The Importance of Strategy and Agility with Bree Davies at Atlassian Team ’24 Europe

This is Textron tv. Hi, I'm Mitch Ashley in Barcelona, Atlassian, team 24 Europe. We're, we're gonna talk strategy and agility and planning and how to kind of align things in the organization.

I'm joined by, uh, Bree Davies. Well, good to be talking with you. Thank you.

You are senior group product manager of Enterprise Strategy and Agility. Is that right? Uh, enterprise strategy and Planning.

Yes. And plan. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. There's some title changes just happened.

Yes, yes. This announcement, so we've Made by yourself. Uh, so I am Australian as you'll be able to tell by the accent.

Um, I have been at Atlassian eight years. Uh, I worked in Jira Cloud for a very long time. Um, have been intrigued by enterprise customers, uh, and have built some fantastic relationships with many of our enterprise customers, uh, since I shifted to work within Jira Align at the start of this calendar year, which also involved a shift from Australia to the US with my young family, which has been really fun.

That's like a lot of fun. Great. Yeah.

Great. Well, congratulations on the move. Thank You.

Good. Well, tell us about Focus. That was the big announcement.

So excited about Focus. It's something that we have been working on for a really long time. Uh, really since we acquired Agile Craft, um, which is now Jira Align.

We've learned so much about working with different enterprise customers, and of course, even ourselves as Atlassian has scaled and grown quite significantly over the years. So one of the things that we've learned is there's, when you have this strategic alignment, uh, especially from the tops down, but of course, you know, there's a, a bottoms up element to it as well. It makes what are the goals that we're trying to achieve?

How do we prioritize work? How do we organize ourselves to get there? It makes those conversations, uh, so much more clarifying.

And then the pace at which you're able to make decisions is generally so much faster because that you have that clarity around what should we be doing and why are we doing it? Uh, why is this important for our business and our customers? So, and we've heard this time and time again, all organizations are doing this.

Often they're doing this planning in a PowerPoint deck or, uh, in some kind of document, which can be Excel or something. Yeah, exactly. In Excel.

Um, which is often, uh, very quickly becomes stale because we all know every company is a living, breathing organism and is changing all the time. And then it's really hard to find this information, uh, especially for people as they're trying to remember in the context of their day-to-Day work. Like why does this matter?

Uh, and even in the, through all of the team anywhere, research, obviously we've been doing that for some time now. All of these problems around, well, not problems, but, you know, friction and confusion for people around why does my work matter? So being able to have this clarity somewhere where everybody can access it, it's up to date, and then able to kind of bring that context into their day-to-Day work, it's just really powerful for moving an organization forward.

So, great. One of many reasons. We're very excited about it.

Yeah. So how does focus work? What does, how does, how do you use it for strategy?

Yeah. So we have, so we have our Atlassian system of work, the philosophy, which is underpinned by the teamwork graph, which is really how the system of work comes to life. So how, as part of a, uh, one of the new nouns, we call them all of these different nodes.

In the teamwork graph, we've introduced a new concept which we call focus areas. And this is the, uh, the noun or, or the object that we've created, which allows you to model your organizational strategy. So this is the, really, the focus areas are the foundational focus, uh, because it allows you to create a focus area hierarchy, because of course, there's all kinds of different levels of your, uh, strategy.

And then for each level of, of your strategy, of course, you can have multiple focus areas. And then the way that we define a focus area is this high level strategic grouping of the goals work teams and funds needed to bring that strategy to life. So when we are, you know, speaking with, you know, obviously so many customers this week having made, you know, our exciting announcement, it's how can you think about the strategy that you know, you already have in the PowerPoint deck or the Excel document, or wherever it exists today, model that within, focus through the lens of these focus areas and start to bring that information together.

And then, uh, the aha moment is that, oh, wow, we've got this visibility, um, which we know is so powerful for the all of the alignment, um, benefits that I spoke about before. So yeah, first things first is bringing your strategy across, modeling it as focus areas, and then being able to bring in all of this powerful data across our, from across Atlassian portfolio, JIRA Align, as well as Jira for work data. Um, and then, uh, derive, you know, some really powerful insights.

But yeah, most importantly, visibility. That's always been the challenge with goals and planning is mm-Hmm. You know, cascades down.

Yes. It's difficult to cascade back up, how does what I'm doing Yes. Help achieve that big goal or that strategy.

