AI-Driven Product Innovation and Customer Experience with Sanchan Saxena at Atlassian Team ’24 Europe

This is Textron tv. Hey everybody, Mitch Ashley back here in Barcelona at Atlassian, team 24 Europe, having a great time talking with a lot of great people in Atlassian. Finding out what some of the new things that are happening that have announced the show, and just getting to know people that are kind of behind the scenes and in front of the scenes, uh, running what's happening here at, uh, Atlassian.

So I have the pleasure being joined by Sanction Ana, welcome. Uh, you're head of Workflow Management, right? Which is Confluence and Loom, correct?

That's right. Um, thank, I'm excited to be here and, uh, I lead, uh, work management, which includes products and services like Confluence, lumen Fellow. Very nice.

So you've, you've been only been a couple months with Atlassian, correct? Two And a half months. Yeah.

You've got Quite a pedigree. Coinbase, uh, Instagram, Microsoft, uh, Airbnb. You've been a, been a few to a few places and it seems like you've done done well.

Um, so what, what is it that brought you to Atlassian? What did, what are you hoping to accomplish here? I mean, as for someone like you, I would imagine you want a good challenge.

So what's that? What's that mission you're on? Atlassian is at a amazing junction where historically it has been a company that has nailed it with, uh, engineers and developers using Jira and other products.

But over the years, we've built incredible product lineup that allows us to go to business teams and help them collaborate even better. So as part of work management, we have amazing products like Confluence, which is basically a connected workspace that houses a company's most critical knowledge and thereby allows people to collaborate and get better business outcomes for their business and their teams. We have, loom is a recent acquisition that is allowing people to collaborate asynchronously and eliminate meeting burden that typically happens in any organization.

So to be at a place where we are today and to be able to 10 x that impact is very exciting and I'm excited to be here, uh, with Atlassian. You know, confluence and Jira are really the underpinnings of so much of Atlassian's technologies and not that they're the behind the scenes. They're very much front and center.

That's right. Um, talk about some of the new things that have happened with Confluence, maybe either announced at the show or recently. Yeah, we are very excited to share all the amazing stuff that we're doing with Confluence and AI today.

5 million pages a month are created in Confluence. That's a lot of knowledge that is being created, and a lot of AI is going to help you create and share that knowledge even more effectively. To give you an example, when you go to a conference page, let's, let's say you're reading an HR policy or you're reading a product strategy doc, the ai AI can come in and help you summarize what exactly the team's trying to do.

It can also help you catch up since you last visited that page. All of these things are allowing people to become more productive and use AI to drive business outcomes very effectively. You know, it seems the kind of the process of finding knowledge, understanding it, taking action with it, sometimes that knowledge is a little verbose and we need some help in ingesting and understanding what, what that page was that was written three years ago or when That's Exactly right.

Yesterday. Um, so it seems like AI is on, on the scene at the right time, at the right time. 'cause we want the headline, you know, tell us the, especially with the team graph, you know, might be 20 things on that page and only two of them I'm working on that might be more relevant to me, can even focus to better.

That's right. I mean, I'll give you my example. I joined two and a half months ago.

It was a lot of conference pages to read as an onboarding purpose. Many of our customers use conference for precisely that purpose. When a new employee joins, they help them onboard to the company's, uh, knowledge and culture.

Now, AI comes to the rescue, particularly in new employee's case, where I can use that to summarize the multiplicity of documents and the multiplicity of pages that exist and give me the key elements that matter to me. For example, you tell me, here's an action item for me. Instead of reading the whole thing, I can understand here's what I'm supposed to be doing in this project, for example, it can also translate that action item into project management interfaces.

For example, we can go directly from Confluence to Jira and actually create a ticket that you can then track over time and collaborate on it. Similarly, let's talk about Loom for example. Confluence and Loom are very deeply integrated now.

So when you go to a page, you can actually see a recording of the summary of that page very easily. And if you wanna res respond to that, you can record a loom right from there through a click of a button and be able to engage with your team through video communication as well. So these are all things that will make employees more productive, especially the newly onboarded employees like myself at Atlassian and others, and will also allow people to collaborate more efficiently.

You think about it, it's not just a URL to YouTube, it's a video that's been, you know, trans translated or translated, um, the transcribed, and then that's part of the knowledge base now too. So it's a searchable or consumable, not just by watching the video, but also searching it, finding it, summarizing it. That's right.

And watching it. That's right. And I'll give you some specific examples.

Uh, we are seeing a lot of traction about with Loom, with sales teams. And an example of that would be sales teams do a lot of outbound communication to the potential customers, and they record videos and record, send out emails with a recorded video, but it's pretty unscalable. You have to record that every time with every customer.

What Loom AI does, it allows you to record once, but then be able to personalize that video. Like you will personalize an email for the respective customer. And that speeds up the process for salespeople to do the outreach with their customers very effectively.

Shocking salespeople like to see themselves on video. What, what? That's right.

You know, there's gambling going on here. No, wait, just kidding. I work with a lot of salespeople and what, what you said is really important because it's not, okay, this is the 20th, same video I've recorded with a different name at the front of it.

You might wanna customize what you're saying, what you're kind of starting the conversation with, Hey, I know that this is a big project on your area. There's some information about whatever, and I wanna follow up. And that could be different for the next next customer.

I know you're not familiar with this, but here's, here's the two minute version of what you should know or what, whatever that intro is. That's exactly right. And what that allows you to do is scale your pro work very rapidly using the power of video.

