Redefining Teamwork with Mark Cruth at Atlassian Team ’24

This is Techron tv. Hey everybody. Mitch Ashley here at, uh, Atlassian, team 24.

We have a very special guest. Occasionally I get to spend some time talking to people that play a different but vital role as part of the community. And today I am joined by Mark Mark Crus.

Mark Kru Cruz. Okay. Thank you for that.

So are you, you're not Mario, but are you Marko? Is that, uh, You know what, I, I try to think. Marko just doesn't roll off the tongue that well.

So I still go. I, I'll, I'll, I'll go by Marko. You'll go go Marko.

Marko. That works. I'll, I'll practice.

We'll see. Maybe I'll See. Maybe.

We'll, you'll catch on, right? Okay. There you go.

Good. I like Marko, so I Love it. So if you wouldn't have scheduled some time to come talk, I would've gone and grabbed you off the floor.

Right. Exactly. Hey dude, what's your name?

I have sweaty questions. What's the deal? I need to talk to you.

So tell us about workplace coach, modern work For Modern work plumbers today. Today plumbing. Exactly.

But yes, my role in Atlassian is a modern work coach. And uh, it's really cool. It's, I joke around that it is, they literally said, what do you wanna call yourself because you're doing this job.

What do you wanna call yourself? I'm, yeah, I wanna be a modern work coach. And what it means is I, I work with our customers, I work with our partners.

I just work with the community in general to help them, not just look at our products and how to use 'em, but like, how do we solve problems? How do we change our ways of working? And so for me, this year, every year we come dressed as something to try to emphasize this idea.

Like, what was it, two years ago? We were doctors, coats, scrubs, all the, you know, two, the nine, uh, last year we were, uh, coaches. We had our Ted lasso outfits on.

And this year we're like, you know what? We need to clean out the work pipelines for so many customers. Like, you know what?

We're modern work plumbers, so there's three of us wandering around. So if you don't catch me, you'll catch probably one of the other guys. Did you ever see the movie Brazil as Robert De Niro?

Oh, yes. Yes. He is.

The, he's the HVAC plumber guy Is Right. And it's a, you know, it's a living, breathing system. I know, right?

That's Gone way back. That's like an 84 movie or some. Well, And it's so Fascinating way back there Being a li Living breathing system, that's exactly what our Customers are.

That's what made me think about that. Exactly. It's exactly what it is.

It's, it's not it as simple as, you know, you know, welding some pipes together. It's actually like, you have to sense and respond. And so many of our customers, they'll bring in a product or they'll do something and, and hope that it saves the day at some level.

But really they're just becoming more efficient at doing maybe the wrong thing. Yeah. And so for us, we're like, all right, how do we work within that system?

Help them find their way of working versus just any way of work. You know, so often we think the tool is the solution. Yeah.

The solution is how we work. Right, exactly. Changing how we work and the right tool or adaptation of a tool to Tools will give good guardrails in my mind.

But it's always the tool, which you, we need a different tool. Call up wherever the tool it versus you saw That in the pandemic. Everyone, everyone, you know, bought all their software to go remote.

And they did. And they were, you know, they tried to solve how they did it. But I'm a big, uh, I'm a big believer that most of the return to office, you know, push that's been out there is because these organizations bought a tool, but they never actually figured out how to work remotely.

Mm-Hmm. They had the tools, but they were like, how do we team when we're not together? And I, I think that's a big thing that we're still working with our customers on.

We're like, cool, what is a, in communication at I, how do you actually do AA communication? Things like that. I still have a modem, so I can do Yeah, there you go.

Communication, but a whole nother story. So talk about system of work. That's, it's the big phrase that we're talking about.

I I absolutely love that we've aligned on this. So, you know, internally in Atlassian, they started talking about this before Team 24. And, uh, I got excited because one of the things that System of work does is it kind of talk the, it recognizes that there is a foundation for how we work as a team, and that we build upon that.

And that in that system there are living breathing pieces of that. Sometimes, you know, as a, as a team, we're always gonna have, have to have that teamwork foundation. And from there we're gonna have tools that support it.

But we're gonna be looking at things like, all right, cool. How do we work from connecting strategy to execution? How do we create a service mindset?

