Atlassian Community AMA with Cameron Deatsch - thejiraguy.com X-Post

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If you have ever considered going after a Atlassian Community Leader status, you should. There are many benefits, but workshops and events put on by the Atlassian Community team are among my favorites. And that's what I'm here to talk about today.

Last week, I got to attend an "AMA" (Ask Me Anything) with Atlassian CRO Cameron Deatsch. And wow, so much was covered. Thankfully, I also got Atlassian's permission to share what was said with everyone! No, seriously, they went so far as to provide the transcript to make it easier! Special thanks to Erica Moss for moderating the event and Bridget Sauer for getting me the permission and transcript! So, let's dig into it!

What are you most Proud of this past year?

Erica Moss: We do have a lot of very specific questions we have some more high-level questions, so I'd love to start with, just kind of broadly, anything that you're most proud of in the past year, obviously there's been a lot of change we're living through unprecedented times, etc., etc., but what sparks joy for you, what are you proud of over the last year.

Cameron Deatsch: Yeah, and sadly I think in fiscal years, so let's go like July 2020. Do any of you remember Jay Simons, who was my predecessor? He was the President of Atlassian, short guy, played piano.

So I've worked with Jay since 2005, since out of graduate school. He has been a mentor, my boss, and one of my best friends. It still continues to this day; for many, many years. And last July, he basically left the company and I effectively took on his roles. So running Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Support. Which, you know, I put on a good face that I was confident, and I can go do, but also at that particular time COVID had hit everything. We had our smallest to new customer growth ever in the previous quarter like we normally did six to 7000 new customers in the previous quarter we've done like 3400 customers.

Obviously, we had the server end-of-life message coming out, and we were working on that. And a lot of the core metrics in the business just had uncertainty due to COVID and all those things.

Also, we have a strong leader like Jay leave. So it obviously puts a lot of transition in place of other leaders; you know, there's lots of change was all I can say. And, I was pretty stressed out, I'll just be perfectly honest, on it. The reality is a year later, now the company is in the best strategic, operational, financial, and from my perspective, leadership perspective that we've had since I've been here.

I'm most proud of the broader go-to-market organization that I'm the leader of, in that some people have stepped up and taken bigger roles, we've hired some incredible leaders from outside the industry, and outside the business small; specifically, Kevin Egan, who we hired from Slack to run the Enterprise part of the business.

And we've continued to execute on our roadmaps across the board in the business. So the thing I'm most proud of is the fact is that we went through - And Atlassian has some history here - like one of the hardest times that we could face as a company, and we've come out the other end largely healthier than we have than we've ever been. You know with more customers, like we got like 23,000 new customers. So the Atlassian world continues to grow and expand. Compared to 12 months ago, I'm completely blown idea that we're able to achieve that.

Will Team '22 be in-person?

Erica Moss: Well, speaking of unprecedented times, things are changing. We've been hosting Team virtually, and it's on the tip of everyone's tongue. Are we going to Vegas? What is the plan - Tell us everything!

Cameron Deatsch: I had to make sure I got permission - like a lot of these things, I checked permission ahead of time. So yes, we are having Team 22 in Vegas in early April of next year. We will be doing an online event, but it will be separate from the Team 22 events as we've realized that trying to do it in person and an online event makes like a shitty experience for both, so we are going to do them separately. So we are going to have a very good online event and a very good in-person event.

Obviously, we are going to take the health and safety of all of our employees, all the staff, and of course, all of you who attend as the number one priority. So, obviously, it will be different, but we want to get in person. We absolutely want to continue that event.

You will also see, I think, an evolution, as far as our events strategy in general beyond Team 22. So we hope to share even more there, but you should expect even more in-person events coming from Atlassian in the next few years. More regionally focused, more in-person smaller events, more market focus, and more individual product focus. Versus having just these giant "Get 10,000 people in a room rah, rah, rah!" We think that just the market opportunities are there if we can come closer to you and be more focused on our events strategy in general.

One of the challenges we face, as you all know, Atlassian has like 16 products now. It's hard to give information on each of the 16 products to our very different audiences in a single big Keynote presentation, so we're trying to be more focused on how we reach out.

But Yes, Team 22, it's on. Expect more details coming shortly

How do you assess the progress of Point A initiatives?

