Innovative Work Management with Erika Trautman at Atlassian Team ’24

This is techron tv. Hi everybody. Mitch Ashley here at Atlassian, team 24 Las Vegas, Nevada.

You know, a system of work talking about workflow and not just in it across the organization, uh, is a big topic of conversation. A lot of announcements around that. And I have the pleasure being joined by Erica Troutman.

Welcome. Good to be chatting with you. Thank You for having me.

Great to, great to be here. Good to have you. So you have a great, you have a, you're kind of in the smack in the middle of this whole topic.

Uh, tell us folks about what you do, and then let's dive in. I Head up the, uh, the work management product team at Atlassian. So I've got three products in my portfolio that's Confluence, loom, and Trello.

And we really think a lot about how do we enable work from conceptualization and ideation into the work itself, and then transformation out of the work to alignment reporting goals. So I think about it as sort of the, you know, the work life cycle. Mm-Hmm.

That's not, um, I have this task and I automate this, and now IT app, I mean, that's much more putting the whole context and the whole flow of the people part of it, not just the action. Yeah. Uh, yeah.

I mean, so we can get right into, uh, we can get right into some of the announcements that we're making. I'd love to hear that, because I think they, if you think about, um, the lifecycle of work, what's the first thing that has to happen? You have to have an idea.

True. Uh, and often idea generation is the collaborative game. So, uh, Atlassian launched whiteboards to Confluence this year, so that's now generally available.

And what I'm really excited about is the ways in which Atlassian whiteboards are gonna completely transform that first phase of work. So, um, think back to the last time you had to do an in-person brainstorm session. What was that like?

Um, we're all trying to, like, how do we communicate our ideas? Like how do we get some things on the board, or if you will, to talk About, did you maybe have a moderator who was like, here's five stickies and you got two minutes. Go And, and, uh, you know, the, the, the markers for the stickies.

Yep. Yes. That's exactly what we did.

And we did the context diagram or whatever it was, and sort 'em all around and Yeah. These things bubble up to The top, and then you had like 14 photos on your phone of the whiteboard and someone had to, Or you take those back and stick 'em up. Yeah.

Or you take it back Exactly. And then you never look at 'em again. Exactly.

Right. So the way that we're changing that is by bringing AI into the digital whiteboard experience. The AI connects to Atlassian's platform, the teamwork graph.

So you can ask it questions like, you could say, what are our customers saying about this problem? Atlassian intelligence will look at your, uh, your product ideas in Jira product discovery, your customer call notes, and Confluence customer support tickets in Jira service management, and help seed that brainstorm for you. Hmm.

You'll be able to easily see where that information came from, and it helps kickstart that whole process. So, So it's not all done in isolation from everything else, the organization, right. It was on this one piece of paper or digital whiteboard.

Right. It instantly collects all the context across your entire company to help give you some starting nuggets. So then from there, hopefully that makes the brainstorming that much more fruitful.

Ideas are flowing, everybody's having, um, a great time. The next step then is turning that into work. So we've made it really easy.

One click to take ideas in the whiteboard and turn those into tasks in Jira. Mm-Hmm. Create relationships, assign it to the right people.

If that brainstorm should become, say, a launch plan or documentation, you can select a portion of that whiteboard and AI will convert it into a confluence page for you. Mm. So the idea is that you can go from ideation straight into execution without losing any of that context and not having to waste any time.

I was just gonna ask you about that, because there's sort of, you leave the room, right? The old, the traditional way you leave the room and you suddenly lose momentum. Yeah.

Right. Everybody goes back to their world of whatever context things that they're working on. So putting that into, you know, in a part of an overall platform with, with Atlassian and into Jira, how does that keep the flow going?

How does that kind of keep people engaged? So it's part of their work when they go back to whatever their virtual or home or in office desks? I think that the momentum that comes from when you're in that moment of ideation, you're doing it so that you can turn that into work.

What al what always happens, right? You have, you have an offsite, you do the brainstorm, and then like, it's gotta be someone's job to keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing, get it going. If that, if if that's connected from that moment, um, then, then that momentum carries forward.