It's less about the tools doing it and more about the, the problem we're trying to solve. Mm-Hmm. I know NPN, uh, Mike and his, I think it was Mike and his keynote was talking about the kind of three layers of enterprise infrastructure, if you will.

I, I mean, I've got the terms wrong, but there's a lot of conversations about this graph in the Middle. Oh, the teamwork graph. Teamwork graph.

So sounds like a good marketing word. Oh yeah. And Maybe it is, maybe it's, it's, you know, helpful that way.

But talk about what teamwork graph is from your standpoint. How do you help customers understand? No, it's not just a bunch of Yeah.

Tasks. Exactly. In Jira and Pages and Confluence, it's a lot More, it's so much more.

And really what it is, is I think what it, it, when I think of the teamwork graph, I almost think of it. It's, it's supposed to be like a blueprint. You know?

It's like, it's this image that says, here's how you should think about how you work together. Again, it's not just the products that's, that's has its place, but it's actually thinking about, cool, what are the foundational practices that we have? How do we cross team?

How do we deal with cross team collaboration? And so recognizing that we actually have this cross team need, that's one of the things that the team we're graph actually starts calling out. It actually goes out there and says, Hey, it's no longer just a single team initiative that does something.

It's actually multiple teams. And I think that's one of the things I love about us bringing that teamwork graph up and up and center with this whole system of work. Sometimes, well, sometimes a lot of times we, we have redundant functions or people don't realize that they have very similar work.

I you could actually make things more efficient or, or consolidate, collaborate. Yeah. How do you present that kind of information to a team so they don't go, oh, it's AI looking to replace my Job again?

Here we go, oh, here, Another I gotta start. I gotta, I gotta, now of course, AI I'm getting is here, right? Yep.

And that's when people unfortunately start putting up walls, they start kind of hoarding stuff. And so for us, that's where, uh, like I'm really excited about some of the stuff we're talking about with ai because we're talking about it as not a even a tecum necessarily. We're talking about it is the support function.

It's gonna help get rid of the things that honestly prevent you from actually doing the work you were hired for. We were talking about it yesterday that no one gets hired to go and summarize pages. No one gets hired to do this.

People, people get hired to go be creative, you know, write code, do whatever. And so what we wanna look at that for is helping them see what they could actually apply something like AI to, and so for me, when I, when I work with teams, it's really getting clear on actually their own things. Like roles and responsibilities.

We have a play in our team Playbook, which is a, a list of all the practices that we follow at Atlassian that we put out there for free. Anybody can access it, no email, nothing like that. And, uh, one of them is the roles and responsibilities.

And it's something I run with teams a lot. And one of the things I'm starting to see now is we actually have a role for AI on that. It's like, alright, cool, we have all different roles in our team.

What's the role of ai? Like, what, how do we want to use it? It is, it is a part of our team, but it's a tool that we use.

So let's get intentional about that. I wonder, in the metaphor of Mario, maybe, uh, Rolo is the power up. Yeah, exactly.

Honestly, that that's what it is. Yeah. Power up power, right.

Exactly. But it, it really is. It's the, it's the superstar power.

Right? Exactly. It allows you to move through things fluidly without having any issues.

Right. That's the goal. So, So Talk about how do you work with customers or how do you help people?

Because as we're talking about it's, it's real easy to focus on the technology. It's so much more about how we, I dunno if rethinking work Yeah. But maybe redesigning and recreating and on our, and leveraging what we can do today that we couldn't, when we established couldn't do it certain patterns.

Right. Well, and it's, it's fascinating because it's, uh, for like a big part of my job. About half of my job is working with our customers and like partners and others in the community to actually help them understand, again, the problem they're trying to solve.

And then once we solve that, we can show them how they can accelerate that through the tooling. And a great example is I go out there and I work with our customers. I run workshops like I'm a huge facilitator.

I love doing these things. And we go in and we dive into like, what are they trying to accomplish? We come out, we sketch out how we, how we could get from point A to point B.

And then we say, alright, cool. What tools do we have at our disposal to help us? And you know what the secret is?

Almost a hundred percent of the time you've got a tool like Confluence, or you've got a tool like Jira or something like that will actually solve that. They just don't know how to use it that way. And so what we do is layer it in and, and like one of the most fascinating things I've been doing lately is helping our customers actually collaborate more asynchronously because they don't know what Async work is.

