Atlassian's Transformational Change Playbook for Exponential Growth with Anu Bharadwaj, Atlassian

Self care is never selfish, right? So the time you invest in yourself, it's just good stewardship of the only way you can deliver value. You can have impact on the world. So taking the time to build perspective outside of just your narrow scope of your day job really makes you a better human being. It makes you a better leader. It brings experiences into your cognizance that you would have never thought of before, where you can really translate lessons very well. Whatever your personal interest is, give yourself the time to really explore that in depth because it'll make whatever you're doing in your day job way better and deeper.

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Hey what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction Podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself, on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more, this episode is brought to you by Boast AI. Each year, the US And Canadian governments give out billions of dollars in R and D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses like yours. But the application process is cumbersome, prone to frustrating audits, and receiving the money can take up to 16 months. Boast AI gets you access to research and development tax credits and innovation funding opportunities without the headache and red tape. Join thousands of North American companies leveraging Boast AI software to maximize cashback. Check out Boast AI. This episode is also brought to you by Launch Academy, an international tech hub that provides mentorship, resources, network and the environment for entrepreneurs to launch, fund and grow their startups. Since 2012, Launch Academy has incubated over 6,000 entrepreneurs, of which 300 have grown their startups past Seed and Series A and have collectively raised over $1.2 billion in funding. To learn more about Launch Academy's programs, check out LaunchAcademy CA.

The most successful companies of the last decade, from Amazon to Netflix and Microsoft, have seen and been through transformational changes. Anu's talk that I had listened to, she had said great companies must develop the muscle to transform if they want to last and movements make those changes possible. So Anu is going to share all about how to inspire a movement in your company to drive transformational change so you can continue shipping blockbuster products and having exponential growth. Anu is the Chief Operating Officer Atlassian and she's seen and Accomplished a great tracker of growing 500 million plus revenue businesses, building great teams and continuing shipping great products. And prior to Atlassian she was at Microsoft. She launched several products from Microsoft visual studio over 10 years. She also serves as the chairperson of the Atlassian foundation, which is a nonprofit organization focused on global education. And something really interesting is during her illustrious career she took a year off to work as an animal safari guide, hanging out with lions and penguins and giant turtles. Anu, welcome to Traction. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you Laib, it's wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me.

You've had a super successful career from running product at transformational companies to working as an animal safari guide. Give us your backstory, perhaps serving as an inspiration to a lot of other people trying to get into the product game and eventually lead a transformational company.

