Jira Service Management with Shihab Hamid at Atlassian’s Team ’24

This is Textron tv. Hi, everybody. Mitch Ashley here in Barcelona, Atlassian, team 24 Europe.

It's, it's been a fantastic week so far. A lot of great announcements with Atlassian. And of course Atlassian covers the spectrum now from strategy with focus, uh, to software development, ai, and of course service management.

So we're gonna talk about service management, which we haven't done a lot yet. And I have the pleasure of being joined by, joined by Shihab Hamid, who is product manager, or head of product, I should say, with, uh, JIRA Service Management. Welcome.

Thank you. Nice to be here. Thanks For flying all the way half across the globe.

Meet with us in Barcelona. Yeah, Sydney. It's quite a trip, but yeah.

Happy to be here. Good, good. Well, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're responsible for at, at, uh, Atlassian.

Yeah, so, uh, I look after, uh, the Jira service management product and the Jira service management product is kind of split up into three key pillars. One is around, uh, self-service and enterprise service management. Uh, taking the concept of service beyond IT to all teams.

We have another pillar that goes deep into IT, operations, uh, making it easy for teams to, uh, build and run software. Um, and then we've got another pillar looking at enterprise and scaling service management. All That sounds like the harder one.

Not that the other two aren't hard. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, when you scale something enterprise wide that always bring special, special requirements Yeah, Absolute.

It's hard to Do that. Absolutely, because we see a lot of, uh, uh, organizations try to standardize on practices, and some of them more forward thinking organizations, really think about the employee experience, um, not just every team building their own thing, but what does it mean for the entire organization to have a unified front door to getting help and seeking, uh, service. Well, tell us, um, for people who don't know what kind of ITSM is, maybe they don't live in the operational world kind, you kind of position, how much does, uh, Atlassian cover of the spectrum of ITSM?

Yeah, The ITSM is definitely a big domain. Um, uh, the areas that we specialize in, uh, around, uh, core service management. So basically creating tracking requests, uh, helping deal with that frontline support all the way through to IT operations, which is all about, uh, making sure that you can build and run services, some that you might be, uh, responsible for running and some that you might be responsible for building and then iterating on.

And so everything from oncall management to incidents, uh, alerts, uh, change management, um, through the whole spectrum of itil. Um, and then on the other side, taking that concept of service management, uh, wall to wall in organization. So we often see, uh, organizations start with it and then expand to hr, service management, facilities, finance, um, and then there's a long tail of, uh, teams looking to kind of model their work as a service.

Yeah. Very nice. Well, let's talk about what's some of the news around, uh, JIRA service management?

Yeah. Um, so one of the, uh, exciting things that we've got around service management today is basically, uh, you know, with the wave of ai, um, we've seen a lot of customers take up, uh, the virtual service agent. So the ability to really scale up your team by providing, uh, instant answers, instant actions, uh, eliminating a lot of the, uh, the basic requests that come into a service desk.

Um, so we've got a lot of innovation there. Some of the exciting things that we've got is the ability to, um, take the virtual service agent and plug it into a variety of different channels. So whether your customers are reaching out to you in, you know, uh, an instant messaging tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams, or you, you might wanna embed it on your intranet or on your corporate website, but have the power of all of these channels connect to the same robust AI engine that can, uh, instantly deliver answers and, uh, fulfill requests.

So that's on the front end when it comes to employee self-service. But we know that, you know, with ai, we're gonna see lots and lots of things solved with self-service, right? But, you know, for the more complex requests you're gonna need to get your team involved.

And so we've invested, um, a, a bunch in, um, making sure that your teams have the right tools to really scale up. And so that's where, uh, robo comes in for us, where we've got the ability to have a virtual teammate, um, that can, uh, really easily act like, um, a member of your team and help you on tickets as they come in. So things like, um, you know, making sure that you can ask questions about a particular ticket.

Like if someone's, uh, fried their laptop, you don't wanna ask the same question over and over again. You can actually ask the virtual teammate and they can scan through, uh, all of the conversations so far. So we've seen tickets bounce around, uh, between a lot of, uh, you know, different agents around different time zones where in Barcelona, but you know, if a ticket gets handed over to someone in Sydney, you wanna make sure that they can get up to speed, and we can use the power of AI to generate, uh, rapid summaries.

We can use the power of AI to pulling the right people at the right time. You don't have to, I don't have to answer the same questions three times each time Yeah. To get you hand Off, right?

Yeah. We all know what that's like. Yeah, Sure.

Exactly. You know, part of, at an enterprise scale, it is that handoff, it's that process that's behind it. Maybe you're escalating it to someone who specifically can help, uh, a customer, or it may be just a process that has to be kicked off.

And one of the things I've learned about the, the Atlassian approach to AI is those agents actually are kind of treated as users within, within Atlassian. In other words, they can be assigned work. Yeah.

They can respond to information. And so I might hand it off actually to an agent or vice versa is Yeah. Is That true?

Yeah, absolutely. And so, um, I guess the difference between, um, the team working on it versus an agent working on it is they've got, uh, the connection to the entire teamwork graph. So they have complete visibility on what went on, not just on that particular ticket, but if there were previous, uh, cases that had, uh, similar, uh, problems or similar challenges, it can actually troll through all of your past case history and recommend a tailored action plan just for you.

In some cases, if it's very confident it can run that action plan, in other cases it might present that plan to you. So you could quickly look over the draft and go, yeah, that looks about right. Or you can tweak it, uh, before the response gets sent back to the customer.

