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AMA on Tuesday, April 7th, with Anu Bharadwaj: Atlassian's Head of Product Management

Bridget_822i4b

Hello Community members!

On Tuesday, April 7th, from 3-4 PM PST, Anu Bharadwaj, Atlassian's Head of Product Management will be LIVE on Community to answer your questions.

In case you missed it, you can watch her Remote Summit 2020 session recording here: Atlassian Enterprise Cloud - Scaling the Future of Cloud

Feel free to submit your questions before the AMA goes live - Anu and her team will be sure to address them when the time comes.

We look forward to reading your questions - don't hold back!

Comments

John Funk

Well, you said don’t hold back, so here we go. I know this will probably not make me very popular in the Community or in Atlassian ranks. But I feel it is important to represent the users to some degree.

This is my third attempt at this (and my last 😊 ), but honestly, I was very disappointed with the Product Leadership AMA on Monday a week ago. My question, which I paste again below, received the most votes, but it was well after the first half hour of the AMA before it was even addressed. And then it was clear that the question made people uncomfortable and the full question was not even read. And as a result, in my opinion, it received corporate doublespeak and was never truly addressed. I hope that can happen today.

In the meantime, I have seen several emails with comments on open requests that validate my concerns even further. I include some of them here – simply read some of the latest comments on each request.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ID-6677

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-17783

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-67563

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-6999

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-70555

The first two above have more than 1000 votes and have been in the Gathering Interest state for 17 years and 11 years respectively. Frankly, that’s insulting to users.

As others have commented before, it seems that Atlassian has decided certain paths and is pursuing them regardless of customers’ requests/comments – like the move to Cloud, New Issue View, Next-gen projects, etc. While outstanding requests for years get ignored.

One of the links above is aimed at the New Issue View and has many comments from users about how they do not like the interface. AND there are already more than 100 sub-tasks linked to it for bugs and changes. That means that dozens, probably thousands, of other requested features have gone undone while the new interface was developed, put in place and corrected.

Granted, there are lots of grumblers out there and always will be. But I don’t think the grumblings related to these types of things is unfounded. And as stated above, this will be my last time to grumble about it.

So, I guess my question would be “Is Atlassian Leadership aware of these problems, aware of the lack of communication on these requests by Atlassian personnel and is there any plan to change how the requests are handled.

Below is a part of my original question for that AMA last week that was not addressed (again in my opinion):

My question is around selection of features to implement. And, I guess I have two different areas to explore.

There are requests that have hundreds or even thousands of votes yet are ignored. I say ignored because some have been open for YEARS. I know of at least 2 that celebrated their 17th birthday this month. That’s incredible! To not have a policy to quickly deal with the requests – either do them or scrap them – is very baffling to users. It’s also not good customer service. And often, there are no comments at all from Atlassian personnel for months or years about what is going on with requests. This is extremely frustrating for customers.
I know you have a document that details what process you go through for feature selection, but frankly, the end result that I get from the document is that you pretty much do what you want to do regardless of what customers are asking for. That’s another reference to requests that have hundreds or thousands of votes. But then things like the new issue view or next-gen comes along with no apparent supporting requests for those – certainly not thousands asking for those. And the amount of negative comments about those products/features shows the frustration of customers.

Russell Zera

Can you speak to the roadmap of Jira Next-Gen and Jira Classic as it pertains to Cloud customers? Presently it seems as though there are multiple offerings with no plans to sunset Classic in favor of the Next-Gen, but at the same token, the Next-Gen does not have the capabilities necessary for some of your customers (like myself) to be able to use it on the enterprise level to fit their needs, So I would like to know if there is a roadmap that maps the MVP features of Jira Next Gen that Atlassian feels must be in place prior to sunsetting Jira Classic?

John Funk

I should have also included this link above - sorry for the oversight:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Answerers/Atlassian-backlog-management/gpm-p/1336963#M275%3Futm_source=atlcomm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=immediate_general_post&utm_content=topic

anu

Good question Russell. We are impatient to move quicker to bring more capabilities to next-gen projects too. The best place to see what we’ve shipped for next-gen so far and what’s in the works is our public next-gen roadmap: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/whats-new/next-gen#overview

That said, we’re painfully aware that having this bifurcated experience is making it more difficult for many teams to grow on Jira Software Cloud. While we’ve done our best to ensure that the newest capabilities for enterprise customers in Jira Software Cloud, like automation and advanced roadmaps, work across both classic and next-gen projects, we also know that it’s bound to create a sense of unease for Jira administrators like yourself.

