What does it actually mean to change something?

[#1]

That's a question we kept asking ourselves the week Atlassian announced this year's Partner of the Year categories. "Marketplace Change-Maker" It's the kind of title that sounds bigger than the work that earns it, and we wanted to be honest about which side of that line we were on.

The photo above is from Partner Accelerate in Anaheim. @Pankaj Jangid and @Meenal-Optimizory holding the trophy with Brian Duffy, Atlassian's CRO, and the Atlassian Partner team. We'll come back to that moment in a second, but first the part that actually matters, what we changed, and why we think it added up to this.

The honest answer was never one thing. It was a handful of small shifts that compounded over years. We changed how we ship, with tighter cycles and fewer roadmaps written in a vacuum. We changed how we listen, customer calls stopped being a sales function and quietly became a product function, and the roadmap started following the conversation instead of the other way around. The result wasn't dramatic in any single quarter, but if you stack the quarters end to end, the product you get at the bottom of the pile looks meaningfully different from the one at the top.

We changed how we show up in the community too. ACE chapters, App Central, sessions at Team. Not because someone drew it up as a marketing plan, but because the people building on Atlassian are the same people we wanted to learn from, and the only way to do that properly was to be in the room. Somewhere along the way, that changed our own idea of what a Marketplace vendor could look like on a stage like this. Same field, same standards, no asterisks.

Twelve apps, one philosophy. Complete what Atlassian started, and stay close enough to customers to know when something needs to change. That has been the bet from day one.

So thank you. To the customers who told us what was broken before we noticed; to the partners who carried our apps into rooms we couldn't walk into ourselves; to Brian and the Marketplace team at Atlassian for building a place where the work speaks louder than the postcode; and to every person at Optimizory who shows up to build for users they've never met. None of this is on the trophy, but all of it is.

Here's the photo from Award Night in Anaheim and a proper thank you.

[Anahit Sukiasyan]

Congratulations to the whole team! 🎉

[Shivam Sharma - Optimizory]

Thank you, @Anahit Sukiasyan !! 😃