Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira)
February 4, 2024
AI Summary
5 min readMegan Cook, head of product for Jira at Atlassian, shares practices for fostering team innovation, remote effectiveness, securing executive support, launching products, and maintaining dominance in a competitive market.
Fostering psychological safety and play
Cook prioritizes psychological safety to counter fear-driven incrementalism, especially post-COVID ambiguity. Her team runs biweekly peer feedback groups where PMs at all levels review rough drafts like strategies or experiments, building trust through repeated exposure. Semiannual onsites mix fun, craft workshops taught by peers or experts, and senior leader failure stories to normalize setbacks. A new "$10 game" allocates time across personal priorities with managers, revealing overloads. Weekly "Fight Club" sessions with her engineering and design leads dedicate 30 minutes to air conflicts early, improving relationships.
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What you'll learn
- 1 *(00:00:18) Fight Club: Weekly conflict resolution ritual**
- 2 *(00:04:29) Building psychological safety and play**
- 3 *(00:15:24) Remote work best practices for PMs**
- 4 *(00:24:16) Getting executive buy-in on ideas**
- 5 *(00:37:24) CSAT improvement case study**
- 6 *(00:46:17) Launching new products like Jira Work Management and Product Discovery**
- 7 *(00:58:00) Sustaining Jira's dominance**
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Megan Cook is the head of product for Atlassian’s Jira software, which is used by 75% of Fortune 500 companies, has over 125,000 customers globally, over 15 different products, and is by far the most popular project management tool in the world. Megan has been at Atlassian for just under 11 years, and before this role, she was an analyst, a developer, and an Agile coach. In our conversation, we discuss:
• How to get buy-in for your ideas
• The value of starting small
• How, and why, creating space for play is so essential
• How Jira stays ahead of endless competition
• Atlassian’s approach to launching new product lines
• Tactical tips for making remote work, work
• A personal failure and the lessons learned from it
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Find the transcript for this episode and all past episodes at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-atlassian-launching
Today’s transcript will be live by 8 a.m. PT.
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Where to find Megan Cook:
• X: https://twitter.com/meganwcook
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cookmegan
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Megan’s background
(03:50) Creating space for play and psychological safety on teams
(07:36) Peer feedback groups
(10:30) Sharing stories of failure
(13:33) The “10 dollar” game for priorities
(15:24) Advice on making remote work, work
(24:16) Getting buy-in for your ideas
(28:33) The importance of staying open-minded
(34:05) A quick summary of how to get buy-in
(36:45) Fighting the good fight
(38:15) Identifying customer pain points
(43:04) Starting small and showing success
(46:08) Launching new product lines
(53:35) Atlassian’s gated process for new product ideas
(58:00) How Jira stays ahead of competitors
(01:04:28) Learning from failure More from this podcast