They're like, cool, I send emails. That's async, right? It's like, well, yeah, it is.

But it's, it's a variation of it. And so one thing we've been doing is helping them think about, well, how do you collaborate continuously as a team on like a page? And so we'll show them, you know, confluence page edit, where you can get in there constantly be adding comments, you know, feedback, things like that.

And it blows people's minds because a lot of our customers don't realize that they can do that. They're like, oh yeah, we use Confluence for document with fo support. I'm like, oh, that's like having a portion in the middle of New York City, right.

1 0 1. I know, right, exactly. You don't do That.

There's so much more. There's So much more. And so for us, when they see that, it blows their mind.

And what I like to do too is I show them how we work. Because a lot of times, like I was talking to a customer yesterday and they, they were like, I want to be like Atlassian, you know, like, we are death by meetings, you know, we never feel like we get work done. It seems like you guys haven't figured out.

And I says, we become very intentional about how we use meetings, how we use tools like Loom to help us have asynchronous, like face-to-face. We do things like Confluence. And, and I says, it's not, it's not that we figured out any magical science.

We just picked some very specific practices that we say we're going to do it this way. And so, like, you know, a great example I brought up loo. They say, well, how do you do town halls?

And I says, well, we used to be Atlassian, do weekly town halls where we'd always get together. You wouldn't necessarily get everybody together because we're a global company, right? We're all, some people calling in at, you know, 1:00 AM just to hear what's going on.

Well, we started doing is we said, all right, instead of having these global town halls, let's have some more. Let's, let's like drink our own champagne. We create a Confluence page.

Mike and Scott do a Loom video. And then guess what? Everyone can consume that at their own time.

And then we can actually collaborate. What I love about it is you go onto these pages, these like state of Atlassian pages that we have and all the inline comments, the questions, and then the dialogue that happens. We've actually seen, I think it was the stat was we saw a 60% engagement, less than 60% engagement in our town halls by at that point.

And that's just people tuning in. We've seen over an 80% engagement on these pages where people are actually like, we can get the analytics. We can see that, oh, people are actually engaging on the content.

And I think that's, that's something that when a customer hears it, they're like, oh, I guess we could try it. And I literally challenged the customer yesterday. I'm like, what if your director, instead of doing your your biweekly team meeting, what if they send out a loom and try this out?

And they're like, whatever. Would if, did anyone die? And he says, no.

He's like, why not try it? Let's see if it helps come up with a hypothesis here. The No, the internet won't shut down if we Yeah, Exactly.

Meeting There. Exactly. At least we hope that I know, right?

Well, we did have CloudFlare Michelle was up, but That's True. That's another great company. Um, I, I was wondering about Loom, uh, as an object in the, in the Atlassian world, is that kind of fit in anywhere?

You can put it on a Confluence page, you can put it in a Jira task or ticket or Whatever. That's gonna be the future of what we're looking at. That's where, so that's where you see it in like the, uh, the, you'll see it in the announcements that we have is the idea is that we bring Loom in.

And right now Loom does a great job at integrating just out of the box where you, you know, with things like Smart Links. But now the idea is that we wanna bring it in and truly integrate it in with Conice now that it's part of the family. Like, let's make it so that way if I have an issue with something, I can tag it into a Jira ticket.

Now I can repeat a, you know, steps to create a bug, because I don't know about you, but like, I remember when I was a, uh, I, I was a developer at one point. I get a ticket with all these things. Like, this is how you reproduce it.

And I'll be like, I followed the steps. It didn't work, you know? And so now we can actually associate that easily with a ticket.

And so for us, that's where I think the power of looms gonna come in to integrate into Pages, to have that dialogue you would do in Loom, but now actually a college, You know, so something that I often struggle with as a developer. Yeah. Yeah.

And I still do today as an analyst is, you know, I wrote that thing two months ago and somebody wants a change to it. Yeah. You know, go add something about X, Y, Z into this paper or document or whatever.

And I'm like, okay, I gotta go in my head in that head space. Right? Uh, yeah.

Yeah. And it sounds like sort of that knowledge catch up, that context switching pause. Oh Yeah.