Sure. So I was born and brought up in Bangalore IN the 80s when it used to be known more for its gardens and trees than for being the silicon capital of India as it is now. Back in the 80s it was really easy to go out and play and not worry about traffic. Now when I go back to Bangalore, it feels like an entirely different country. Now almost not just city, but one thing that happened while growing up was I'm the youngest of three siblings. Siblings. I learned to always be the youngest in the room and be okay with asking questions that felt basic, that felt fundamental, but being comfortable with asking those questions, which has served me well, I think through my career as well. I graduated out of computer science, just engineering just like you Lloyd out of Bangalore. And Microsoft came to school and recruited me out of school and and my first job was writing video games on the net SDK. When Microsoft offered me the job, I couldn't believe it. I was like, you're going to pay me for this thing? I would do this for free. This is so much fun. Who doesn't want to do gaming? So that was a really exciting start for me in technology. When I went to Microsoft, I had the good fortune of being able to try out different roles where Microsoft has a program through which they facilitate rotation of high performers across different teams. So I was able to work on different problem sets not just on the gaming SDK but also building compilers with J. And I also worked on some research teams and automation development teams. But eventually I gravitated towards the product management role because ultimately what moves me is being able to impact someone's life with my work. So I distinctly remember when I went to a user conference as an engineering lead, I met A customer who said, hey, this product you guys are building, it was called team build, it was a build management piece of software. He said, this helps me get my job done way faster so I can go home quicker in the evenings and I get to spend time with my 3 year old son. And for me, that was very striking. I thought, wow, okay, the work that we're doing really has an impact on somebody's life so meaningfully that it's changing what they can do with their time. And so I naturally found my way to product management. I'm also a little bit of a science nerd. So one of my favorite theoretical physicists, Steven Weinberg, has a quote where he says, that's the problem with physics. It's not that we don't take things, theories too seriously, it's that we don't. It's that we. It's not that we take our theories too seriously, it's that we do not take them seriously enough because all of the equations and numbers that we're working on, we don't quite understand how they explain the entire universe we live in. And I think so is the case with software development. Sometimes when you're in the weeds, you kind of feel like, oh, this is cool technology. I'm building this game, I'm building this compiler, amazing, fun, but you don't quite get how much impact it has on the user's life. So eventually I started building more products and businesses at Microsoft, Built developer tools in Visual Studio, part of Team Foundation Server. And after about 10 years there, I found my way to Atlassian. I have to confess, when Atlassian called me, I said, what's a jira? I had no idea what this company was, but back in 2014 they convinced me to come to Sydney and meet the team. And, and when I went to Sydney and I met the team, I felt, oh my God, these are my people, this is my tribe. I belong here. Because I met a group of people that were so focused on solving customer problems, they weren't in it to just put the next big technology brand on their resume and move on or to make like a big ipo and then primarily looking at it from a financial lens, they were really there to solve customer problems and they really click together as a community. So I felt like I belong here. I want to come here and I want to be part of this. And so I joined as the head of product for JITA and built out the product management team, did a couple of worldwide tours, convincing people to move continents to Australia to come join my team for a company they had never heard of. We are pretty low key, we are very Australian that way. And for the first two years I led the platformization of Jira and took Jira from a single product to a product line, Jira software for IT teams and for non technical teams. And we also IPO'd at the end of those two years and it was very intense. It was an intense period. And at the end of 12 years in the tech industry, I felt, okay, I really want to do something else, I want to do something different. So I went to my boss at the time, so we have two CO CEOs at Atlassian. I reported to one of them, I went to my boss and I said, I have 12 years in the tech industry, I really want to go off and do something different. I think I'm going to quit my job. And he said, no, don't quit the job, just go do whatever you want and then think about what you want to do after a significant period of time. And I said, I don't know how long I'm going to take off, I might need a year. He said, that's okay, take a sabbatical of a year and we will think about what to do after that. And that was a great lesson in leadership because now if I'm faced with a situation like that, I would 100% do that because I think it's important to have people go off and do something different to build perspective. As a result, they become better leaders. So I was very much involved in funding a bunch of wildlife conservation projects. So I took the year off and went and did field work. So I spent time in South Africa working with lions, rehabilitating them, rescuing them from canned hunting operations and rehabilitating them and trying to rewild them. And also in the same year I went to Namibia and you refer to that as the safari guide experience. I went and worked with cheetah conservation projects there. We basically had to chase cheetahs across the desert and fit GPS collars on them and try to protect them from poachers so we could track where they are and we could tip off livestock farmers if they were near their farm so they could scare them away instead of get into really dangerous situations. And because I'm a wildlife nerd and I had a working visa in Namibia, I also signed up as a safari guide and that was really fulfilling in many ways. It was so different than my day job and it was very liberating to be out there in the wilderness with animals telling people about, about how special they are and talking about their ecology and things like that. Finally, I went to Antarctica and worked with penguins on a penguin conservation project. It was really fascinating. We see pictures of Antarctica as like this icy continent, but nothing quite prepares you for the sheer scale of ice. I remember when we floated in, just look at 360 degree view of just sheer ice everywhere and it was breathtaking. And when we went to the penguin rookeries, because there's still very much restricted traffic in Antarctica, it's the last wilderness left in the world. The penguins are really not scared of humans at all. They come really close and come super close to you and look up at you and they're wondering who are these two legged animals? We haven't seen too many of them around. So that was a very fascinating experience. After a year of doing that, I remember Scott, my boss, called me and he said, anu, a year is done. What are you doing? At the time I was somewhere in the Atacama desert doing some stargazing sessions. I'm also a little bit of an amateur astronomer and I thought, wow, this was really good. I'm raring to go back to tech this year. Experience was very nourishing also, I'd blown all my money and needed a real job. So I thought, okay, I need to go back and see what I should be doing next. And I came back to Sydney and I worked as the head of products strategy for Atlassian. And one of the key things we did at the time was we had contemplated a shift of our business from on premise to SaaS. And one of the projects I worked on at the time was how we can actually make that happen. And that was a big transformation for us at the time. Over 90% of our revenues came from on premise products and we wanted to shift to a world where we were completely SaaS. And that would take a good three to four years of transformation inside Atlassian across R and D teams, GTM teams, go to market teams, finance teams, how we communicate this to the street because we were already a public company to do that. I moved to California about four years, three and a half years ago, started building out a team, led the building of our cloud native platform. Over the last few years I've mostly been doing that and now as part of my CEO role, I run our enterprise business, data center, business developer platform marketplace as well as manager Corp Dev strategy and operations teams.

What do you think are the key traits you had to accomplish this level of leadership?

That's a good one. As a person, I'VE always believed in values based leadership. We talk about this a lot. And I remember when I interviewed at Atlassian, they told me a lot about values and I thought, oh, this is, is just some marketing bullshit. Every company says this. Who knows how true this is? But when I met the team, I felt like, okay, I get it. They're really living their company values day in and day out. So for me, when I think about all the common thing across all the decisions and all of the twists and turns in my life, the things that have been constant are my core values that have driven me through a lot of these changes and those have remained constant. And I would say the top three of those 1. Courage. I have a tendency to lead with courage and go into situations which seem fairly unknown, but I enjoy that. I enjoy going into situations where I don't quite know what's going to happen. It's new, but I'm sure I will learn something interesting out of it and being brave about trying out new things. The other one for me is integrity. Integrity is an interesting one in terms of it's not just about honesty. Integrity is when what you're thinking, what you're saying and what you're doing are all in line. And for me that's really important as a person and also it helps with making decisions. Where I knew when I took the year off, for example, I knew in my heart that I did need a change of scene, a change of pace. I wanted to have a completely different set of experiences and being able to synchronize what I'm doing with what I'm thinking or what I'm feeling. And being the same Viceyvig, what you see is what you get in interactions with other people has been really important. So being open and having that integrity and I also look for people like that when I hire them on my team because it really helps build strong bonds. And the last one for me is fairness. I am very much a person who cares deeply about fairness. The fairness circuits in my brain typically blow when I see situations of injustice. So when I was living in India, I was part of, I had gone to a protest and I was part of a group that was leading this protest and giving TV interviews about why we were protesting. It was an anti corruption bill we were trying to introduce. And the thing that, and I remember somebody asked me in the interview, so why are you here? This is a dangerous situation. You could land in trouble because of this strike. And the thing that really drove me was a sense of fairness and justice that really the world is not fair, but we've got to do everything we can to make it a better place. And that's what has helped me with the wildlife conservation projects to a lot of wildlife. They don't deserve the kind of treatment we met out to them, and it's unfair, but I really feel strongly about being able to do something to help them. And that also leads to my role as the chairperson at Atlassian foundation, where we invest in global education projects for underprivileged kids, where they've been born into an unfair situation. But we can do something to help correct that situation.

