Turn Rovo into a practical teammate with skills: public class 28th August

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Thanks to everyone who joined us for the session! We looked at Platform Skills and discussed how Rovo is most useful when you give it a clear task, inspect the result, and keep refining. In our first public session on Rovo Platform Skills, Kristjan and I used our thus-far underutilized acting skills to recreate a release-readiness scenario and show how platform skills can turn scattered work context into a researched next step.

We followed a new delivery lead who needed to understand the state of a notification-reliability release. The work and the evidence were spread across Jira, Confluence and connected tools. Rather than manually collecting each signal, we used skills to investigate, draft and refine.

Start with the task you need to complete

Skills are explicit, focused actions. You can invoke one directly with /skill-name, or describe the outcome you need in natural language.

The session focused on four practical Skills and patterns:

• Get Data Insights to bring together relevant work, documentation, and signals from connected sources.

• Write Status Update to turn evidence into an audience-ready draft.

• Explain Workflow to help make sense of an unavailable Jira transition.

• Conversation sharing to hand context to another person without asking them to start from scratch.

The result still needs your judgment. A Skill can quickly gather together context across your Atlassian apps to prepare useful material. Then you review and make sure the recommendations check out. You decide what is accurate, relevant, and ready to share.

Skills, tools and agents: a useful distinction

One learner asked when to use a Skill rather than a custom agent. And I can answer with my favorite response: “That depends.” It is not an either-or decision. A Tool is one defined action, such as sending a Slack message or editing a Confluence page. A Skill is a reusable set of instructions that can combine tools with reasoning, telling an agent how to approach a particular task well. A Rovo agent can use both tools and skills to complete work. It is less a philosophical debate and more a sensible division of labor.

New: add Rovo Skills to agents in Studio

The class coincided with an exciting update to Rovo Studio relating to Skills. On 28 August, Atlassian announced an open beta that lets customers building custom agents in Rovo Studio add supported Rovo Skills directly to their agents. If you’d like to check out Skills in Rovo Studio, open an agent’s details, select Edit, go to Skills, then choose Add skills. Select Read on a skill card to review its instructions and required tools before adding it.

During the beta, some skills available in Rovo Chat aren't yet available in agents, and slash-command invocation doesn't work in agents. Ask the agent for the outcome you need instead.

Use connected context, with the same permissions

Rovo can draw on connected sources such as Jira and Confluence when your organization has made them available. It respects the permissions you already have in those sources. That means a response is grounded in accessible work context, not a separate copy of company information. Atlassian’s Teamwork Graph helps make that connection possible.

Refine a draft instead of accepting the first response

We used a status-update skill to create an evidence-based starting point and then refined it through follow-up prompts. You can ask for a shorter version, a specific word count, a different audience, or stronger emphasis on risks. Treat the first result as a working draft.

Verify actions that matter

One learner raised an important problem: Rovo sometimes says it created a Confluence page or Jira work item, but the expected item isn't visible. If something feels unclear or doesn't work as expected, ask Rovo what it did and why.

In this case, ask Rovo to show its evidence:

• “Give me the URL to the page.”

• “Where exactly is this task?”

• “I cannot see it. Did you create it?”

You can also use reverse prompting to ask why it took an action or why the result differs from what you expected. Try “Why did that not work?” “What permission prevented this task creation?”, or “Why did you word it that way?” Think of questioning as feedback or quality assurance, with good manners. If you can understand why or how Rovo works, you can both work together even more effectively. And then, of course, verify any important item you create before you move on.

Try it yourself

Choose one real piece of work that needs a status update. Ask Rovo to gather the current evidence, then draft a 100- to 180-word update for your intended audience. Review the sources, refine the wording, and share the conversation if others need the same context. Start with a small, low-risk task. Save the grand orchestration of civilization for later; I usually schedule a slot on Wednesday afternoons for that task :)

Watch the session recording

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Keep learning with free classes

Want to build your Rovo skills further? Explore the Atlassian Community Learning calendar to find upcoming free classes, live learning sessions, and opportunities to learn alongside other Atlassian users.

See you in the next session!