Post #1. The Introduction.

I’m excited today to be kicking off our new Atlassian Product Management blog. As a product team, we try to be open, honest and have a thirst for learning. We’ve created this blog to do just that but on a larger scale by bringing together a community of people who are passionate about making amazing products. Atlassian’s mission is to unleash the potential in every team so our hope is that we can mutually learn from one another to make all our teams and products better.

Our products — Jira, Trello, Confluence, OpsGenie, Bitbucket, and more — help power the work behind over 125,000 companies. Behind those products are over 120 product managers who help our vision come to life. My teammates are ready and excited to share their stories, and we really hope you are too.

Why another product management blog?

We’ve actually been blogging about product insights, learnings, mess-ups for over a decade inside our company using Confluence. We’ve also been learning a ton from other product managers and technology teams across the globe as they depend on our tools daily to build great products. We’ve benefited greatly from being at the epicenter of the agile and digital transformation waves and want to share for the benefit of all. Hence, this blog.

What kind of stuff will we write about?

First and foremost, this is a safe place for people who love making products. Craftspeople. Folks who tend to be doers, dreamers, optimists, open, courageous, and who are “proud to ship”. But it’s not just for folks with Product Manager in their title. We want designers, engineers, program managers, project managers, marketers, students, and everyone in between to come play too.

We will: Mostly focus on insights from building products. We often use the metaphor that your products are your ships and can only be as good as the shipyard that builds them. We’ll peek into different product shipyards to try to understand the people and practices that make them hum (or not).

We wont: Sales pitch you to use our products. We love our products and we’d really love to have you as a customer, but that’s not the focus of this blog. We’ll likely mention or talk about our tools as we share best practices but no sales job.

Most of the content will be written by Atlassian Product Managers who span across four continents, have different levels of tenure, and come from a diverse set of backgrounds. Some have built up Atlassian from the earliest days and others have joined from other product teams like LinkedIn, VMWare, Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, and startups.

We’ll also be sure to share a thought or two from our founders who started the Atlassian party 17 years ago. They’re still at the center of the work we do and continue to set the fashion standards for our company with Mike’s baseball caps and Scott’s glorious t-shirt collection (I ❤️his Mickey Mouse and Pink Floyd tees).

Want to partake?
It’s simple, start by following this blog and join the journey! Together we’ll pave the path that this blog takes. Is there a topic you are interested in learning more about? Do you have an amazing story that would make for a great guest post? Let us know! We’re all 👀s and ears.

Best,
Joff & the Atlassian Product Team