Graduates

What do you focus on in your job?

As a Product Manager, I’m responsible for the strategy and the roadmap of the products and platforms that we’re working on at Atlassian. The PM role is very specifically understanding the customer, working very closely with the problems that customers have, and trying to really get to the root of the problem. What customers generally tell you is not the actual problem that they’re having or the solution they actually need. I work on determining what it really is, from a bunch of different quantitative and qualitative sources, and build a strategy around that.

What was your first Atlassian experience like?

Seven years ago, at the end of my third year at college, I started an internship at Atlassian. I showed up and I reported to the VP of product. At the time, the company didn’t even have 300 people. There were 10 product managers—I was number 11. On my first day, the VP of product asked me to shadow her, so we walked into her office. She said, “Hey, this is Mike Brooks. He’s the CEO.” I had no idea this guy was, I clearly didn’t do my research.

What was your favorite shipit moment?

My team won a Ship-It in San Francisco, we created an editing function for Hipchat messages. It sounds really trivial, but we did it in 24 hours. Scott happened to be in San Francisco at the time, so he gave me the trophy and shook my hand. Then he whispered in my ear, “You haven’t won Ship-It until you’ve won a Ship-It in Sydney, so don’t let this get to your head.” Ouch!

What's your favorite Atlassian value and why?

Be the change you seek. When someone’s new and they say, “this is broken,” and you say, “why don’t you fix it?” Their eyes glaze over and they say, “I can’t do that.” You encourage them and help them to fix it. Making sure you always believe in that value is so important.

What do you focus on in your job?

As an information experience writer, it’s kind of a hybrid between a tech writer and a UI writer. Traditionally, tech writers focus on a lot of in-depth product documentation—but a) no one reads the instruction manuals anyway, and b) the biggest challenge users have isn’t just knowing what’s inside their products, but understanding how to use them the right way. That’s where we come in. So what we’re really thinking about when someone gets inside an app is, are we making the app sound friendly? Does the copy in the app make you as a user feel like someone has got your back?

What was your first Atlassian experience like?

At my interview, I said, “I don’t want to work somewhere that only cares about KPIs and sales. I want to work somewhere where I can feel like I’m making an impact. I want to be able to challenge the status quo and come up with new ideas, rather than just doing what I’m told.”

My interviewer said, “Don’t worry, that’s not going to be an issue. They encourage you to push back and give your own opinion and really care about what we’re doing with the company.” I was so excited to come here when I heard that.

What was your favorite shipit moment?

I like that we’ll all come up with ideas, and even if you don’t finish it and it’s not actually perfect and it doesn’t get shipped, it’s still great. Because it inspires the other teams, and maybe they will end up actually continuing to work on something like that later on. It feels like nothing is ever wasted.

What's your favorite Atlassian value and why?

Open company, no bullshit. At a lot of other companies, it feels like everyone’s being fake and unwilling to bring up problems in their environment. Here, if there’s something you don’t like, you can complain about it. You can bring your whole person to work, and not feel like you have to tow the company line or drink the Kool-Aid, and that’s really cool.

What do you focus on in your job?

I’m a Java developer, and I work on the server-to-cloud migrations team. Our goal is currently for people to migrate from our server products to our cloud products— at the moment, the experience is pretty crap. So we’re trying to automate a lot of stuff and make it a much smoother, more seamless experience.

What was your first Atlassian experience like?

I had a friend who started here, and they explained it in a way that sounded like a fantasy place that doesn’t really exist. They had a Hack House where all the grads went to a beach house, and innovation time where you can work on something that isn’t part of Sprint work. It sounded like they were given a lot of flexibility and a lot of room to make a massive impact, even starting at the Grad level.

When I spoke to people, they were really enjoying everything they were doing, and working on new exciting technologies, and for me that was just, you know, where I wanted to be.

What was your favorite shipit moment?

We have five days a year to spend on a charity project for the Atlassian Foundation, and I’d already used mine on building a dog rescue website, but it wasn’t nearly done. So I just thought about it again during Ship-It, and decided to ask if anyone would like to join my team working on this project. And suddenly, we grew from a team of three or four to a team of 15. Every hour, someone would contact me and say, “I’ve heard what you’re doing, and can I join?” The progress that we made in that 24 hours was absolutely unreal.

What's your favorite Atlassian value and why?

Open company, no bullshit. I don’t really like flowery crap, going around and trying to sugar coat everything. I like that you get straight to the point, everyone totally doesn’t mess around, and then you solve really good problems quite quickly as a result.