Let me be clear: we have no plans to sunset Jira’s classic projects at this time. We’re really proud of the progress we’ve made in simplifying Jira with next-gen projects, but we’ve heard loud and clear that they are not yet fully ready for enterprise customers. We are working through the best path to reconcile both project types and make next gen more powerful.

So to directly answer your question, the link above is the best resource on what features are coming to Jira next-gen, but there is no “MVP” set of features that we believe we need to have to sunset classic projects because as of now, we’re not planning to sunset classic projects.

Darin Klein

@John Funk - THIS - "As others have commented before, it seems that Atlassian has decided certain paths and is pursuing them regardless of customers’ requests/comments – like the move to Cloud, New Issue View, Next-gen projects, etc. While outstanding requests for years get ignored.

Thank you for bringing this up again.

I love the Atlassian DC and Server products, but just can't get behind Cloud. I run a relatively large instance of it and we're pulling 80% back to on-premise (Large DC environment) this year. We'll still use Cloud, but it's just not right for the majority of our work.

Russell Zera

Love this response and thank you so very much! That is what I was hoping would be the answer and that we can continue to leverage some amazing things from both Classic and Next Gen capabilities. For what it's worth, I always imagined a world (insert your own movie trailer voice overlay here saying "In a world...") where you could leverage a base standard workflow as a template for projects (say "To Do", "In Progress", "Code Review", "UAT", "Done") for standardized reporting and alignment, but then embrace the Next-Gen team empowerment mechanism to allow teams to add custom steps on top of that template however they want, so long as they don't violate the enterprise underlayment (so if a team wanted to add "UX Review" between "Code Review" and "UAT" to better define the way they work, to the intent of JNG, they could do that and it wouldn't impact the larger alignment and ability for team members to join a new team quickly). This is something I would love to eventually have, because I truly want to have squads harness the power of JNG, but we do have to have some general commonalities and structure to enable us to operate at scale.

Thanks so much!

Russell Zera

I will say, as a Server to Cloud convert, that we have been finding immense success at large enterprise cloud adoption in my company. It took a little getting used to, but I honestly can say I PREFER Cloud to On-Prem now! What I will say is that I do understand and share the concern from @John Funk about not understanding the "Gathering Interest" status and the thresholds for customer votes to get a feature into a state where it is actively worked... It does FEEL sometimes that maybe the "Vote" functionality is a mechanism that is utilized to evaluate "Gathering Interest" but I don't know if there are thresholds. I also know that there are things that are much more complex to implement than to type, so I also give a lot of patience and understanding if something that is important to me, might not be a "stop the presses, guy here has a need" type effort. I do wish for more communication and transparency into what each status means and how the request and ticketing functionality works so that I know EXACTLY what each status means, how they progress, and have more clarity that I'm heard.

For what it's worth, I've been very lucky to have seen, on multiple occasions just how much Atlassian cares about their customers and the feedback they receive, which is why I try to share as much as possible that experience or what I have witnessed with others so that people can fully see just how much Atlassian creates as a result of customer feedback on issues like these! Maybe one idea could be to share that kind of data more regularly? Something like "% of features delivered this month that were customer requested/driven" or "Customer votes fulfilled this period" or something like that? Also communicating more about the UNBELIEVABLE amount of user testing that Atlassian does, and how many features they implement from those user research sessions?

TL/DR: Just spit-balling, but I think this thread may be more about possible improvements in customer communication on requests and tickets (Expectation Managemenrt), and less about the number of issues that Atlassian is releasing.

Kat Warner

I hope I am not too late for this question.

Could you follow up on the integration between Confluence Server and Trello?

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-45779

This is a significant usability issue for many of our customers (as a Solution Partner) and for our team communication (Confluence is where we could like all out streams of work to converge from Marketing's Trello Boards, to Dev's Jira backlogs, to Support's customer project tracking).

anu

Thank you, Russell. Yes, our goal is to have our project types be both simple and powerful. Tall order, taking us time to get there. Thank you for your patience

Alison Huselid

Kat - Thanks for calling out this issue as one that needs follow up.

Right now we don't have plans to add a Trello macro in Confluence Server/Data Center. We are instead first focused on improving the general usability and intuitiveness of existing macros based on feedback we’ve received. Once that effort is further along, we will re-evaluate introducing additional macros, including one for Trello.

We’ll go ahead and provide an update on the ticket with this current status and you can also watch our current near term efforts on our public backlog for Confluence here: https://jira.atlassian.com/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=2529