What were some transformational changes of the last decade and what can we learn from them?

We're just starting from first principles. When we talk about transformation, it's almost a buzzword now, with digital transformation being something everyone says, but just from fundamental first principles. When we talk about transformation, we are talking about change of the magnitude, where what's on the other end of the change is unknown and uncertain to a certain degree, where what used to be status quo before has been completely upended. And on the other side, we've landed into a very different world. If you look back at society at large, we've gone through many transformations over the last 100 years. But some of the more common, more popular transformations that we all draw inspiration from, transformations and movements like civil rights movement or the suffragette movement, or the Indian independence movement, which is special for me because I was born and brought up in India, so read about that a lot recently. The climate change movement, where a lot of our younger generation are really seeking to transform the way we think about climate change and what we can do to address it, a movement is really a vehicle to bring about a transformation. So when you realize that a transformation is needed in the way we think and act about certain topics, a movement really helps make that transformation a reality. When movements are needed Back to your question of when do you think movements are needed? For any major transformation to happen, a series of movements are needed and typically there are leaders who can start those movements and sustain those movements and attract a large following to be able to see that, hey, the new normal is actually the place we should be in, and who can combat that change, the fear of change and uncertainty, and really lead people into a new future. That's why transformations are important. If you think about tech transformations, it happens a lot in our industry and technology because transformations happen at also a speed and frequency that's a lot higher than most other industries. Many common transformations that we all like to speak about in the tech industry, Netflix is a popular one, which went from disrupting themselves and their own business to now being leaders in streaming. Microsoft's another one, which is also especially personally close to me because I worked there for 10 years. It's amazing what Satya Nadella has done in terms of transforming Microsoft into the company that it is right now. From a Windows centric world to more of an Azure and multi product world, and Apple from a hardware to hardware plus software plus services business. Plenty of transformation stories abound in software.

In technology, the key theme here is the ability to transform is a muscle that everyone needs to develop if they want to last. And building this movement is that first step. Because when I think movement, yes, the tech ones come to mind, but I'm thinking about Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King. So what are some key traits of those movements and how do you spark that in a company?

Fundamentally, movements are vehicles that help organizations or societies transform. So for example, the civil rights movement as a movement was effective in helping people change perspective about what was acceptable, what was fair, what was just. So movement overall should really have one common uniting purpose. So one key trait that's required is a shared understanding of why. Same thing in technical industries, in the technology industries, for transformations. The key thing is for everyone in a company to understand why is that transformation required. So closer home to us at Atlassian, the cloud shift was a big transformation for us as a company, for all of our 8,000 Atlassians to understand why is this the number one transformation that Atlassian has to go through and how can we contribute to that mission? That's a key thing. So every good movement should have a powerful why and one that is shared across a large group of people. And as a leader of a movement and through personal experience, I love this Jeff Beiner quote where he says, when you get tired of saying something, that's when they start listening. So it's important to keep repeating the why. Why are we in this movement? What's the shared purpose that unites us? And successful movements have that as a key trait. A second one would really be the ability to be nimble and change as needed. Anything worth doing takes a long time. Anything worth doing is more or less a long term situation of multiple years at least. And people's attention spans are not that long, especially in the world today. A second key trait of a movement is staying power. Does it have the ability to sustain momentum and go through multiple years of transformation and retain interest and energy and enthusiasm for the movement and adapt to any kind of change that happens because multiple years is a long time and there will be setbacks. So all successful movements have the ability to adapt and react to changes that happen to sustain themselves over the long run.

You got 8,000 employees. I can't even imagine doing this with eight employees. But how do you communicate or what hacks or methods you've picked up so that people are on mission when you're not in the room?