So we think that that'll be, um, we think it'll help teams accelerate reduce, you know, reduce the busy work, reduce the overhead, hopefully have more fun. Yeah. That would be, It's always cool.

The action item phase of the meeting is always the last three sec seconds. Right? Everybody's red headed out the door picking.

Yeah. Right. Who's gonna do this?

Your name a lot. Yeah. Don't Go lead yet.

Yeah. Um, I, I was thinking too about, and we're, we're a Trello user at, at our company, and we like the visual workflow, you know, very much kind of Yeah. Old sticky idea of it in a modern form.

How does that fit into this world of ideation and work and that part of it? What's so interesting is how most of our customers who, who use Trello and man, people love Trello. My husband loves Trello.

He loves that he has a direct line to get Trello feedback to the Trello team. Um, what, what we see with our Trello customers is that they use Trello as a way to, I would say, organize their personal work productivity. So if you think about your workday, you know, in the morning you, I'll talk about my workday.

I can't speak about your workday in the morning. I maybe have to review strategy documents and get prepared to do some product reviews. And then in the middle of the day, I've got a set of meetings, and then in the afternoon I've set aside some time to handle some HR requests or whatever.

Mm-Hmm. Um, and that's any given day. So tho that those are, you know, very disparate kinds of projects.

Yeah. I need to be able to organize and coordinate my personal work, um, in the context of my team and what I do. Uh, and that's what we see Trello is really phenomenal at.

It's very flexible. Um, so it's a, and we just launched the collapsible lists and list colors and colors. Yep.

Um, Trello team really cares about having delightful experiences and, and making that, uh, making that day-to-Day task management, you know, a little bit more fun. Don't You dive in. It's, you, you're like, how do I live?

How did I live without this? Yeah. Because we've always been trying to do the same thing in our calendars.

Yep. Wrong place, wrong tool. Yep.

You know, um, talk about, talk about, uh, loon and how that fits into the picture. A lot of discussion around asynchronous communication. Yeah.

In our world, we know what that means. I'm not sure if everybody kind of, that that resonates right away anyway. Yeah.

So, um, we talked about it a little bit in our keynote today. People are very familiar at this point with Zoom teams Google Meet. Right?

That's, that's synchronous video communication. We all Have to be somewhere digitally at the same Time. Yeah.

And it's saved us during the pandemic, and we all now fully understand that a asynchronous is when, you know you're communicating work, sending it to someone, they're consuming it. Um, and we've done that obviously with Text Forever, you know, from carrier pigeons. Yeah.

Uh, the original asynchronous work Loom does, loom is a video version of asynchronous communication and collaboration. Mm-Hmm. And Atlassian was a power user of Loom before we acquired the company.

And I can tell you a couple of ways it really transformed our business. Um, the first is we're very distributed and some, and we are engaged in very visual work. So if you think about the job of a designer that is, that's inherently visual.

And if you're, if you're trying to collaborate between Sydney and San Francisco, being able to just like, hang on, let me show you. Mm-Hmm. Lou makes it incredibly easy.

One click start recording, walk through your work, send it, the recipient can comment, add emojis, reply back with video. It's really accelerated our ability to work in a distributed, uh, distributed setup. The other thing that's really been powerful, uh, for us is, is broadcast team wide communication.

Mm-Hmm. So, um, we did a study internally, we had some leaders who would regularly send out written summaries of this is what we need to be focusing on, this is what our strategy is. And we had some leaders who would send out videos, and what we found was they were equivalent in terms of driving shared understanding of what we were trying to accomplish.

But the videos created a much deeper sense of personal connection, um, which I think we can all, you know, use a little bit more of. So yeah. We definitely need more of that.

Plus you have the visual, you have more cues, right? Yeah. I mean, it's more than reading the written word can be misinterpreted or not gain.

Right. The same things from it. I think about how many times I've put a screenshot of something I wanna share an idea about this is like what we'll kind of think about.

Could we do something like this? Yeah. But then you gotta try to explain it in text.