Yep. And it seems like those are the dots you're connecting with Align, and then focus, so literally through the team graph, through the work you're doing, through the goals and measurements, the OKRs could say, okay, well that's why this work is important. Or, or maybe it's not.

Maybe I should ask, what if I should be doing that instead of something else? Yes, exactly. And I think a lot of organizations, uh, it can be very easy to, uh, not really over index, but you know, the, the strategy will often come from the top down.

Uh, and then we know it's so important for individual motivation as humans, you know, we understand this, you need to know like, why does my work matter? And also, exactly as you say, if you know, you have this n******g feeling that maybe there is something that you can see that you know is more important, like, should we be spending our time on this? Or should we be spending it somewhere else?

So we hope that it's the catalyst for some really powerful conversations in inside of an organization because of the connections that will be able to visualize and also for, you know, leaders all across an organization to be able to understand what are the work and goals that perhaps are being prioritized, where there also is no strategic connection. So should we be investing in this or are we, when we think about, you know, the balance of the investment decisions that we wanna make across all of our different strategies, have we kind of, is the reality of where we wanted to weight our investment? Is that kind of what's actually showing up?

So that's, um, with, with the teamwork graph. And, you know, by being able to bring all of this really powerful information together, these are the, uh, sorts of insights that we, um, will be able to bring to our enterprise customers. Great.

And lastly, kinda leans into tech or organizations tech, tech savvy maybe is the right word. Yeah. Um, how do you kinda break into that strategy planning process Mm-Hmm.

That, that weren't, that wasn't the origins of Jira and Confluence, but today of course you're doing that. How do you get into those conversations and help them use focus? Yeah, it's a great question.

We find that, uh, it was really, I guess a lot of it goes back to what we were talking about just before, where leaders across an organization are really trying to understand at scale, what is the work that's happening and is it the work that we expected to do? And so then there's a interesting immediate, you know, next question that you can ask where it's, well, what is the work that you're expected to do? What's important?

What are your priorities? And, and how do you know if you're on track to, um, uh, to achieve them? So it's often through these kinds of conversations, and obviously with Jira Align over the years, we've been able to, you know, deliver visibility at scale and really start so many of these conversations.

And now, exactly as you were saying before, with, uh, parts of the organization or technology, technologically driven organizations, even the technology part of that organization, you know, they're having this success through Jira Align of being able to see their work at scale and start to have some of these conversations. And then other parts of the organization as well are, we're hearing all the time. They're like, I went in on that too.

Like, and it's the, it's the nature of work too. You know, teams are cross-functional, like we vehemently believe that, and you have better outcomes when an organization is able to have as mu as many cross-functional conversations as possible. So again, when we're speaking with our customers, and we're speaking with, you know, our, our Jira line champions and our portfolio managers, and, um, all of the customers who we work with at this level, and they're, they're trying to answer these questions around what is most important, and then also how do we bring the rest of the organization along with us and through the lens of what unites us as an organization is our strategic priorities.

It's at the highest level. So this is kind of where the conversation's starting, which is yeah, really exciting. Interesting.

You know, it's just that we're talking about, it's hard to see line of sight between my work and the strategy as an executive. Oftentimes you're in the place of, well, we have, we have strategies and goals and measures Mm-Hmm. But is the work happening Is that, is that, are we really making progress towards that?

Yeah. We have to do QBR or other things to try to get a sense of what's happening. It seems like through both focus and then through align Mm-Hmm.

You can really start to see the data shows. Yep. What work is happening that moves you towards the goals, the OKRs, the strategies, That's exactly it.

Essentially Connecting the dots both ways. Yep. That'd be a pretty unique position to be in.

I know, I think every executive would love to have that every CEO, every strategy chief strategy officer would. Yeah. The thing, uh, the, the question or pain point we hear about most often is, uh, when I come into work in the morning, like, help me find the needle in the haystack.

Like, what do I need to pay attention to? Uh, as an executive, obviously there is so much happening across the business. There is, you know, finite time and, you know, of course, organizations look to their leaders to help with decision making and prioritization, trade offs, but sometimes the, with the, the noise of everything that's happening, it can be really hard for a leader to say, well, oh, this is where I know that I need to, to jump in and support a team with a trade off or some kind of risk mitigation or help make a decision faster.

So ultimately, that's one of the, uh, other big pain points that we really hope, um, and we believe we're going to be able to address, is to help with that signal to noise problem for executives to give them that with the kind of underlying power of the platform. And all of this data we'll be able to bring together, of course, leveraging AI over the top to help really draw attention to the, this is where, as an executive, you should focus most of your time because this is a particular strategy that may not be trending well, for reasons that, you know, we can quickly summarize from you, from all of this data that we've, um, been able to aggregate from across our various parts of our portfolio, You would always pick the right actions to take. Yep.