It seems like there's so much information that you've got in Jerry and Confluence to say, okay, for this task, and this is where that kind of connected graph Yes. Right. Comes into play.

And by the way, there's three people written something on that topic. You wrote data that has this information. Right.

Where do I go find it? Right. And But you don't think of that.

No. It's almost, the other thing I thought about is, um, how onboarding, how many people are like, I don't feel like I'm productive until about six months or a year. Sometimes, Especially in a distributed world where maybe you're onboarding remotely Well, and you gotta figure out like, all right, cool.

Who, who does this? Right. Who does this?

Right. I mean, I Get tired of asking my sponsor, you know, I know you time, you know, they're gonna think I'm dumb, but yeah. Guess what?

You know, natural language. Now all of a sudden you got robo out there. And I think that's one of the big things.

Robo doesn't judge. I it doesn't, no judge. You know what, and, and what I love about it's, so I've been using, so we of course, we, we, again, we like to practice these tools beforehand.

So we, I've been using Robo for a little bit inside us, or internally with the Atlassian. And it's been fascinating to go through and do just that where I'm like, I'm trying to answer a question and I can go do searching Confluence if I, and I'm like, I know I'm gonna get 50 pages that might have some reference to it. Like I'm really looking for a specific answer or something.

Like, Hey, we deprecated the Jira Mac, uh, JIRA Mac app years ago. And I was like, why did we do that? And I can ask you that.

And it will literally give me, be like, okay, here's what I found. It'll summarize what it found and then say here, if you want to reference why, like all that detail, here's the pages. And I think that to me is like, it helps reduce that time we spend searching for information because I, we've done studies and, and we've seen that half of our time can get spent just searching, like again, goes back to what AI does, is it prevents us from doing the stuff we don't want.

I mean, there's many things a AI can do to help us. Oh yeah. I think the biggest, the ultimate kind of holy grail is if I could just fix my email.

No, I don't. If you realize That pass the last five messages At the top, I know if it can go well, if it can integrate across all these tools, if we're starting to see, right. We're starting to see that come about.

Email's not asynchronous. They are, it, it's just not synchronous. It's just not A, not synchronous, synchronous.

It falls into this gray zone. That's why we don't email a lot in Atlass. It's just Yeah.

Sync. It's just a It's so true. So true.

A sinkhole, I guess. Sinkhole. I like that.

I like that. You go, what, so what, what's really gotten you going, obviously you go, is exciting. What else has happened with announcements and things happen at the show?

So some of the things we're doing, and we've got a couple talks we're doing about this, but uh, like we've been talking a lot about this idea of like, how do we, how do we rethink about the principles of work? And so we're actually doing, uh, we've gotta talk, my boss Don Price, our few work futures, he's gotta talk tomorrow, but he is gonna be going into the Modern Work manifesto. And it's a new kind of concept that we're pushing from Atlassian to say, Hey, work has changed.

We need some principles to guide us. You know, we need to focus on things like context over content. How do we focus in on, you know, using tools like AI to say we need to get to a specific answer.

How do we make decisions around that versus just saying, let's just create all the, all the data, you know? And so we've got essentially eight principles within that that we feel is, are really important. That's actually one of the reasons we're in this getup, is to say, Hey, we can think about work differently.

And for us, that's what I'm super excited about is sharing that out with folks. Now, from a product perspective, I'm incredibly excited about things like honestly bringing goals into Jira. Like I come from, uh, working with executives, like that's what my, my prior life for last.

Right, exactly. Yeah. And it's so many times I'm doing, I can see work and I can see goals and there's nothing connecting together.

And you know that, That's a great point. Right? I was just going to interject about that.

Oftentimes, especially in technical organizations, we crave measures that are relevant to us. Like how releases per week can I Exactly. The business was like, why do I really, why do I care about that?

Why is that important? I mean, it's a now Goal that's important of I wanna get this capability off the market as fast as possible. Yep.

Okay. Now I know why that's I Yep. But we don't have line of sight to that, so No, we don't because there's often, you know, goals cascading that get to that ultimate of like, why are we doing it?

Yeah. So is is that something that having service, having those goals could help with? Honestly, for me, having those types of goals, what you mentioned actually will enable you to build better solutions to, because if you're, if you write a goal, like to your point that says, we need to be able to release two times a week, you know, cool, it's a great goal.

