Congratulations Atlassian Marketplace on your first decade and to the next 10 years!

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Here is how Mibex has been part of this journey 

It’s great to be a part of this unique moment for Atlassian Marketplace, and celebrate the first decade with them. Mibex was founded in 2013 by Michael and Monica, and since then we’ve had a lot of changes, a lot of memories, challenges, and good times! The journey has been beautiful and rough, thus with a great team nothing is impossible to achieve and to overcome.

It’s almost cliché at this point to talk about how much has changed in the midst of the last two years – but that doesn’t stop it from being true.  The pandemic really did shift how we work by forcing distributed and remote working whether we liked it or not.  This new paradigm is one that needs fresh ideas, perspectives, and rituals to maintain the level of team cohesion and collaboration that we rely on to do what we do.

Here at Mibex, we recognized the risks of our team members getting out of sync and therefore losing the magic that comes with regular connection, brainstorming, and interpersonal interactions.  That’s why we’ve worked very hard to instill some pieces of team culture that were designed to capture some of what was being lost because we weren’t in the same office together.

As part of Atlassian’s focus on teamwork this month, we thought we’d share some of the things that we’ve done that might be of use to the rest of the community:

• Dedicated product owner app groups.  To maximize the impact of our collaboration efforts, we split our team into dedicated product owner app groups that most aligned with the pillars that those people were responsible for.  For us, this included a technical documentation group, a development productivity group, and a security app group.  By aligning our people like this we helped to proactively promote direct responsibility and this worked wonders in terms of keeping everyone pulling in the same direction.

• Regular sync calls.  We would have two calls per day where the current status of ongoing work was discussed and adjustments could be made if needed.  This was invaluable in terms of tracking progress, identifying bottlenecks, and finding solutions quickly as they were arising.  It also meant that everyone was aware of what the rest of the team was doing – which can be a tricky thing in a distributed work environment.

• Hackathons.  We started using the concept of ShipIt days to encourage our teams to take a new idea and build something from scratch in a very short space of time.  This was a wonderful experience both in terms of what we created and the team bonding that happened as a result.  You can read more about one of them here.

• Volunteering.  As a company, we are proud members of the Pledge 1% movement and that means that we dedicate 1% of our team’s time to hands-on volunteering for worthy causes.  We can’t tell you how fulfilling this has been and it is becoming a firm favorite for team cohesion and purpose.

• Book Clubs.  To encourage continuous development we also have two different book clubs where we discuss weekly various books and resources related to our work and the state of the industry.  This is a great way to break out of the routine and consider new ideas and perspectives that we might not have considered before.

All of this is accomplished while still celebrating the remote/hybrid ecosystem that gives our team the flexibility and agility that they need to do their best work.  While there are still some parts of brainstorming and idea collection that are best done in our safe haven (AKA the office), we’ve found that intentionally investing in these pillars has done wonders for keeping everyone engaged and empowered. And once we are back with our feet at our funky concrete, we indulge ourselves in mini table tennis tournaments to boost the energy, team spirit and believe it or not great productivity. It’s incredible what sport and social games can do to a team. 

We hope this has been helpful and we’d love to hear about what has worked for you!

Give back on the Marketplace’s 10th birthday

Install an app to give back. For every app installed on May 31st, Atlassian will donate $5 to Raspberry Pi Foundation, a nonprofit that helps put the power of computing and digital making into the hands of people all over the world.

Try out new apps and do something good at the same time! It’s a birthday celebration! Install an app today to give to future developers. Cheers to the next 10 years!