They may not have be achieving it. You've gotta change. Yes.

You know, it's, it's ironic. It seems like we're in a world where everything is in constant motion, but we rely on the save button of a PowerPoint or an Excel document for planning. Yeah.

It's already outta date. By the time we hit save, it's gotta be a, a living kind of breathing. We say we living breathing document, but it is, yes.

It's, it's static thing. Yep. If it's part of the work and part of the kind of DNA or the con the content of the organization, you can connect the dots to see what's happening with it.

Yeah. That's a really radical concept. And so if you think about it compared to the static way we, we plan today.

Yeah, absolutely. And one of the ways which, like we use extensively in Atlassian, there's, there's two things, um, but smart links, which is a very, very kind of simple proposition really. You know, you take a, a work item or a page and you know, you can embed them all around our portfolio, but it's live.

So you are able to get the information you need or just enough, uh, with, you know, some a say for a, a Jira issue, um, or a Jira line work item. You know, you can grab the title, the status, the owner. So as you're bringing together often, you know, rich, qualitative contextual information, you have really got this living and breathing artifact, um, from all across the Atlassian portfolio.

So one of the, um, particular experiences that we're developing and um, we, we showed in the keynote and in our super session yesterday is this, uh, your, uh, your focus area map, which is this visualization that shows you all of the strategic connections of all of your priorities, the goals that are connected to those priorities. And, you know, this can be embedded straight into Confluence, and it's all real time. So as something's changing elsewhere in the system, you may be using this to prepare for a QBR.

Uh, you don't have to, it, it's, it's right there. And yeah, living and breathing with you. So it's, it's a, it like, it's a relatively simple capability, but really exceptionally powerful Combined, just simple as hard.

Right. Simple is powerful. Exactly.

Well, you just launched focus, so I don't wanna get ahead of ourselves. Congratulations on launching Focus. What are the, what are the things that you're thinking about kind of working on Next?

Yeah. Customers. Oh, so much.

There's, uh, there's so much. We'll, uh, we, we are already using focus to, uh, plan our next set of priorities, um, as you can imagine. Um, so, you know, obviously we are always reacting to feedback that we are receiving, both from our internal use of focus, um, and then some of the, uh, early access, uh, customers who we've, uh, been really, really lucky to work very, very closely with.

Um, there's a few areas in particular that we're very excited about. Um, the first is obviously ai, um, you know, some of the potential with rvo and automation to really help with this signal to noise problem, you know, as a leader, help me know, you know, when something's off track or, and then help me quickly interrogate to understand why, so I've got enough context or surface that context to me. So we'll be, you know, exploring all of these things, um, very deeply.

Um, and then also on the data side and the data visualization side. So, you know, obviously we have Atlassian Analytics, which is really powerful. We can use ai, you know, over the top of that to help, you know, got all these amazing charts.

But what does it mean? How do I make sense of it quickly? Um, especially at enterprise scale, um, those sorts of experiences.

Uh, we're going to be investing and exploring where we already are, kind of quite far into our explorations there. Uh, but making sure that we are providing the right insight at the right time. I think it sounds a little cliched, like we say this, the right insight in the right context at the right time, but we know for leaders and executives kind of getting this right, um, is so important.

Um, so that's certainly, uh, that's certainly top of mind. Uh, and then there's some really interesting, uh, ideas that we're exploring around, uh, helping executives to make trade-off decisions, which is kind of the day-to-Day reality of generally, you know, there is some part of your company, generally the people, your resources, which is relatively finite, of course, the budgets are relatively finite and you're trying to make decisions, what should we prioritize next? How is this going?

Should we bring something else in? So using all of the data that we've got, um, through our systems now, being able to do that in a, um, in a, in a, in a powerful, but obviously like more executive friendly way. Um, really excited to bring these capabilities to life.

Very good. Well, congratulations, B Brie. Thank you.

Uh, the, uh, the launch and the, the move to the US Recently. Thank you very much To California. So the qui, uh, talking with Brie today, now you get a kind of a sense of a picture of why VOCA is so important and how that plays a role in the ecosystem of Atlassian technologies and, and helping organizations really connect the dots all directions.

So thanks again for sharing with us. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

You bet. We'll be back in a minute.