Yeah, that's difficult, isn't it? A few lessons that I have learned. Movements at scale. For movements at scale specifically, one, like I said, is the shared purpose being really clear and continually communicating it tactically. For example, what we do at Atlassian is we have regular all hands. We embody the transformation purpose and metrics on how we are progressing on that transformation in what we call OKRs or objectives and key results. And there is constant communic application cadence about that. Because as we have more and more new people join, for instance, we have over 3,000 Atlassians that have joined over the last two years. For them to come in and understand, okay, this is the key central tenet around which this company is organized. This is why this transformation is important. Asynchronous communication is very important. So this is part of their onboarding material where we explain, here's the transformation we're going through, this is why it's important, and here's how you can contribute to it. And repeated communication through multiple channels and being consistent about it, where every week after week you go in front of the company and say, here's what's going on and here's how it matters to your life. So great companies don't just cascade goals, they cascade purpose. And for a transformation, that's very important. How you cascade purpose all the way from the very top to every leaf node at the company in terms of why this is the purpose around which this transformation is organized. A second one that was a good learning was it's important to lead with courage when you're undertaking a transformation, because this is typically met with fear and uncertainty. When people look at an uncertain situation, the first instinct typically is fear. But the only antidote to fear is love. So you lead with courage, but it's also important to lead with love. And leading with love might sound very trite and New Agey, and what does that actually translate to? In work life, it's easy to show love and be understanding when your team members sitting right next to you. In the pandemic ridden world, and especially as we accelerate into more and more distributed work, plus as you scale as a company, like you said, At 8,000 people, I don't know this person that's sitting out there in the finance team. I've never met them. It's hard for me to lead with love with a person that I don't know very well. But the thing with transformations is it confronts you with such a magnitude of change that typically people react with, my God, I don't know what this means to my life. So for example, in the cloudshift transformation, what happened was a lot of our partners, the way they ran their businesses changed entirely. They could no longer rely on configuration of behind the firewall software, but now we had a brand new SaaS offering. So their fundamental business changed. So their natural reaction was, oh my God, is this really going to work? Should we be doing this? And same thing internally at Atlassian, normally when people don't quite understand what's going on or fear what's going on, their first reaction is conspiracy theories. So you very much hear the thing about, oh, the sales team doesn't understand what to do, or the R and D team is just way too slow.

And lazy or they're trying to fire this whole department, I'm going to lose my job, so I'm going to make it extra difficult.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. It's easy to assume the worst intent and come up with worst case scenarios in those times. As a leader, you have to hold emotional space for the other person because really what they're playing out is an emotional reaction to the change. And it's important to stay with the team, with the person at that situation, create that space and help them see that the inevitable future is really what the end of the transformation looks like. And therefore it's actually in their interest and in their team's interest and in the global interest to lean in rather than lean out. So building transformation requires not only for the leader to lead with courage, to show from the frontline that they're out there risking a lot even for themselves in terms of driving this change, but also leading with love, where you show empathy and you understand that this is hard. We know this is hard, but we're in this together.

What is one concrete example maybe of leading with love and showing empathy?

Actually, maybe two examples because you asked about love and empathy. One in terms of leading with love is taking the shift to remote work. Right. So Atlassian was one of the first companies that said this is here to stay and we're not just doing this for a pandemic ridden world, but we're doing this because we believe that better software will be built by fully distributed teams. Early last year we said as a company we will switch to being fully remote. What that means is any employees can work out of virtually anywhere. We have a few constraints logistically, but you don't have to come in into the office ever. Not just for 2020 or 2021, but over the long run. What that did is it helped us open up ability to hire people in different locations, hire people in different stages of life with different constraints, and create overall a more diverse pool of people that we can have. At Atlassian, the change naturally triggered a bunch of fearful responses from a lot of our own internal Atlassians. Primarily because Atlassian is a social company. And when like I was telling you the story of when I went to Australia, I hired a bunch of people, convinced them to move to Australia. They were all in the same boat as they joined the company. People new to the country, looking for schools, looking for homes. So it was easy to form a well knit tight. And a lot of that was fostered through in person interaction. So as a company we were very much, very strongly aligned around in person interaction, having a social fabric, meeting other Atlassians socially, in outside world, etc. So the remote transformation took a few of us by surprise and through inevitable phases of rejection, instant rejection. At those times, leading with love would basically mean sitting down with the employees that are feeling scared about okay, what does this remote transformation mean to Atlassian? What does it mean to our culture? Are we now going to become a different company? Is it going to no longer be? My best friends are also the ones that are working at Atlassian. Should I think of my social circle as completely different than my office circle, which are all valid questions to ask. But leading with love basically means taking the time to sit down and listen to what employees are worried about, offering potential suggestions to mitigate and also accepting where yes, certain things are going to be harder in this new world. But we are making an informed trade off because it enables us to bring more Atlassians into the fold. People who would have never had a chance to be an Atlassian before. So holding that space, it takes much longer. Instead of just doing top down mandates to say no, we made the switch. Too bad. This is how it's going to be versus co creating the new reality with your people and doing listening tours, doing interviews, surveys, running specific programs to address specific groups of people, specific geos, locales that have different problems. That is what leading with love would be. And it takes longer, but it's worth the results. So, leading with empathy, I want to share a personal example, something that I learned too, which is a lesson for me through the cloud transformation. Again, for example, I have an engineering pedigree and a product pedigree and like I've shared an animal nerd and a bit of a science nerd, very geeky personality. So I had to go to a sales kickoff a few years ago and explain to our sales team, you've got to stop selling on premise products and sell these SaaS products instead. This was a few years ago back in Amsterdam and I had to get up on stage and say that. And I'm thinking in my mind, oh my God, I'm just an engineer. I'm just this geek from this product team who has this vision of the future. And I'm about to stand up on stage and tell all of these folks whose day to day livelihood depends on selling these on prem products, stop what you're doing now and do this other thing instead. Which is riskier because I'm still building out, my team is still building out those SaaS products. I'm asking them to fundamentally change their lens of the world. So I went to dinner the previous night with a bunch of sales folks and some external channel partners and external salespeople from other companies that had come in. And I was at dinner and the conversation, the dinner topic was new acquisitions that you've made. What are the newest things that people have bought? And people were talking about vacation homes and new cars and new sailboats. And it was my turn. And when I was asked, what was the last new thing that you bought that you're really excited about? I said, oh, I bought this textbook on the evolutionary history of slime molds. And that instantly killed the conversation at the dinner table. They're like, what? This is really strange thing. And so I went back to my hotel room and I called up one of my favorite mentors, Jay Simons, who happened to be the president at Atlassian at the time.