Erica Moss: What you said was kind of a great segue into some more product-specific questions that we have for you. Walter wrote in, and he says that he was very impressed by the announcement of the Point A program last year at Team 21. How do you assess the new products and initiatives that were announced - in terms of their contribution to the Atlassian fly-wheel? And similarly, how is customer adoption of those new initiatives as well as their involvement to improve the products?

Cameron Deatsch: So point A. If you look at the last few years, especially since Atlassian went public, we had all this money, and we bought companies, right? We bought Trello, and we bought Agilecraft, we bought Opsgenie, we bought Insight, we've been buying a bunch of Tech. Which is great - that's part of enterprise software - and we have to be good at it, you see a lot. But we realized a couple years back that we were getting too dependent or too heavily focused on inorganic Innovation, which is basically buying companies. And I said, " Hey, listen, why aren't we developing new stuff?" We still did ship-it, we still did all these internal innovation things, but the reality is the company was getting so big, it wasn't just that an inspiring engineer with an idea could get a product and launch it out; we needed more structure around it.

That was what the Point A program was. It was to ensure that we, actually, had structured investments as a part of our corporate strategy to drive organic innovation through new products. We've launched four new initiatives: Jira Work Management, Jira Product Discovery, Team Central, and Compass - All in various States of their maturity. Only Jira Work Management, today, you can actually purchase as a generally available product. And actually, as a Jira Software or JSM Customer, you get Jira Work Management for free right now.

How we measure the success of all these things largely is: we're trying to find adoption. Are we scratching an itch that our customers - or potentially new customers - would be interested in? Do we see some adoption? We're not looking to get 10s of thousands, but we're looking to get enough adoption to know that, "Hey, a certain portion of our customer base wants these tools."

And also, is it something we can scale on? Are the capabilities there? We're trying to partner deeply with the people in the early days, to ensure that we are building the right set of features and roadmaps behind those products. And then eventually, we have gates along the way. So if we need a certain amount of adoption and a certain amount of customer satisfaction, we will invest the next step to eventually take them and make them all generally available, so all of our customers can purchase them. We hold a pretty high bar. I think we've had 50 ideas to get these four out, and even those four, you know we'll have to get to a certain adoption before they get a price and we actually sell them.

The other interesting piece along those lines, the goal is like get them out as quickly as possible once we hit those gates. So if it feels like, "This is going a little bit slow here, I want to use this," it's on purpose. The reality is our customer base is getting gigantic, and we want to be very clear that if we launch a product and make it generally available to our customer base, that it's going to support the needs of all of our customers, both the very very big and the very very small. That's that's a pretty high bar right now, so it does take a while.

The other side of that is like we invest a good portion. We have a dedicated percentage of our R&D allocation towards those; and the same on the go-to-market side. So the cool part about this is, you should expect, like in general, four or five of these every year going forward. Mike and Scott made it clear now that - and I almost passed out at this -"Oh yeah, we're going to 100 products in our portfolio one day," And I'm like, "Oh God, Mike, you're killing me." But it's one of those where you know, our ambition is that there's plenty of team-related problems out there in the industry to solve, and there's many, many innovative ways to go solve them. That's our landscape, let's go do it and invest to go do it, and we have a good history of this. You know Jira Service Desk was a ship-IT project seven years ago. Now it's our third largest product and growing faster than anything else in our portfolio right, so we have a good track record; it just takes a while.

And this is where Mike and Scott, they can think five to ten years out there, like "Okay we'll get the ball rolling, and five years from now that's going to be a big part of our business." So that's how we view it.

Also, I'll prep you we will kill some of these products. And sometimes, it will be products that a portion of our customers will be really excited about, and it's always hard to kill those things. But we have to do that in order to take that development capacity and put it towards the other initiatives that we have more faith in. And that will be the nature of this program going forward. I think there are four or five more projects in the pipeline right now, which will continue in perpetuity, so expect a lot of innovation from Atlassian.

Will Atlassian Provide a "Cloud to Cloud" Migration Tool?

Erica Moss: Is there a plan to provide a "Cloud to Cloud" Migration tool to make the life of Jira Admins easier?

Cameron Deatsch: Yes, there actually is a Jira Cloud-to-Cloud tool in the works right now with our migrations team, it is currently being tested. i've heard yesterday, should be ended October, when you can get your hands on it. We do not have a Confluence-to-Confluence Cloud Migration tool in the pipeline yet, but please make your voice heard if that's needed. As many of you know, a lot of this comes down to this kind of federation of Jiras, both on Prem and Cloud across organizations. We had focused historically on the Server-to-Cloud migration tools, but we realized that a lot of consolidation in the Cloud is happening as well, and we've seen that too, and it should be available pretty soon. And everyone loves Jira migrations; I know every one of you gets up like, "I get to migrate Jira today."

