Jira Day 2020 Remote Edition highlights, pt. 1: needs and processes

[#1]

What a week it was! While NASA and SpaceX were preparing the Dragon Crew flight to the International Space Station, we broadcast Jira Day 2020 Remote Edition to the whole universe. For the former, this was the first-ever commercial space flight, for us - our first-ever fully remote event. Coincidentally, both were a huge success thanks to Atlassian tools. From over 2700 registered people, 1736 were with us on board for at least one of four days, and only one-third of them were from Poland. We tried to get as close to live experience as possible with 32 expert talks, 11 AMAs, 3 online training sessions, and more perks, which you can read about below.

Answering the world's current needs

All businesses are facing a challenging time in 2020. It forces the companies to shift to the reality of remote work. We wanted to give those struggling a helping hand and some advice down the road, so instead of canceling the eighth edition of our annual on-site Jira Day conference, we moved it online and tried to answer the current problems that have arisen worldwide. That’s why in the event's agenda there were lots of practical tips on how to handle processes like project management, customer support, and team communication in a remote way. We’ve tried to show how Atlassian products can support our efforts in building a digital workplace, as well as in different aspects of everyday work.

The keynote of the conference contained the guidelines for changing the business and still scaling up. Chris Moojen, Head of Sales for EMEA & APAC at Atlassian, showed that digital transformation can actually future-proof any company and help build competitive advantage with technology. The common advantages are maintaining rapid delivery at scale, global talent acquisition, improved teams' productivity, and greater responsiveness to customer feedback. Chris also stressed that we should start the transformation from our people and practices, and then gradually add tools as we become more mature with it. He provided various examples of successfully transformed companies such as LEGO, ANZ Bank, Domino's, and Audi.

Improving the processes

Then Tom Harris and Chris Cooke from Old Street Solutions shared tips and tricks for managing customer success across multiple distributed teams. Basically, customer success nowadays can be defined and shared throughout all the teams working on the product. Support teams should be collaborating as much with marketing and sales as they do with product development - this way, the overall customer experience would become more unified, and the support quality would influence more purchase decisions. Tom and Chris showed how automating communication and follow-ups (and still keeping a human tone of voice) can help respond to support tickets as quickly and precisely as possible, even in the remote setting.

While their case is all about efficiency, as they're still a small team, a similar topic from a larger perspective was picked up by our own Atlassian Apps Support Specialists Barbara Kowalczyk and Klaudia Schon. The girls showed the team's current workflow involving customers into product development from receiving a feature request in Jira Service Desk, through analysis and writing requirements, design, development, testing, and releasing - all inside the Atlassian suite using a couple of Marketplace apps. The transitions are automated and synchronized with each other, so the information and attachment flow is instant from developers to the customer and vice versa.

Here's how this cross-team automated workflow looks like

Listening to the customers and aligning with their needs is the new black now when everyone has high expectations and values tailored experience. Lex Kovalenko, Senior Product Manager at Spartez Software, shared the best practices on building product features that customers actually want:

• Talk to users;
• Decompose feedback and address the root causes;
• Build genuine relationships;
• Observe how the product is used;
• Spend time on testing prototypes.

Lex' teammate Paweł Wodkowski followed up with the multi-layered topic of accessibility also known as a11y. He provided some handy do's and don’ts of inclusive design, examples of improvements like new priority icons in Jira 8.0, as well as shared the story of his journey to becoming an expert in this area. It appears to be a very challenging task for a product designer to empathize with an impaired customer persona, so Paweł admitted himself that Atlassian has still some work to do adjusting its products to various perception conditions, but it's becoming more and more important to the team, as the company bets all-in on diversity and inclusion, and a11y product design has been globally discussed over the last years.

Read the second part of the article to learn about connecting the teams and mastering the tools in the new reality.