Atlassian Stephen Sifers shares his banana bread recipe 🍞 and what makes a successful team

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We're rounding out our week of recipe inspration from Atlassians with @Stephen Sifers, who shares the banana bread recipe he's perfected, what he likes about baking, and what makes a successful team.

Tell us about your role and team at Atlassian! What’s your favorite Atlassian value?

I’m Stephen Sifers, Community Product Lead. At Atlassian I work as a conduit between Support and Marketing, ensuring we’re partnering when possible. Along with working with in leadership and product support teams to get Support into Community and understand the in’s and out’s of our Community.

My favorite value is ‘Be The Change You Seek’. Knowing it’s up to us to break the cycle and create better and more productive ways of doing the same and/or new things. Always knowing it’s up to each and every one of us to change the future and advocate for making things better for everyone helps me have a clear goal of why we do the things we do.

We heard you love to bake! How did you start learning, and what do you love most about it?

I do love to bake, and I’ve done it out of a hobby and something enjoyable to do with free time. Taking a recipe, breaking it down and re-creating it to become your own while doing incremental testing to improve it is something I really enjoy. I actually use Confluence to track my recipes to manage my own comments and revert ingredient changes that didn’t work out just right.

Baking allows me to plan, create, and enjoy. The best part about it is I have something I can readily and easily share with others.

Do you have a favorite recipe that you’d like to share?

I have a banana bread recipe that took years to perfect and I think I’m as close as I can get…..for now. Enjoy the recipe, and I’ll look forward to seeing and hearing how the results turned out.

That banana bread though

Ingredients

• 4 overripe Bananas (I leave my ripe bananas in the freezer)

• 2 2/3 cup flour

• 1 tbsp Almond Extract

  • Food Allergy; Replace with Vanilla

• 1 tbsp Cinnamon (Optional)

• 2 cups brown sugar

• 2 tsp baking soda

• 8 oz Sour Cream, The secret ingredient

• 1/2 tsp salt

• 1 stick butter

• 2 large eggs

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 300 f / 150c

2. Mix everything together

   1. (If you don’t have a 4.5 quart mixer; Use a potato masher to mix everything, leaving it a little lumpy)

3. Fill a bread medium bread pan to half.

   1. Ensure the batter stays cold (Since you’re using frozen bananas).

4. Bake until golden brown and crust cracks.

   1. Half Loaf; Normally about 45 minutes.

   2. Full loaf; Normally about 60 minutes.

5. Stick with a toothpick to ensure cooked all the way.

What kind of kitchen collaborator are you?

With any recipe, I’m always looking for feedback and ways to improve. I really enjoy cooking/baking and understanding how the textures, smells and tastes, and presentations are interpreted by others to learn the most to improve.

Being able to show take a decent recipe and make it amazing from someone's feedback and then sharing the results with that person really makes the whole process worth it. Pro Tip; this applies to all aspects of life.

What’s a go-to “ingredient” or quality that successful teams have?

Being open to change and new perspectives is the go-to ingredient to the best teams. If there is one thing I’ve seen from successful teams it’s how receptive, responsive, and adaptive they’ve been to feedback and new ideas. A team that can trust and build one another is capable of creating the most amazing outcomes.

But just like a recipe, this requires you to have quality ingredients that compliment and contrast one another to bring out the best parts of each other.

Having a team of just salt will taste, well, salty. But having a bit of salt, water, sugar, yeast, and flour you’ll have basics needed to make a Loaf’ly team. Combined them with another team of Lettuce, Tomatoes, and Bacon; then you’ll have an unstoppable BLT. dad jokes

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Thanks, Stephen! Don't forget to get your Great Atlassian Bake Off submissions in, and check out all the fun using #atlassian-bake-off.

[Patrícia Fortunato Montenegro]

That's nice; I love Banana Bread!

Tasty and nourishing 😃 !

Thanks for sharing, Stephen and @Sharon Tan !!

[Kristin Lyons]

I love banana bread! This looks amazing :)