And he spoke at our live conference three years ago in Vancouver.

Oh, wonderful. He's an amazing guy. Such a good human being. I love him. And he said, I told him, jay, this is what happened. I was the most unpopular person at the table, dinner table. And tomorrow I have to stand up and tell them, do this thing that's clearly the unpopular ch. And Jay laughed at my story and he said, no, just think about what's common, what's the shared purpose across you and the sales team. Both of you want to do the right thing for the customer. So talk about it in terms of why is this shift important to customers and why are you asking them to do this? Because all of you remember, want to do the right thing by Atlassian customers. And that was sage advice that really helped to create empathy for what our sales teams are going through. And using that lens helped our salespeople create empathy for me to see where I'm coming from. So the next day I went up on stage and I said, look, in terms of our company values, we're an Australian company, We have a lot of swear words in our values, which is don't do bad things by the customer, which is don't screw over the customer. We are really in a situation where we've invested heavily in the cloud product line because we strongly believe that's the future. Atlassian's future is the cloud, because we believe the tech industry's future is the cloud. And we want our customers to be where the future is. We don't want them to be left behind and therefore we have to help them make the switch, which is painful in the short term, but is very beneficial in the long term, which is why I'm asking you to help land our customers in the right place to start with instead of put them through a long, painful migration process. And that instantly clicked with the team. They understood where I was coming from and why this would be the right thing to do by customers and helped create empathy across two groups of seemingly very dissimilar people.

As you're leading organizational change, transformational change, creating movements, you got the people and you at the bottom or through the organization and the leaders at the top. And you talked about transparency and empathy and love and constant communication. Now, what can middle management roles effectively do to help usher things along?

That's a great question, and one that in fact the majority of people in an organization face. Because typically most orgs are structured in some shape or form of a pyramid. But the middle layer is the most powerful layer in the company because execs can say whatever the hell we want, but people doing the real work are going to listen to their managers, which is really the middle layer. So middle management is really the glue that binds purpose to the actual engine of the company, to the actual set of people who get work done. So it's important first for middle management to be bought off on the Y. So as I have been a middle manager for several years and there have been times when I have not understood, why are we following this particular strategy? For example, at Microsoft, I was in A role where I wasn't entirely sure why we were embarking on a particular project. And I remember standing up at an all hands meeting and asking that question of the CEO and he welcomed it and he answered it. I think that's key because I'd rather have questions I can't answer than answers I can't question. So it's important for middle management to really deeply understand and agree with what the top level company purpose and the transformation in this case, if the company is going through a transformation, why we're doing what we're doing. So the question said, I have a deep understanding of it. It's always worthwhile testing that and internalizing it. So you feel it viscerally because when you communicate it back to your teams, that's when rubber hits the road. They'll be able to tell if you truly believe this or you're just parroting what you've heard from a cop. The second thing is the constant communication that I referred to can only work if middle management is participating in it. Right? The future will not arrive without our participation. So the middle management really are the people who have to repeatedly do this communication to their teams because the communication coming from the leader of the transformation or from the CEO or the CTO happens at infrequent cadences, but your team really relies on you. People don't leave companies, they leave managers because managers are the ones that have the most impact on an employee's well being, on an employee's autonomy drive, etc. So much of the communication burden really falls on middle management. So it's worthwhile to think about the lattice, the framework through which communications happen. What are middle management folks responsible for what needs to arrive at a company wide cadence? And how can we take our teams and make them feel like they're part of the overall purpose? But one of my favorite stories is from NASA where the president at the time apparently was walking through the halls. I don't know if this is an urban myth or an actual story, but I love the story nonetheless. He was walking through the halls of NASA and he met a janitor and he said, oh, I didn't know you were still. He thought the facility was closed and he ran into the janitor and he said, sorry, I didn't know you were still working. What do you do here? And the janitor said, you would expect the janitor to describe his job. But the janitor said, I'm putting a man on the wound, sir, because he believed so strongly in NASA's mission and he was able to connect his work to the purpose rather than to say, oh, I'm cleaning out this closet over here or I'm just doing my routine duties for the day. And middle management is the one that has the power to drive that kind of alignment. So for every employee to understand how they contribute to the purpose, the cascading purpose code that David is talking about, middle management is the one that's able to cascade that. So think about how can you do that through your one on ones with your people, through your own team meetings, through communicating with new hires that are being onboarded as well as upwards execs, have an understanding of this is how transformation is being perceived and these are the roadblocks that we are running into. It's important to keep talking about the hurdles we are running into and how we solve them too because like I said, sustenance over a long term period is a challenge. So how do you equip your teams for the marathon that becomes your key responsibility?

