Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery)

June 16, 2024

AI Summary

5 min read

Tanguy Crusson, head of Jira Product Discovery at Atlassian after a decade there, recounts building new products from zero to one amid the company's scale. He details failures like HipChat and Stride, acquisition integration with Statuspage, and a successful internal pitch for IT operations that stalled, contrasting them with the hit Jira Product Discovery via the Point A incubator.

Challenges in large-company innovation
Atlassian benefits from 300,000 customers across segments, flat decision-making via a network of influencers, and resources like research teams and customer access, easing opportunity spotting over startups. Yet success demands $100 million-scale outcomes matching established products, with pitfalls like uniform metrics (e.g., monthly active users too early), unvalidated assumptions from past playbooks (e.g., IT-led bottom-up adoption), over-investment without scarcity, and limbo without "why now" urgency.

Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.

Read Full Summary →

Free • No credit card required

Open in App

What you'll learn

1 `* (00:01:45) **Guest intro and Atlassian 0-1 background**`
2 `* (00:04:52) **Atlassian advantages for new products**`
3 `* (00:10:41) **Core challenges of 0-1 in large companies**`
4 `* (00:13:53) **HipChat/Stride failure: key lessons**`
5 `* (00:34:04) **Statuspage acquisition: integration pitfalls**`
6 `* (00:48:35) **Failed IT Ops pitch: urgency matters**`
7 `* (00:56:00) **Jira Product Discovery success via Point A**`

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Tanguy Crusson is the product lead for Jira Product Discovery at Atlassian. In his more than 10 years at the company, he has been instrumental in taking several new products from zero to one, including HipChat, Statuspage, and Jira Product Discovery. In this episode, we dive deep into the struggles of innovating and building new products inside a large company. Tanguy shares candid stories about what worked, what didn’t, and his many hard-won lessons learned about how to successfully build 0 to 1. We cover:

• Why large companies with so many advantages still fail at creating new products

• Lessons learned from building HipChat

• How to avoid common pitfalls like competitive myopia and premature scaling

• Lessons learned from the acquisition and integration of Statuspage

• Insights from the success of Jira Product Discovery

• Tactics for protecting your “ugly babies”

• The power of “lighthouse users”

• The importance of having a “why now”

• Much more

—

Brought to you by:

• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security

• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs

• Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace

—

Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-0-to-1-inside-atlassian-tanguy-crusson

—

Where to find Tanguy Crusson:

• X: https://x.com/tanguycrusson

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanguy-crusson-99832a

—

Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

—

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Tanguy’s background

(02:30) Tanguy’s journey at Atlassian

(07:03) The challenges of innovating in large companies

(10:42) Atlassian's high bar for excellence

(12:58) The HipChat story: successes, failures, and lessons learned

(20:47) Lessons learned from building HipChat

(33:49) Statuspage: a journey of perseverance

(39:48) Acquisition challenges and lessons

(47:22) Strategic decisions: build, buy, or partner?

(48:17) Learning to articulate "why now"

(54:08) A quick summary