Lessons from Atlassian | Megan Cook (Head of Product, Jira)

Where I dropped the ball was more about what I should have realized about that feature. So automation, it's super useful. It can be used by a whole slew of people who aren't just developers. It could be used in every single product. It's more than just moving things to a new status. And so I should have realized that we could have built this amazing service that every product could have moved themselves forward with.

When I see a new idea, I'm always asking myself, 'How do we push this further? Is there something there that we can 10X? Can we apply it more broadly to more types of users, more products? Is there some bigger opportunity that we can really take advantage of?'

The opposite of play is fear. And I realized I think that's what I was seeing a lot of in my team and that's why the ideas were getting more incremental.

We constructed the roadmap so that we found this sort of a low cost, very cheap way to have some impactful change early on. I think that was really, really important. And so we put together just some of the designs for what the experiences were going to look like.

We changed that to create really small groups with stage gates that we call wonder, explore, make, impact, and then getting to scale. And that meant to assess those bets at every stage. And the idea was to iterate really quickly, either to it not working out and proving that it couldn't be a business or iterate really quickly to yes it could and we should invest more in this.