The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Clowes: AI will entrench dominant enterprise SaaS incumbents over startups
“The most likely outcome is that the currently dominant companies are going to get more dominant. But I don't think this idea that it would just cause a spring up of a whole bunch of new, new apps that will more easily challenge the incumbents makes any particu…”
Crusson: Corporate intrapreneurs must manufacture artificial scarcity to emulate startup urgency
“The thing that we're trying to do when starting new products is to basically emulate a startup in an environment that is not hungry. Like, it's not starving, and so you need to create scarcity.”
Crusson: Any engineer knowing ten customers by name becomes a product engineer
“In my opinion, everyone can be a product engineer. They just need to be exposed to the right user context, and the right user context, what is it? It's 10 customers. You know by name. You know their context. You know their problems.”
Dietrich: Product bundling is an ineffective land strategy for product-led companies
“Specifically for product-led growth companies, bundling is not a great land strategy. So at Atlassian, we had a number of products and experimented with different bundled lands, and it really slowed down the product-led growth motion. So we ended up going back…”
Crusson: Served as both PM and engineering lead for Jira Product Discovery
“So I decided not to have an engineering leader in the team and to do it myself. So I was the product leader and the engineering leader.”
Crusson: Accepting help from internal teams inevitably slows down new products
“The help always comes with condition, and the condition is usually things slow down.”
Crusson: Software teams should never do a full product rewrite
“There's lots of literature around there on should you do rewrites, should you not do rewrites? You ask me now, I tell you never.”
Crusson: Growing product teams often hide behind formal research and surveys
“As the products grow, you tend to leverage a lot more user research, formal user research, or CSAT surveys, and the way I call it, it's hiding behind research. And not being close enough to the ground with customers.”
Crusson: Internal corporate startups should deliberately keep initial MAU low
“What if you're building an quote unquote internal startup, your monthly active user number should look very low for quite some time up until you know that your product is ready to serve the vast majority of the customers that you want to put it in front of so …”
Atlassian research shows intentional in-person meetups boost remote productivity by 30%
“We found that connection and productivity, they both get boosted by about 30% when you bring people together, but then intentionally, and it lasts for months.”
Crusson: Jira Product Discovery hit 8,000 customers within one year
“So anyway, so we launched a year ago, fast forward to today, we've got 8000 customers, amazing CSAT, great traction, it's one of the fastest growing products in Atlassian history, which is great.”
Crusson: Internal 0-to-1 teams must break scale rules without breaking trust
“If you're starting something like this, your teams will need to break a lot of rules. That are established, but they need to be able to do that without breaking the trust of everyone in the organization. The rules were created to support the business at the st…”
Crusson: Phased user tiers protected Jira Product Discovery from premature MAU targets
“That helped us because we could then claim the space to do the right thing, and we were not asked to hit, for example, a monthly active users number, or number of customers number, or percentage of users who use this number, because it's very qualitative still…”
Time zone distance shielded early Jira Product Discovery from corporate meddling
“And so there was a lot of the early Success that we had in being able to move super fast that came from being so far that people just did not engage to stop us. And that's why we were initially the group with the fastest speed.”
Crusson: At Atlassian, a $100M business is merely a good start
“A one hundred million dollar business is a good start, basically. In most companies out there, like a hundred million dollar business is a home run. For us, it's not like that. It's, we're trying to build businesses that, that grow really big and keep growing …”
Crusson: Large companies can sustain opportunities longer than individuals can
“That's more like a story of big companies can play the long run, and for you individually, inside that process, it might look like a loss, and you might feel like you're going around, going nowhere, Yet the company stays on the opportunity for long enough to m…”
Crusson: Relentless weekly momentum protects early corporate projects from executive interference
“Those kinds of things are what give people a sense of velocity and speed. And no one wants to fuck with a high speed train. You don't get in front of it. That doesn't help, and you're going to look bad by doing that.”
Crusson: Disconnect creative and research processes from competitor tracking
“Now I, whenever I work at, I tend to try and ignore competition other than watching key, like every three months or so seeing what came out, if there's anything we should be worried about, afraid of stuff like that. But Really just try to disconnect all the cr…”
Crusson: Teams prefer 3-minute customer video snippets over 30-minute research reports
“No one is going to read a research report that takes 30 minutes to read. Everyone is happy to watch a three-minute snippet with four customers talking about something.”
Crusson: Business cases must articulate an urgent 'why now' trigger
“We need a very strong trigger for why now to go after it. And I did not do a good enough job at articulating this. Why now? Why, why do we have to do this now versus in a year's time, in two years time? And the next team that came in afterwards did a much bett…”
Crusson: Companies must validate why they succeeded before reusing playbooks
“The other one is what took you here is not going to take you there. And so go back and try to explain why you are successful today. And then if you try, if you think you can use the same thing on the next thing, find ways to validate it, find ways to test it. …”
Crusson: First 10 product users must be proven proxies for target market
“Where we spend most of the time for the Lighthouse, the first 10 Lighthouse users, is to explain why they are the Lighthouse users. Everything that explains why we believe they are a proxy for every customer that we serve afterwards.”
Crusson: Atlassian targeted tech teams while Slack targeted business teams bottom-up
“Atlassian was going after the users in tech teams. Slack was going after the users in business teams. And in both cases, what happened was a bottom up adoption.”
