Atlassian already had, JPD could provide specialised value beyond Jira's core functionality and actually expand our TAM in the process.

9:55 AM ✓

Ok I think it’s time to get spicy and talk about competitors 🌶️

How did you get away with …

10:02 AM ✓

TA is typing …