Enhancing Collaboration with the New Teamwork Collection – Atlassian Team ’25 NA

This is Textron tv And we're back at Elysian, team 25. I'm John Swartz, senior content writer of Textron tv, Textron Gang, Textron Group, lot of tech Strongs. Anyway, I'm here with Allison Sid, who's the head of product system of work at Adolescent.

Yes. Is that correct? That's Correct, John.

Okay. Yes. And I know the, the linchpin or the key, the cornerstone of what you do is something called teamwork collection.

Can you tell me what that is? Sure. Yeah.

So we announced it today during the keynote. Okay. Teamwork collections, our new offering that brings together Jira, confluence, loom, and along with some agents for teamwork to help become the common language for all teamwork.

Okay. And, um, what, what customer challenges are you trying to solve with this? That's a great question.

There, there are a handful of que ones that we're trying to solve, but mostly it's really around how do you align all of your work that you're doing to your goals? How do you plan and track work together as a team? How do you then unleash the knowledge of your team across your entire organization?

And then, of course, bringing the power of AI teamwork teammates to the, to the table with them. So how, within that equation, where does AI fit in or how does AI change what you're doing or influence what you're doing? Or is that just part of the, the basic plan of, of teamwork collection?

Got it. It's, well, today we announced that, um, ro o will be included in every Jira, confluence and Jira You said ro o the, the search, Search chat and AI agents as well for specific types of things, like for teamwork will be included in your Jira, confluence and Jira service management subscriptions going forward. So it's basically part of the base plan now with the collection, with all of those products included.

So from, we, we, we talked to, uh, the head of product at Rove, uh, GJA, and he mentioned the, the, this importance of, of searching across enterprises and apps, which I think is in increasingly gonna be a challenge in terms of finding data across a, a a, a landscape of, of, of applications and systems. Is that kind of where, where this, this kind of fits into where their, their element of what you announced, That's one piece of it, certainly the enterprise search piece, but it's also how do you bring those specific agents to work with you as a fellow teammate to help you be more effective and efficient moving work forward as a team? See, that's, so you hit on something that it kind of confounds me at times and it has something to do with your company, but it's just in general, I mean, I've been writing about AI agents for several months.

It seems there's an announcement almost every week. Sure. There's an abundance of them.

And since it's like a sensory overload, and I'm wondering from a customer standpoint whether they feel that same way. They, they feel overwhelmed by all these options of agents and how do they fit together? Do they fit at all?

Um, how do you silo them or do you silo them? Is is that something that you're hearing from the, the customers? It's just like, how do I address all these options that are coming out at me seemingly every week?

Not, it's not something I personally hear a lot though. A lot of the way we've introduced agents into our experiences is really very much in context of what you're trying to, to do. Right.

And so for things like, let's say you're in Jira and you want to get help with writing your work item, or if you're in Confluence and you wanna turn content into a work item in Jira, you can basically use those agents right there in place within that experience. So it's much more organic, or it fits into exactly what you were doing in your flow. Yeah.

So it's not so orthogonal to what you were doing. Yeah. So I mean, I was just like wondering, like looking forward, you know, as is, as this starts to gain traction and it's, it's, it's, it is within enterprises.

So conceivably I, as a company, I might have five different AI agents doing five different tasks. Maybe each of them is over, is overseen by a, a traffic cop of sort or a super agents. There will, would there be a coordination between agents from different vendors?

I'm just asking this as a, as as a reporter. I, I just don't know how this is gonna, how this is gonna come out. Yeah.

Right now we've been, so we've been very focused on the agents that we're providing our customers along with giving them the ability to create their own agents. Okay. So haven't focused, at least myself personally, too much yet on bringing in those third party vendors.

Yeah. I'm getting ahead of myself. Yeah.

No, I'm sorry. No, let's, yeah, let's start with first things first, I guess. Yeah.

So what are, so what are some of the innovations across Jira, uh, confluence and Loom that you're most excited about? Yeah, So within the context of Jira specifically, one of the things we are introducing is something called Custom project templates. And that gives our customers the opportunity to recreate or build common workflows for their organization to reuse and re repeated patterns.

So if, let's say, you know, for instance, in the session I did earlier today, we walked through a vendor onboarding process. You've nailed that process. You wanna be able to repeat it over and over again.

So now you can use these custom project templates to bring in things like workflows, fields, and really like just repeat that very well to worn process over and over again, rather than reinventing the wheel every time. So that's one of the items I'm pretty excited about. Um, I may have asked this question already, but I I, maybe I'll rephrase it.

So with, with ro o fitting into the teamwork collection, how, what AI driven enhancements does it offer at teamwork? Like, what, what can it, how can it raise the level of what you're doing and how, and in kind of, can you gimme an example of how that might fit in? Yeah, So one of the examples would be, so let's say, and I mentioned it I believe before, but, uh, just in case, um, in the context of let's say a Confluence page and you've got a bunch of action items you wrote down, you took some meeting notes, um, in that context, you can just highlight those meeting notes.

And, and I, I Agile will automatically create those into j work items. So that's one piece. Another piece I haven't mentioned before is we now have AI Loom AI for meetings where you can invite our Loom AI note taker into your meeting and it can take notes for you so you can focus on the conversation and not worry about jotting down all the notes as you go, creates a written record of what you just talked about, all the action items so you can focus on the conversation and then get back to work when you need to.