What's the, what's the response been by customers that's using Jira service management? Are they anxious to try a AI or A little bit? I mean, we're all, yeah, bit apprehensive, right?

What does it mean for our work and how's it gonna change our work? And the idea of AI as a teammate, not a replacement. Yeah, absolutely.

We're, we're seeing a lot of good traction so far. So a lot of customers are like willing to dabble and see whether they, they can get a lot of value. Um, we've seen a lot of customers excited about getting rid of that low value, um, you know, kind of annoying work that you just have to do, but there's, um, a lot of volume in that work.

And so, you know, when it comes to level one support, no one wants to be the person that says, have you tried turning it on and off again? Um, but those are the things that we can really automate away. So we give time back to the team to work on higher value work, and that's something that everyone's excited about.

Very nice. Very nice. Um, any, any other announcements about Jira service management happen?

Yeah, yeah. So we've got, um, uh, a real huge focus on that employee experience. So we're making it possible for teams to really customize and tailor, um, the, uh, the help center that we've got on the portal.

Um, we've also got a lot of innovation in, uh, AI operations. So on the other side, for teams that are building and running and managing services, being able to deal with a lot of, uh, alerts. So one of the things that we see teams get overwhelmed by is basically just alerts coming from every which way, but it might only be one underlying problem that's causing that, uh, uh, you know, that explosion of alerts.

And so we've invested in building out AI solutions that can group and cluster alerts together and present them into a, uh, an underlying, probably an incident. And then we make it very easy for someone to go through that incident with a team pulling the right people, the right experts, and all the way through to basically codifying best practice with ai. So we're using the power of AI to help generate, uh, post-incident responses.

You know, it's not something that everyone loves to do, but if we can encode, uh, that best practice into the tool and into the flow and make it easy by pulling in the right information and right. People, we're seeing a lot of good, uh, excitement around that One less, uh, incident response report to, sorry, Fill out, right? Yeah, absolutely.

That's nice. Yeah. Yeah.

And, and what we've seen from teams is, um, the more we can help them get onto the best practices, the easier it is for them, because fundamentally, all of that data exists, right? And you don't wanna spend your time searching and trolling through and connecting all that data, like your system should be able to do that. And because we've got the power of the Atlassian teamwork graph, we know how work moves forward right down to the data level, you know, across products, across teams.

Um, and that's why we can make those recommendations and connections on the fly. Yeah, it's, it's a really important point. 'cause if you really think about what a lot of that information that we're inputting into systems to track, it's really going back and looking at what, what, what system was that?

What were they doing? What was the problem reported? Trying to assemble that all into one kind of status or result or whatever the actions were.

That's what that data's all there. It should be easy to pull it together for you. Yeah, absolutely.

And, uh, that's one of the things that our, our customers are really excited about because we've got all of that information in our systems, we can actually start to do some creative things with it to really empower teams and not just have, you know, a nice shiny button somewhere. Like it's actually making a difference. Very nice.

Um, any sessions that you've spoken at or, or you have coming up? Yeah. Yeah.

So, uh, yesterday, uh, I had the opportunity to speak, uh, about hr. So we had our, uh, chief people Officer talk about how we are doing HR service management in Atlassian, and I talked about some of the, uh, innovations we've got in Jira service management just to help teams get started. So one of the cool things that we've got, uh, inside Jira service management is the idea of AI process templates.

Like you can't really expect a product to have templates for every single use case out there, but I think we've cracked a nut by combining the power of generative AI with these templates. So you could very easily write a short phrase or describe, um, your team in a sentence like, um, I'm on the employee relations team. Um, what do I need to get set up?

And it can recommend the right, uh, processes for you. You can recommend the right request types, the right fields so you can, you know, really hit the ground running, um, regardless of what team you're on. And so we're really excited about it, What extra work when you have to build out all the templates for what your specific job is, versus I can pull that down A hundred percent immediately.

Yeah. And we found a lot of the teams, um, want to get started with the best practice defaults and then tweak it to make it their own. And that's one of the successes of Jira service management internally.

We call that like autonomy with alignment. So you have the ability to, you know, really experiment and go your own and then align with a, a, a central, uh, organization. Great.

Great. Um, what are the next six, 12 months look like for you? What kind of things are you focusing on?

Yeah, We're really excited about the possibility of, um, you know, bringing AI and teams closer and closer together. And so that's, uh, a world that we're definitely investing in. Um, and we're excited to see what, uh, our customers come up with when it comes to these agents, right?

Like, there's some that we've got internally, some that we're really excited about, and we've seen a lot of, um, you know, non-developers, like non-technical users really create, uh, these agents and come up with creative solutions that we didn't even think of. And so I think that's what I'm really excited about, to see where this goes. It's pretty amazing.

Watch the natural language, just typing out, create an agent that does this and then takes this action, or Yeah, this is what you wanted me to do. A way to do it. Wow.

Exactly. And I, I guess the thing that's really exciting right now is that it's kind of interactive and we're seeing the worlds collide, where, you know, previously it would all just be like business process automation. It'd be a black box, but something gets triggered and it's kind of like doing its own thing.

But that collaboration between the system and the teams is what, uh, I think will be a new generation of interaction. Great. Well, Shiha, it was great talking with you and, uh, congrats on a good session yesterday and all the new announcements for J to service management.

Awesome. Thanks. Forward to great things.

Thank you for having me. You Bet. Thanks to, uh, Shiha for being here with us.

We're back with, uh, more great interviews here from Atlassian, team 24 Europe.