And about the third sentence, it's, it's lost all this stuff I want to Communicate. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

It's just a different medium for communicating more richly in some ways. Well, and as I think about, you know, as I think about the future of work and communication, this is gonna sound incredibly obvious. It's, it's communicating is obviously not just about text on a page anymore.

There's many, many ways to communicate ideas. And Atlassian wants to enable the easy transformation of content into whatever is the appropriate format for the job that you're trying to do. Mm-Hmm.

Um, so Loom, for example, has some really, really cool AI announcements that we've made, uh, at team. So AI driven workflows. One of the things that's held people back from adopting video, I think is this intimidation factor.

It's like, you know, work to set up a camera and I, I hope I look good, and this is really complicated. Yeah. And if I screw up, oh, now I'm gonna have to do take two or take 100.

Loom is announcing, uh, editing via transcript. So you record your video generates a transcript, that whole segment you totally screwed up. You just delete it.

Loom does the, the video correction for you. Nice. There's some other really interesting workflows that Loom AI is powering.

So a really common use case is, um, someone records a video to walk you through something that should have documentation that goes with it. Maybe it's a standard operating procedure. Maybe it's, you know, updates to your HR policy, maybe it's release notes.

You record the video one click to turn that into a document in Confluence that meets those needs. Mm-Hmm. One I think that, uh, technical users will really like is the bug report.

I mean, bugs are inherently visual. It's easy to show what the problem is. Loom captures all that information and automatically populates Jira For you.

Yep. And it doesn't start a ticket. It already is in the process of here it is, there's the context of who was having that issue, what they were, you know, what they were doing or recording up Yep.

And all that kind of thing. Exactly. Very cool.

Um, so if you had to kind of project forward, what does work look like? I mean, I think about how much we've transformed in the last, you know, covid and Yeah. Digital transformation and, you know, so many things are much more of a digital experience already, but we have AI that's already part of it.

And by the way, just a comment for me is sort of the copilot is a nice start. Yeah. But we don't need 50 copilots.

We need things that are part of our work to be AI also. And I think, I think, uh, lasting really done some nice work thinking about how to fit that in and make that part of here's what also you can do, or I could help you do this if you want me to. Well, And that's one of the things that we've found as we've been building AI features and experimenting with what actually is really valuable that AI can help us accomplish it is putting it right in front of you in what you're naturally doing anyway.

Mm-Hmm. The, um, you know, the capability for AI to identify definitions for you and, and strange acronyms. Mm-Hmm.

I use that, I don't know, a hundred times a day. It saves me from having to be like, I know I should know this acronym. We go Real quick.

Don't, don't look down. So they don't know your Exactly. And it's, you know, and so I I, I love that that feature has saved me so many times and creates so much shared context.

Also, asking ai, I do this all the time. Like, um, remind me what our leave policy in Australia is. That's a annoying search in a prior world.

AI just says, this is it. Here's your pages, here's What the government of whatever says. Yeah.

Here's what our, oh, been there somewhere is our policy. Yeah. It's, it's really, really useful.

That's interesting. Wow. So are, are any other announcements you want to talk about?

Any things that have happened? Let's see. Not that, that isn't enough.

Oh, those are exciting. I think one more that, um, our customers are really excited about is an announcement that we're making around company hub. So Confluences used as an org-wide collaboration and knowledge hub, where all of your most important information resides.

And companies wanna make those really beautiful. They want a front door that is branded and helps direct users to the important spaces where the information lives and Mm-Hmm. So, uh, we're announcing company hub for our premium and up customers so they can make those confluence front doors really beautiful.

Kind of how to connect it all together. Get Yeah. Make it easier to get to it.

Yeah. Make that front door feel comfortable. Great.

So something, I don't know, you may have mentioned it, is kind of the graph idea. Yeah. Um, I think it was, can't remember if it was Scott or Mike's one of who were talking about kinda that middle layer of, of, because you have so much connect into the workflow of what's happening in your organization.

That's how you can make the, and here's who you would talk about Yeah. Or who wrote that. Yeah.

Um, how does that play for you? How do you think about that part of the technology that enables how you're helping people Work? Yeah.