We'll do these things. But what was that in service to? Like, what is the reason you're doing that?

Yeah. Is it, because guess what we have, we've got customers now that need to be able to use updates in our software, uh, continuously. Okay.

So the goal actually wasn't two times a week. You just made up that arbitrary number you would like to have continuous release. Exactly.

Oh. And so for me, it helps teams actually sit back and make a better solution. Because so often, again, we, we, we don't have that line of sight of what the business is trying to solve.

Mm-Hmm. And so that translation doesn't happen. So now if I can connect that together, all of a sudden I feel like, alright, maybe I'm gonna make a recommendation that this, you know, JIRA, epic, we change what it's supposed to be, because guess what, the goal of it is actually this.

Right. Right. As opposed to, it kind of feels like a vanity metric.

If you don't understand why, why is that? Why is two Oh yeah. Whatever the goal is and forth.

Now I get it. Okay. Because it's more than just releasing this and things I can do to, it's all, All this side upstream To help with that or whatever Delay.

And that, that's where I used to do a lot of work with teams from like an agile coaching perspective. And the biggest thing I continue to do, and I still do it today, even in my role as a modern work coach, but I work with our customers, is to say how, like, what is it you're trying to accomplish? Like, let's just an, let's answer that.

Like, cool, I wanna do this. Awesome. Why?

Like, what's, what's the thing that you're trying to do? And then at that point we can actually really start getting started because otherwise you've already got bias in terms of what you're doing and you're not, you may or may not hit the right answer. Yeah.

You know, A question for you, it it's, it's kind of said stated, but not Yeah. Not like super, super explicit. It seems like there's been a lot of work around the user experience across Yeah.

All the products. So it, it isn't such a hard lying crossing into I'm working in Jira and if, if it's interface and I don't know where to find Robo Echo. Yeah.

How does that work? But in the context switching between Yeah. Those different products seems like that's getting much more Seamless.

It's one of those things where I like to say to our customers, and I want you to be able to use our tools in a way where you don't think about us. Honestly, if you don't think about it Atlassian once in a day, but you, you're using our tools. Actually that's a success.

Because guess what that means? The tools are so simple for you. You, you move across, whether it be Jira to Confluence or rva, whatever it is.

And it's just, you do your work. You know, I think about it as many of the operating systems out there, we just do it. We don't think, oh, I'm in Microsoft today, you know, and I'm in Windows.

It's, oh, I want you to think about us as that foundation of just how I do teamwork. Mm-Hmm. And that's honestly what a UI will help us do a be a unified ui.

Are you planning your character for next experience? You know what, I'm starting to think about it. I'm always open to recommendations though.

So is we're gonna have to see what our, what we're coming out with, what some of the themes are. But I'm, uh, like I said, I like to commit to, uh, the extravagant Maybe guardians of the workflow. Ooh, You know what?

You'd be, you'd make an awesome Rocco. Oh my God, yes. I like, you know what, I've got Dom Price is this big guy I can see him at, what's his name?

The Big guy. I can't remember. Oh, I know the green guy, right.

Whoever it is. Yeah, yeah. Uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be think about.

Yes. He's already gonna be him. I've already, I'm with somebody one, one place Zoe, what's her name, right, Green Exactly.

I'm sorry, her name. Yeah. We do some of those things too.

I love that. Actually. I think this might despite be a good, good approach.

So we'll have to talk next year. You put cosplay on your, on your resume at corporate cosplay, You know, corporate cosplay. I will admit on the side outside of Atlassian, I do the same.

You do. I are that. We'll shoot that video another time.

Well, exactly, exactly. It's All good, good stuff. Hey, thanks a lot Mark, So much great talking To you with you and uh, thanks for making it entertaining to talk about.

Hey, it's all about half. We do it every day and we wanna make better. I Love it.

Alright, great. Thanks to Mark for joining us, mark, from the, the work, what is it? We're the Work Modern work Plumbers.

Okay. You see just a little low. I can't read it.

So thanks for Mark for joining us and uh, great conversation. So we'll be back. We have some other great talks coming right up, so stay tuned.

I hope you watch that video with us again.