Crusson: Rebuilding a High-Traction Product Differs from Tuck-In Rebuilds
“In one case, what you try to do is, so when you rebuild, you've got a successful business. You've got hundreds of thousands of customers, for example, and you're trying to rebuild the same thing or a different thing, but for the same customers that have got ex…”
Crusson: Atlassian bet HipChat could expand from tech teams into business
“Atlassian was successful with a playbook, and the playbook was, we've got people in, like developers or tech or IT, they choose Atlassian apps, they love them, they start to recommend them to people in the business, and we start to see adoption, like bottom-up…”
Crusson: Accelerating Market Entry by One Year Pays for Startup Acqui-Hires
“If we can like enter a market one year earlier, it's probably going to pay the acquisition back on its own.”
Crusson: Early 0-to-1 evaluation focuses on team rigor, not business outcomes
“And I think initially they judged not the outcome. They judged the team a lot more than the outcome. So there's all this talk of a founder market fit. And I think really that's what you need to be teasing out, which is, is it the right team going after the rig…”
Cook: Atlassian acquired Loom because asynchronous video became internally essential
“That's a big part of why we bought Lib.”
Cook: Aligning three or four separate team roadmaps is basically impossible
“I don't know if you've ever tried to align, you know, three or four different roadmaps so that the timing is just right to get some improvement through, but it's basically impossible.”
Cook: Team hesitation and silence emerge when work streams hit 15 people
“So I think that was probably around, even, even around 15, we started to see a little bit of that.”
Jira leadership holds weekly 'Fight Club' meetings for direct product conflict
“What we put into place is something we called fight club... It's 30 minutes every week, and it's just for myself, my engineering, and my design leader, and we get together, and we know that we're going in there to have a conflict.”
Cook: Half or fewer of all Jira Software users are developers
“Then actually it's more like 50% or maybe just shy of 50% are developers. And the rest is this huge mix of support and operations and sales and marketing, finance, design, HR, Legal, just this massive mix of everybody, all the roles you could think of in a com…”
Rachitsky: Every product-led growth company eventually builds a sales team
“Every product-led growth company ends up building a sales team, 100% of them, including Atlassian, which had product-led growth for a long time.”
Atlassian spends 10-20% less on marketing than competitors due to virality
“Atlassian spends maybe like 10, 20 percentage points less on marketing than the equivalent competitors because it's viral.”
Dietrich: Atlassian Spent 2x-3x More on R&D Than Benchmark SaaS Peers
“And so here we're spending two times, three times as many dollars in R and D as many other companies that we benchmark against to make a product that really sold itself.”
Dietrich: Atlassian Took No Outside Funding Except One Liquidity Round Pre-IPO
“Atlassian was a super unique company and a super unique point in time because the founders never took outside money except for one late stage financing to kind of buy out some early employees to give some liquidity. So we never had VCs or private equity that h…”
Miller: Cross-functional leaders should negotiate explicit contracts for role expectations
“The exercise, especially with leaders in an org is to have them sit down and write them for each other. So Alassian has some of this that they do in the form of playbooks, but it's basically I, as a product leader, I'm going to write down what I think the expe…”
Nikita Miller: Trello and Atlassian required core overlapping hours for remote teams
“I do think that the Trello and Atlassian, I think did this really well, is having standards around a couple of things. The biggest one I think was overlapping work hours. So everyone had general flexibility, but there were some set of hours where everyone need…”
Atlassian closes $200,000 enterprise deals entirely through self-serve
“You can see Atlassian closing 200 K deals self-serve.”
Cheng: Atlassian report shows 40% of product teams do not experiment
“I just read this Alassian
state of product report.
And it was like, 40% of product teams, like basically don't run experimentation at all.”
Clowes: Atlassian kept 10% of users in a permanent global experiment holdout
“At Adassian, we did something similar. We had a global holdout group, actually, that was held out of all experiments. There was an interview, experiment platform couldn't target that group at all. So, 10% of all people never saw anything ever.”
Clowes: Atlassian reached 80,000 customers without any direct sales force
“When I joined Atlassian, and like I shared with you, we had no Salesforce at all, actually at all. Literally nobody to sell the software, it sold itself or it didn't get sold at all. And we grew to have 80,000 customers.”
Crusson: Atlassian's Point A incubator selected only three products from 100 pitches
“There were a hundred pitches, and out of it came out three products that basically went through all the different stages of it.”
Atlassian's stock jumped from $60 to $70 after shutting down HipChat
“Yeah, it was actually, it was noticed by the market in that as soon as we did that, our stock price went up, which was, and I think it was 60 dollars back then, and it went up to 70.”
Cannon-Brookes delayed Jira Product Discovery's launch over ugly design standards
“And one of the founders, Mike, went, no, you're not. That thing is ugly. I do not want to look at it. It needs to, you know, level up with the rest of the Atlassian design standards. Our customers have expectations from us on that front, like your stuff is fun…”
Crusson: Atlassian aimed to win enterprise communications before Slack and Teams
“I worked on HipChat and Stride. HipChat was one known, Stride less so we were trying to win the enterprise communications market before Slack and Microsoft Teams came about.”
Crusson: 70% of HipChat's code remains in Atlassian's platform today
“So, I would say that in terms of code, purely in terms of code, 70% of what we wrote for HipChat is, is, is probably still in the Atlassian platform today.”
Crusson: Point A stage gates require a 6-pager reviewed with Atlassian's founders
“So we basically write a six pager. That looks at all the different aspects of all the questions that we're going to answer. And then we are in a meeting with the point A stakeholders and the founders of Atlassian. And everyone reads that page for about 15 minu…”