What are some good communication templates or frameworks that you've used or maybe can point us to?

All depends on the scale of the organization, right? So and I remember when I joined at last year we were 400 people and my team was saying, oh my God, we are experiencing problems of scale. We are a big company and I had come from Microsoft and I thought, oh that's cute, 400 people and you think you're a big company, but now we're 8,000 people and we still act like a startup but we are actually a big company. So the communication templates and formats and channels have had to change. But one big thing for me that I experienced personally as I moved from Microsoft Atlassian was the use of Confluence. Confluence is a cultural beacon at Atlassian. Confluence is basically this somewhat of an intranet wiki sort of tool where this is the heartbeat of Atlassian. We share what's happening in the form of blog posts, all of our six pagers, strategy documents, project plans, everything is written in Confluence. And Confluence by default is open so anyone can look at the work you're doing. For me initially that was a big shock coming from a large company where you would get several cycles to clean up and polish up your work and then do an ultimate presentation to just throwing your work out there to collaborate with people and it's visible to everybody in the company. Felt a little bit like oh my God, I'm walking out naked. This is very vulnerable. But what it did was it really fostered quick collaboration, instant collaboration and people that had common overlapping Interests could create conjoint projects very fast. So it accelerated and fast forwarded a lot of friction that you would see typically. So Confluence has definitely been the gold bar for us in terms of communication across Atlassian and I see this through a number of our customers that are trying to do digital transformation initiatives inside their companies. Confluence really brings information out into the open where it's largely push rather than pull. So it no longer becomes the employee's responsibility to go query out of a document store. Let me see what the CEO is up to today because in Confluence everything is available and it shows up in a feed. So if I want to see what Anu is up to, I all I have to do is follow her feed and they can see what I'm working on right now. What problems am I facing? So just that openness and communication where you reduce friction and reduce burden on employees to be more of a push rather than them having to pull is an important key tenet. Other things that have typically worked are normal channels like keynotes, presentations, meetings, etc. But in the new distributed world I would say one key thing to stress on is Async communication. We have a big writing culture at Atlassian and several other companies due to Google, Amazon, Stripe. When you have a strong writing culture, asynchronous communication becomes much more natural and it's also fairer because when you're working with multiple geos, they don't all have time in terms of time zones to connect to one synchronous big meeting. But if you when you have a writing culture, people can then consume that content on their own time. So we do a lot of recorded videos like I just sent a holiday video to my team and it was a good 24 hour cadence by the time everyone saw the video commented. But they could all do it on their own time and in a format that's that works for them. So some people do audio only, they don't want to see the video. Some people convert the video to text and read the transcript. So it really opens up a lot of surface area. In terms of thumbs, what do you.

Consider a great product team? How is the product team at Atlassian.

Strong organizationally the product team is structured as a single function. So we have a separate product management function. I remember starting the APM program, the associate PM program at Atlassian early on when I joined Atlassian because we are a heavily product driven company. We're a product centric company. We have a product led growth model. We pioneered that model in the industry. So PMs have a very key role inside of Atlassian. And we believe that the craft really is distinct enough that we need to be organized as a function of our own and we need to make sure that we continue to distill and learn the craft. So all of the product managers are organized into a single function and across the CPO and CEO we basically have all of the product managers reporting into them. In terms of what does a good product team look like? Several traits that define a good product team. But fundamentally all product teams, they come in different flavors depending on the kind of product, depending on the kind of team you're working on. For instance, we have separate product and platform teams, very common pattern in multi product companies. So skills you look for in a platform PM might look a little different than skills in the product pm, but overarchingly commonly one, they really have to be the customer voice. And for companies like Atlassian, where we are not really enterprise only, so you don't really get a chance to interact with a customer directly and consistently for too long. So it's not okay. I'm assigned to this large bank account and I'm going to spend like a good year understanding their work and customizing features for them. So when you have a large surface area, you really have to be smart about identifying how to bring customer voice inside your decisions, but you have to voice the customer's interest as a fundamentally as a team. Second, as a product manager, you don't own all the decisions on the team, but you own the velocity of decision making. So the buck stops with you. Whether a team is doing well or not, ultimately is the responsibility of the product manager. That's the way we build it. Build product teams at Atlassian. So what product managers have to do is really make the best idea shine. They don't always have to have the best idea themselves, but they have to have the skill to bring people together, collect the best set of ideas possible and choose what the best idea is irrespective of who brought it up. So that is another key trait. And last but not the least, product managers are really the heart of a company. So really they have to model the values of the company and really be cultural and values role models. Ultimately they own the business outcome. They're responsible for customers, they're responsible for the well being of their individual teams and they're responsible for outcomes for business outcomes. So how they manage those three separate often initiatives that pull them in different directions, while building with heart and balance is really a key trait that we look for.

How about Team sizes. What is the ideal team size? Is it like Amazon defines as two pizza boxes or epod? What is ideal you found? Is there a common structure?

