Innovation @ Atlassian

Innovation @ Atlassian Bill Arconati - bill@atlassian.com @barconati

ATLASSIAN • 200 employees. 8 years old. 8 products. 4 countries. • JIRA - issue tracking & project mgt • Conﬂuence - enterprise wiki • 15,000 enterprise customers in 110 countries. • “Product driven” model

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” Peter Drucker

Innovation Models 1. The lone genius 2. The boss is a genius 3. Copy competitors’ inventions 4. Cluster the geniuses in a lab 5. Make your people the geniuses Scott Cook - CHI 2006

Innovation Models 1. The lone genius Atlassian 2002 2. The boss is a genius 3. Copy competitors’ inventions 4. Cluster the geniuses in a lab 5. Make your people the geniuses Scott Cook - CHI 2006

Innovation Models 1. The lone genius Atlassian 2002 2. The boss is a genius 3. Copy competitors’ inventions 4. Cluster the geniuses in a lab Atlassian 2012 5. Make your people the geniuses Scott Cook - CHI 2006

Innovation Killers • Company growth • Speciﬁcations from ‘on high’ • Date driven culture • Not enough ‘slack time’

Atlassian Activities • Fedex Day • 20% Time

Fedex Day

Fedex Day - 2004 • 24 hour one-day coding exercise • Start early AM, demos late afternoon • One goal - “Ship & deliver in 24 hours” http://blogs.atlassian.com/rebelutionary/archives/ 000495.html

Learnings • One day isn’t long enough • “Winning” needs to be de-emphasised • Get the whole company to watch demos • Didn’t work outside development • Works best with smaller team • Retrospectives are important - “What do we want to try to ship, and what’s required to get there?” • Shipping code takes much longer than you think!

20% Time

20% Time • The Google ‘myth’ Lawless innovation? • Aim: discover the realities Made up our own rules • The $1m gamble http://blogs.atlassian.com/developer/ 2008/03/20_time_experiment.html

Why? • Build innovative features • Engineers’ jobs get less fun w/ growth - further from product decisions • Product Managers aren’t perfect - ﬁll hole in the roadmap • The power of a built idea to shape thinking

How did we do?

http://blogs.atlassian.com/developer/ 2009/02/20_percent_year_in_review.html

20% Results • Filling gaps as much as ﬁnding next big thing • Hardest on tech leads! • Tracking was a contentious issue • Ended with per person, not project

Just Remember • You can start small • Failure is okay • Sometimes weird is better than useful • Build in slack time www.atlassian.com @barconati

Innovation @ Atlassian

by Atlassian on Nov 17, 2009

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

1 Embed 5

Statistics

Innovation @ Atlassian — Presentation Transcript