And there's a personal touch on video as well. You're talking to a human on the other side, not seeing a long email come across. So we're seeing a tremendous adoption there.

Another, uh, example that I can talk about is how people are using Loom and Loom AI to then transform whatever they're doing into actionable items. So let me give you a perfect example. What people are doing is they're recording a video on Loom and then using Loom AI to then create a document or standardized on the, uh, workflow management that they're trying to do using AI very easily.

So it'll record a video, the AI will then transcribe it into a page or a Jira ticket, and the knowledge is preserved end to end and shared with different team members around the organization. So Lumia comes to your rescue where you can do this once, but then have it scaled within your organization even more effectively. Interesting.

So one of the questions I would have if I was coming into a role like yours coming into Atlassian, one of the things I'd wanna know is how do you coordinate all these products, product releases? Because they're not standalone products, right? I mean, they are products, but they're all, they have services that they all share.

You know, you want things to be consistent across products. Have you, have you learned anything about how that works yet? Or are you still kind of uncovering how that happens?

No, it's a, it's a, I've learned a lot about it and I think there's a method to that magic, so to say. So we start the, at the top most talking about what is it that the customers will, what is it that'll enhance the customer's experience? I'll give you an example.

If you go to Loom and Jira, we don't want customers to relearn every tool every time they use it. We wanna build consistent design patterns. So when you go from one product to the other, familiarity is there.

So that's one big initiative that we drive. The other is deeply connected together, so we don't want you to think, oh, I got a copy, something from Confluence into Jira and vice versa. We want these for us to be talking to each other in a very deeply integrated way.

So give you an example. Loom is directly integrated in every Confluence page. So you don't have to go to another website or another tool to do your job.

You can do it right where you are. Similarly, confluence and Jira are very deeply integrated. So when you're working in Jira, when you're working in Confluence with a click of a button, you can create that information or a task inside of Jira, right from Confluence.

So that's a, we call it connective glue if you may, you know, that allows customers to go from one tool to the other very efficiently. Last but not the least, we also have the platform where we actually componentize a bunch of the technology that allows us to then build all of these products using the power of platform. The teamwork graph that you were talking about is a platform as part of Atlassian, and it allows every product to then plug into the teamwork graph very easily and make it easy for our customers to do their job.

Interesting. One, one word I would describe Atlassian is intentional. Everything you do is there's a reason for it.

So, so speaking of intention, as you think about taking Confluence to the broader audience across an enterprise, what are some of the things you think, um, needs to happen? Might be a feature of the tool might be just new, new use cases or whatever it might be. What has to happen to help Confluence embrace more people in their work?

Yeah. Our vision is that Confluence is a connected workspace for all teams in our organization. Whether you're in sales or HR or marketing or engineering, you should be able to collaborate over there.

And part of the, uh, part of the puzzle is for us to then educate these teams that the tools that we have built are actually the best in class for them. And that's what we are on a journey on. We want to do demonstrated value to marketing, to sales, to hr, so that they can see the impact these tools will have on a day-to-day basis.

So that's the number one priority we have, which is to expand in the enterprise and make sure that every team sees value in the parts that we are building and speaks the language that appeals to them. So when you're in marketing, when you start in Confluence, we want you to start with marketing templates and be able to do your job very effectively. When you're in hr, you come to Confluence, we want you to have the right tools and templates available to you, which are relevant to the HR team members as well.

And we believe by doing that, we'll reduce the friction of adoption that is in, is in the customer's mind and get them started very quickly. It's important you don't, you don't want them saying, oh, this is an IT tool. This isn't a marketing tool.

It has to come across, use the language, solve the problems. That's right. Marketing or HR or sales teams need to solve.

That's right. That takes a lot of domain knowledge of what those people, the work they do. How, how do you, how do you get that, get that domain knowledge from your customers?

Yeah, great question. I think we have multiple channels in which we, uh, focus on, but the overriding principle is we work backwards from our customer's needs. We're not building technology for the sake of building technology.

We are building it because the customer has told us they have a problem and we believe we can build a solution for them and their problem in the most effective way. So we have Mel multiple channels, we do a lot of user research where we talk to our customers and the employees of those customers to say, what are the jobs that you're trying to accomplish? What are the friction points in it?

How can confluence, JIRA, loom and others fit into that to build your workflow that makes your life easier? We also have sales counterparts that we work with to go to these enterprise accounts and sit down with them and do shadow, like shadow them along to say, okay, what are they trying to do? Where are they running into fixture in our products?

And we methodically then go back with a list of learnings and try to solve them very quickly. So customer obsession is the key word along with intentionality that you mentioned. Interesting.

So a question I ask almost every new exec executive in a new role in a company is, what's the one thing you've found that you were pleasantly surprised you didn't expect to find since you've come to Atlassian? I think the customer love is phenomenal As you walk around these booths and see what the customers are excited about, I was at the Trello booth earlier and people just love what Trello has done, uh, for their day to day. So the love that Atlassian has about its products from their customers and partner is very unique and we want to continue to develop that and continue to foster that love with our products.

So that's a surprising but a expected thing for a successful company like Atlassian, and we want to continue to deliver on that promise. That's something money can't buy, it's customer love. For sure.

Right. There you go. Yeah.

Okay, good. Well, sanction, we issue the best in your new role and, uh, look forward to seeing great things from Confluence just like we have in the past as you, uh, take it further into the organization. So good luck to you.

Thank you. You Bet. All right.

We'll be back with more great interviews with really smart people doing great things. Atlassian. We'll be back in a few.