Yeah, I wish we had a silver bullet for this. I've been in the tech industry long enough that I've seen a lot of these various different silver bullets fly through. I don't think I have a best practice that I can confidently say this is the size your team should be. But there are a few guiding principles to think about when you form your own team that should help you determine the size of the team. One key thing to think about is Daniel Pink puts this well, what are all employees driven by? Purpose, autonomy and mastery. And for individuals to be able to have purpose, autonomy and mastery is very much a function of their lead, their manager. Are they able to really afford them the space and the opportunities to develop mastery and autonomy while channeling purpose effectively? You can't do that if the team is too big. Just out of human constraints. The span of control typically tends to be four to eight. So when you're structuring a team in terms of an organizational structure, I would say don't make the span of control more than 8 or less than 4. 4 to 8 is somewhat of a good spectrum to think about. Second thing is, when forming a cross functional team, not just an organizational structure, then it's helpful to construct the team at a size where those people can autonomously make progress and each of them knows the other person reasonably well. And you can only do that if the team size is somewhere between 7 to 14. I would say anything more than that, it tends to break off into smaller subgroups. You see this at a party as well. Typically people join a conversation, it tends to get to a certain size and then break off into multiple groups. So that natural bubble size of when everyone can have one cogent conversation is actually a good proxy for how big of a team you can sustain.

How does your team prioritize? What features to ship, what to build, what is the ideal sort of product?

Different companies have different prioritization frameworks. So ultimately what works for you is very much a function of your culture of, of the kind of business you are in. Because for instance, in healthcare prioritization might look very different than collaboration products or in fintech, etc. But there are some common unifying principles that are helpful to remember. So just being tactical and specific about what we do at Atlassian, we follow the OKR model. It works really well for us in terms of saying, look company wide, there are three to Five priorities we declare for the entire year and those three to five priorities represent the key strategic important things company wide. It doesn't mean that other than those three to five things we are not doing anything else. It just means that those are the three to five key things that we are all paying attention to at a company wide level. From there, from those three to five objectives, we then define key results for those objectives and that gets cascaded over as team okrs and sub team okrs etc. How we prioritize which 3 to 5 to pick is fundamentally a function of what's the impact of this objective on our overall business. And in the quadrant of important and urgent, we like to optimize for both the important and urgent as well as the important and not urgent categories because fundamentally we are long term company. We've always thought about Atlassian should be around for 100 years. That's really our dream. Not just build a company and then exit and just think about the next quarter. There is tremendous pressure as a public company to think about short term results and next quarter. So often a common mistake is most people tend to get dragged in the direction of let's think about the important and urgent. But if you don't think about the important and not urgent, you're effectively sacrificing your future for your present. So in those three to five okrs we like to have a mix of both important urgent and important not urgent. And we do the classic horizon planning. So we like to have 70% horizon one which are projects that will yield results in year one, horizon two which is about 15% projects that yield result in two years and horizon three 15% which are projects that might yield a result in three years. But they're things that will take long to build. Foundation examples are developer marketplaces. So it doesn't yield revenue immediately as you start building it because it's a network effect, but you have to start building the network for it to show you returns in three to five years. That's been a great success story for us as well. Marketplace is one of our biggest sources of revenue. Same thing with the platform. Continual investment in the platform allows us to now release products way faster. So we just put out our point a products, five or six new products that we've released just this year because we have taken the time to invest in the long term foundation of the company.

You talked about Atlassian being a product led company, which Atlassian is the pioneer of that framework. What, what do you think are the key traits for success in product Led.

Yeah. So just taking the time to define what product led means because also that's been a little bit of buzzword in the recent past. One thing that is very unique about Atlassian that I love, which kind of aligns with my personal philosophy too, is we're a maverick of a company. We tend to do somewhat of the contrarian thing rather than prevailing wisdom, which is why we don't really have many best practices, so to speak, because we think we can always innovate on practices. We never quite believe something is the best just because it's working for somebody. So when Mike and Scott, our founders, started Atlassian, they started it in Australia where at a time where they couldn't really, they were bootstrapping the company and they didn't really have the ability to hire larger sales teams. That was the de facto template that every company would follow in enterprise software. So they thought about it and they said the Internet is taking off and we are sitting here in Australia, we can't really hire sales teams everywhere if we want to bootstrap our company. A, there's not that much of talent and B, there isn't really VC funding that we can use to hire a whole lot of people. So how can we invent product distribution mechanism through which we don't have to do that, we don't have to hire a large sales team. And they came up with way that is now defined as product led growth where essentially the product distributes itself. So on the, they basically looked at on the Internet how can we build a product that people can pull rather than we have to push into different customers. And we said great, let's just put it up on the website. Completely transparent pricing so customers don't have to go through the hassle of call up a sales guy, go negotiate with them, try to get a discount and then haggle about a bunch of different details and then create an invoice, a PO and all of that stuff. They removed all that friction and we said just click a button, use your credit card and the software is delivered there. Which was radical idea at the time. And now we have pretty much Most of the SaaS companies following that model where it's simple to land and then expand. So key traits of product led growth I would say is one clear, easy, transparent pricing where you don't have to put customers through hoops to understand how much they have to pay for your product. Second, I would say it's push rather than pull. So think about for your own product, for instance, if you're building a Database, it may not make sense to do a pricing model similar to consumer side. It may be more of a consumption model, but based on your product, how can you create a push? How can you create a pull mechanism rather than somebody having to proactively go and push this into customers with friction free pricing, friction free buying and pricing for volume and consistency. So typically a lot of enterprise software tends to cost a lot of money. Even now Atlassian's prices, if you compare with our competitor set, tends to be price such that the value is way higher than what we charge for. And that pricing model really helps in the product led growth because when users look at your pricing, they don't get sticker shock and say, oh my God, maybe I have to think hard. It's easy to just fetch out a credit card and buy it and try it so you can start small. MongoDB is another example of someone that does it well. And the last one's really how do you use your product to get in the door and then expand? So classic enterprise sales works like a salesperson cold calls a customer and says, hey, my product's really great. You should totally buy this. Here's a $1 million bill to cover your whole customer set, et cetera. Whereas at Atlassian, what we do is we never had a cold call. A company, pretty much any customer that approaches us already is using Jira or Trello or Confluence because it has organically taken hold in multiple teams because of all the reasons I mentioned below before. And then the salesperson's job is really to consolidate. So we've already landed in multiple places. The question is how do you expand and how do you go wall to wall building an ecosystem around that is very helpful.