When is the next Jira Data Center LTS Release?

Erica Moss: We are starting to see more questions coming about when the next JIRA Data Center LTS Release might be coming up. Can you give us a hint whether that might be version 8.20 or 8.21, and when it's be expected?

Cameron Deatsch: It's 8.20 and late October. Tom Butler, one of the heads of project management in the server organization, told me that yesterday. He wouldn't tell me with that amount of confidence, so it's completely confident and like almost to be released. So expect by the October, 8.20 is the next long term support release.
Will there be more user-oriented new features in Jira DC?

Erica Moss: Many of the features for data Center products have been under the hood and are appreciated by admins. Any thoughts on what the future holds for updates that end users can appreciate? Features that they can touch and feel to help improve their usage experience? He says a great example recently is comment emojis.

Cameron Deatsch: I'll be perfectly honest here. The data Center promise, value-prop, and strategy is around performance, scale, administrative control, full access to, and control over your data. You should not expect, nor should any of your end-users expect, a ton of end-user feature innovation in the Data Center products going forward.

My promise, there is, you get the scale and get full control of your data. That's a choice you have, but we've been more than honest that the bulk of our innovation, especially from an end-user perspective, is in our cloud products. And that we will do everything in our power to make sure that we address every one of your concerns in our Cloud products, I know it's a long list. And being the head of Server, and believe me, I'm a champion for every single server customer when I have to do this, but in the end, you also have for me is preserving this choice.

If you want full control of your data and never touch the Cloud you have that from Atlassian, and you're going to get perfect scale and a big marketplace to customize the hell out of Data Center till the end of time. If you want end-user feature innovation, and where Atlassian is putting the bulk of its R&D today, it's going to be in Atlassian Cloud. And that is a choice that you and your company's get to make. I know it's not the best choice everyone wants the best of both worlds across everything, but that's just not the nature of the technology, nor a company strategy today.

Will Atlassian get more Migration tools from other Platforms?

Erica Moss: One of the common asks in the community is centered around migrating from other products onto the Jira platform. It seems to me that Atlassian is missing an opportunity by not actively providing migration tools from various platforms. I do recall seeing this as part of the server platform. However, Cloud seems to be missing these features. I would appreciate your thoughts on this topic.

Cameron Deatsch: Oh man, remember when we had all those like migrate from competitive tooling up on the website? That was probably like 2012 2013 days. And actually, when I saw this question yesterday, I went like, we have a few marketplace importers to that companies have built, but yeah, most of them are on Prem today.

From an Innovation and R&D investment perspective, all of our migration developers are largely working on the server-to-cloud and data Center-to-cloud migration. That's the biggest strategic priority, that's the place where we need to continue to improve, and that's where most of our capacity has gone. That said, you're absolutely right, I think we have a bunch of importers for our server products from competitive offerings that are pretty old now and I don't know how good they work anymore. So this is a topic I will actually bring up today when I go to ExecOPS that that's a conversation we should at least have some sort of roadmap behind. And sadly, we don't.

The good part is the api's on Cloud. Because we basically had to get the server-to-cloud migrations working, we had to build a bunch of better api's to ingest that data, so the api's are there. I'm not i'm not sure how sophisticated they are through the CONNECT framework, but for those of you that are connected into the Community or into the Marketplace (and now last few of you are vendors out there), it I think it's a pretty good marketplace opportunity that I know customers would gladly pay for as well. So i'll continue to champion that internally; it kills me that that's a place where we actually I knew we got a bunch of growth and then we've kind of ignored our last few years.

What is your favorite Atlassian Product?

Erica Moss: What is your favorite Atlassian Product, and what is the feature you like best within that Product?

Cameron Deatsch: You can't pick a favorite one! I like Crowd a lot. You know, within Atlassian my the two products that I use every single day is Trello and Confluence. Like now granted, we have seven different Jiras running everything in this business; We have Jira Service Management for our Help Desk. And obviously, we have Jira Service Desk for our external support sites, and I use all those products, but the day-to-day work that I spend in every day is Trello and Confluence. I document all my one-on-ones in Confluence document, I document all of my personal tasks and team tasks. Each of my reports has a list in Trello. And then also we do a lot of writing big docs like our investor relations docs, or I'm writing a blog right now on Atlassian's pricing strategy, which I'm looking forward to all of your feedback on. And that's co-editing in Confluence, where will have five different people working on the Doc, and then Trello is the way I manage my personal life and that of my direct Team to ensure that tasks don't get lost. So that's my day to day, that's that's what I just am dependent on now. And the good part is likely have Team Central coming out there, that's something we've increasingly used at Atlassian to track our teams OKR's and big projects across the board, but that's currently my answer.