It's really important and powerful. So before I came to Atlassian, um, the way that I would try to understand who was doing what is I would, I would like do some internal search, probably fail to find what I was looking for, then I would go to an org chart. But the reality is the org chart almost never reflects how teams are actually organized to get their jobs done.

We're not two dimensional. Beautiful. Right.

And we all need to work cross-functionally. That's the other thing that I think is a, I hear from our customers, you can't just organize, you know, in a departmental vertical, you have to be able to understand how you're handing off across different departments, Especially in a collaborative agile world, you know? Yeah.

Being kind of organization. Right. We're working with everybody.

Yeah. So being able to draw from the cross-functional teams who's doing work at different phases of the workflow, coming back to from the ideation to the work, to goals and alignment. Mm-Hmm.

Um, and surface that in our products via ai via easy affordances. Right, right. Where you are.

So that, that information is really easy to access. I think will, um, will speed up, will speed up collaboration pretty significantly and Learning Yeah. The fastest.

Yeah. You mentioned goals. Um, one of the guys really, really fascinated about, because in the IT world, my view is we often set, um, goals or metrics that are important to us, but aren't necessarily, we don't know if they're connected to the business.

Yeah. That cap uses is releasing twice a day. Why, if that's the goal, why is that important?

Yeah. What, what, what's that enabling other than just maybe getting things done faster, but for what reason? Right.

Yeah. So how, how does connecting the goals into that, into that work, how does that fit? How do you See that?

The way that, uh, the way that we, we do it internally, and this is a big part of the reason we're excited about bringing goals into Jira as a platform object that'll just travel everywhere. Um, we set goals at three levels. There's top company level goals, you know, market level goals, individual products and individual team level goals.

And everyone has visibility. So you can see the relationship to how all of those goals ladder up. And you can see progress over time.

So once a month, I'm looking at my team and I am, I'm able to see who's on track, who's at risk, why. Um, and it allows us to, it saves those status meetings. It gives me a fast And the status reports, Right?

And the status reports. Those are just, they just exist. Uh, and it makes us much nimbler to, okay, this one went from green to yellow, what's up?

Like, um, we can, we can get in there, we can surge, get those goals back to green. And having that tied into, you know, for Jira in particular, what am I doing in Jira? Why does it matter?

What is that related to? Uh, I think it drives a lot of clarity. Reduce it duplicative work For our company goal is to get this product out.

Yeah. In, in a record time for or something. Now I know why.

Yeah, exactly. I'm doing what I'm doing. It's also gotta be refreshing that I don't have to call somebody every time.

I just want to cut a quick, gimme the quick update. Right. And maybe I need to talk to have a nuanced conversation about it, or, Yeah.

We're a little opinionated about that actually. We, I Can't imagine you are. What?

Um, we think that the goals ought to have, you know, really, really short updates. So we limit your characters. You can Oh, really?

You can have, you know, know, you can add more information, but it really should just be, yeah, this is how it's going. And then yes, if you wanna click in and add more information, you can, you can write your novel. But, uh, but the, the quick monthly update should be pretty short.

Many Words. I remember the folks who were like, perceived their value is how long this status report was. Right.

That's not valuable anymore. You just asked GPT to like, make it longer. Make it shorter.

Yeah. Really. If I went a longer, but hopefully you stopped by the pound.

It's by The content. Right, exactly. By the, the meat.

Yeah. Exactly. Erica, it's been fascinating talking to you.

Thank and congratulations on all the announcement we, I about it being, uh, at the heart of the center of what's happening in Atlassian. It has been a super fun year, and, uh, it's been really fun to talk to you. So thanks much.

You seem like you're holding enough. Well, so keep, keep, keep at it. All right.

See, good things happening. So thank you, Erica. Thanks.

Take care. You Bet. Erica Trobin, who is, uh, tell me again, uh, talking Out a product for work management.

Work management. Thank you. I talked to so many folks, I don't want to mess It up.

It's So thanks to Erica for joining us again. We are talking to, you know, the people who are the game changers in our industry and doing some fantastic work through themselves and their organization. So thanks to Erica for joining us.

We have another great interview coming right up. So stay tuned.