With all that recorded already for you. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. So I, you mentioned to the viewers out there that, uh, my, our colleague Adrian Bridgewater has written about teamwork among the rest of his coverage of the keynote speech at Atlassian. I was gonna ask you about the keynote, actually.

I know you've, you saw it. What was it about that and just in general that stood out to you? Were there any takeaways that you think are, um, worth sharing with?

Yeah, I think a couple of the big takeaways I would call out as it relates to Teamwork collection too specifically is Robo for everyone. Now again, we are giving Robo Away with your subscription for Jira Confluence and Jira Service Management. So anyone using Teamwork Collection will get access to those AI capabilities immediately as part of their subscription.

Our platform apps also is a really important piece of how we are bridging and bringing those experiences together across all of those apps and teamwork collection like goals and having those embedded in Jira, for instance. So I think between the platform apps and bringing VO to everybody using the Atlassian set of apps, particularly to our collection, is going to really like supercharge those teams to move work forward. So I was gonna ask you just in terms of, of about search.

Yeah. What, when you, when you look at something like Robo and then compare it to the traditional search, it's, you know, this is like just kind of a hypothetical, what do you, how do you think of about, about this? I mean, in a sense, before Search was about helping consumers find things they didn't know about.

The flip side with this is you're trying to find things you know about, but forgot where you put it, or you're trying to find the connections with the thing. So it's like you're searching for things, you know, exist, but you're not necessarily sure where they, where they are, right? Yeah.

So in this case, I, what I think is great about our search capability with Robo is that it's not just looking at the Atlassian tool chain. So let's say, you know, I have this Confluence page or this Jira work item, I can't remember what it was. It's also looking in, you've got Slack connected, or Figma connected, or any of your third party tools as well.

It's searching across those along with the Atlassian tools. And so you can actually find, like, you might not have remembered it was in a Slack message, but you Find it there. Exactly.

I mean, I, I don't that, that's one of the things. I used to work at a place called Dow Jones, and we had the Okta board. Okay.

There were like 50 different apps on there. And I would struggle at times to figure out where something was, and I would almost, almost invariably go to it and try to track down where could this conceivably be. And now in a sense, you just have like this one source that directs you to what you need to find.

And there your solution is in front of you. Yeah. As long as you've connected all the apps you're using within Yeah, that's true.

You gotta connect them and, but once they're perfect, we can find it wherever it is. All right. Um, what feedback have you received from early access, uh, customers regarding collection?

Like what, what are they telling you and, and, and how is it influencing your company's product development? Yeah, one of the biggest things we're hearing is how they're rolling it out to teams outside of their technical teams. So obviously we've had a really strong hold within technical teams historically, but all of the innovations and experience updates we've brought to Jira in particular, but all of the products really is meaning they're rolling it out more actively to all of their organization.

They're seeing a lot of value in Loom as well, which, which is newer to our portfolio. But if you put that alongside during Confluence and the experiences we've built to really connect those together, they're seeing a lot of, um, productivity enhancements from that in particular and really like just cutting down a lot of meetings, being more efficient, getting projects done faster in general. How long, if I, if you don't mind me asking, how long have you been at Atlassian?

Uh, Oh, that's a bit of a trick question. No, no, because I'm, there's, there is a method to the madness of the seemingly random nature of the question. Yes.

Um, so I've been at Atlassian for five months, and this is my second stint at Atlassian though. So you were I've been here before. Oh, I, I, so you're like a boomerang employee?

I Am a Boomerang, yes. I've done that. Yes, I've done that.

Can I ask, actually ask you about that? So when you were first at the company, you, you, you, what, what, what made you decide to, to leave or what prompted you to leave? I've been here for eight and a half years, and so there's nothing particular that prompts me to leave other than there was an new, another opportunity, opportunity I found.

And you, you're like, okay, eight and a half years is a good stint, but I should probably learn other things or see other exactly. Industry parts of the industry. And so I did that for a bit, um, during a startup, wasn't quite my, my cup of tea.

And so, okay. I took some time off and found out about the system of work and them hiring for the role here and our investments were making a system of work, and I was super excited about what the company's doing in this area. So It is, it is interesting when you go back to a company for the second time, you come back with a different perspective, maybe an appreciate more of an appreciation, but you know how it works, but you also see things that you might be able to bring that, that, that weren't existing there before.

Is that something? I'm just, just, this is like very, I don't know, I, I, I don't want to go too deep, but I'm just thinking of this as a philosophical question. In terms of working at the same place twice, I think you get to have that perspective of having left and come back.

Um, some there is learnings you take from the additional places you've been in between, but also things you appreciate that even more than you've appreciated the first time. And so I think it's the combination of those two that makes it really effective to come back. You've got a lot of the context from the history, so you're not starting from scratch.

Yeah. But you also have some other learnings from seeing these domain areas outside of the company that you can bring to your work. That actually makes it much richer, I think.

And because of the rise of ai, do, do you almost look at Atlassian as a different company than the one you worked at before? Like is it pivoted in its different direction, or is this just kind of a continuation? This feels more of like an evolution rather than a pivot.

Okay. Like, this feels like it's building more organically and naturally on top of what we've done. But having been here for so long before I, I can see the, I can see the increments Over time.

Okay. Yeah. So it's all, the narrative continues.

It feels organic. Yeah. Okay.

Organic's a good word. Um, thank you Allison. Thank you very much for being with us.

Thank you. Um, that's just our latest, greatest interview. We'll be back with more at, uh, Textron tv and keep on watching.