So easy to buy, easy to use, easy to share. That's perfect.

Yes. Yeah, that's a great amalgamation of what I said.

What's the one piece of unconventional advice you have that people ignore?

But shouldn't I have to say it's taking sabbatical. I must admit we are an Australian company, so it was a lot more easier for me to take a sabbatical versus and I know it's really hard in both in India and US countries have worked in other than Australia for people to think about taking a substantial amount of time off for themselves. But it's worthwhile to think about this principle. Self care is never selfish. So the time you invest in yourself, it's just good stewardship of the only way you can deliver value. You can have impact on the world. So taking the time to build perspective outside of just your narrow scope of your day job really makes you a better human being. It makes you a better leader. It brings experiences into your cognizance that you would have never thought of before, where you can really translate lessons very well. So I always look for people who are well rounded and who have had different, varied, interesting experiences or curious about the world. And it's always worthwhile. No matter where your interest is. It doesn't have to be in wildlife or science or whatever I spoke about, but whatever your personal interest is, give yourself the time to really explore that in depth because it'll make whatever you're doing in your day job way better and deeper.

That is wonderful. And I've learned that over the last few years as well. And they tell you that on the flight to essentially put your oxygen mask on before you put it on the person next to you. What are your favorite books? And they don't have to be business books, but some things that have been very influential through your journey.

Yeah, for sure. I have to declare, I'm a book nerd. I read about 70, 75 books a year. Wow. I don't do much TV or movies, so if you ask me pop culture questions, I would miserably fail on it. I spend most of my free time reading rather than watching media. And I read in various different categories. But books that I've enjoyed over the recent past, I have to tell you, in categories. Lincoln is one of my favorite historical figures. He leads with head and heart, so I've enjoyed reading about him a lot. So one of my favorite books from Lincoln that I recently read had really long, I think it was about 1,000 pages or so. Had a really long story of how he was able to make his presidency work amongst a team of rivals. So the book's title is A Team of Rivals, but really talked about how he was able to bring varied, diverse people with potentially conflicting interests to bear impact on a country, to unify them in service of the country. I found that really fascinating. I really love reading science books. So popular science books and books on trees. My last favorite one was this book by a Canadian biologist called Finding the Mother Tree. Suzanne Simard, which has some amazing research. Her PhD thesis is on how trees communicate with each other and send signals and share nutrients and the life cycle of a tree, which was fascinating. Groundbreaking research. And I also particularly love poetry. I read a fair bit of poetry and recently I've really enjoyed reading nature poetry and a title called the Dharma of Poetry by John Brehm. It's nice and a steady start to my day. I read a poem after I wake up in the morning and it puts me in a great place frame of.

Mind and if you had to point to one, maybe business book. Although I feel like reading biographies of Leaders is a great business in itself.

Yeah, I really loved Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. I read that fairly late after multiple people recommended it. I really loved it. In general, I don't enjoy business books that are mainstream because I feel like they oversimplify the context of running a business and they package it up into neat packages and Real World is never really like that. So I enjoy reading biographies of CEOs where they really talk about some of the messy challenges that they dealt with. Play nice but when by Michael Dell was a fantastic one for those of you who have been through the PC era, and he talks about how he had the courage to take Dell private because they were going through a transformation and the public markets didn't believe that they could pull off the transformation and they came out with flying colors and to go back public again. I really enjoyed reading through a lot of the problems they dealt with. Amazon Unbound was another good one, though I don't know if I'd classify it a business book. It has a lot of interesting stories about how different Amazon products were built, war stories and problems they had to solve. Invent and wander. Same genre. Jeff Bezos is a collection of market investor letters that he wrote, which there's a little bit of massaging of PR there, so if you look underneath that, there's a lot of really valuable lessons on how to run the company.

Awesome. This is some really fantastic gold nuggets throughout the conversation. I need some traction. You need some traction.

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