Is there an update on Team Managed Projects vs Company Managed Projects in Jira Cloud?

Erica Moss: I do have another question from Jack, and it seems to be a pretty technical question, so I'm going to pretend that I understand all of the words that I'm reading out loud here, but he says, "I would love to get an update on the future of cloud TMP versus CMP."

Cameron Deatsch: I got this Erica. So Team manage projects versus company manage projects or what historically this whole crowd called next gen versus classic projects to use the old language. And then even internally you'll hear some called it about bento view, which was the new issue of view that you see in company manage projects and donut world, which was effectively what we created Team manage projects all suites codenames.

To say that I've been in the thick of this ever since we started working on it five years ago, is an understatement. The answer to this specific question, and the question was: "Hey, I got a bunch of people that love creating Team manage projects, but then they're coming to me as the administrator and they want a bunch of Controls, workflows, and reporting. And it puts me in a tough spot because I can't do that in the team manage project, they have to do the company manage projects, and I hate having that conversation. Should I just turn off the Team manage projects?"

Tough question general answer is that this is a double-edged sword of Jira: infinitely flexible, which is awesome, but infinitely flexible, which sucks. And I know many of you are all jira experts, so you're all you're good at that delicate balance of allowing freedom for your end users, but also ensuring that you have some governance and control and there's no best way to do that. And this is one of those perfect examples where we've provided more flexibility, but also having a hard spot. My general answer on that is how comfortable are your end users with the extra step of working through you on all the changes that they want to make. This will slow down their ability to manage projects and make changes - not that any of you are slow - but if you're Jira admins serving many, many different users, you have to have a process for that. So, are they willing to make that trade-off of having the additional benefit of having that workflow and reporting done by someone else managing all this at the cost of them not being super flexible and not doing anything they want themselves.

You know, in general, the bigger you get and the more standardization you're looking for from your Jira deployment, the more that it's okay to turn off the Team manage projects and simply run the company manage projects. But that is a decision that I wouldn't want, as a Jira Admin, to just go do it. Survey your end-users, engage with them and talk about the trade-offs and get their feedback. And then, when you make that decision, communicate very loudly on why the decision was made to keep it on or off. Bring them in. I don't need to tell you all this, but that's the fun part of all of our products is, "How do you empower teams, while also driving some sort of standardization and governance across the tooling."

OK, so the other answer that I have on this: Megan Cook is the product manager in charge of all this - I think actually she'd be a great person to get on a Community AMA, so consider me signing her up even though she doesn't work for me. They do have a roadmap to continue improving Team Managed Projects to provide more administration reporting workflow capabilities. But that roadmap will take a while. As you know, eliminating schemes and replacing that with administrative capabilities, on top of individual projects, is a big effort and it's something will continue to have people on so be sure you should expect incremental improvements over the next few years, related to that as we close those gaps; it won't be a big bang release.

How do you determine what is part of the Core Jira Platform, and what goes to specific Jira Products?

Erica Moss: We have another question from Walter here - and I love this one because you touched on it a bit earlier. He starts with, "There was a day when Jira was just well Jira. Today there's Jira Software. Jira Service Management, and Jira Work Management." He continues, "I understand their target market-specific needs that are better addressed with targeted products, and we can see the value there. However, are you considering exchanging more of that work and functionality between the different products and teams? And along the same lines, are you regularly considering reviewing what core functionality has its place in the common Jira platform across all products."

Cameron Deatsch: Oh yes, I remember back in the day when it was just Jira and Confluence, and that's all going to deal with, and we Fisheye and Crucible and Bamboo and Crowd. So we always like making out lives more complicated. So yes, in addition to the three different Jiras, we also have four different editions: Free, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise, so you got that layer on top of that. And not let's not forget our Server, Data Center, and Cloud changes. So yeah, Jira has become...robust.

Let's go back.. and I see someone mentioned Greenhopper here. Yes! You know, anyone who still has a green hopper T-shirt, that thing is like "frame it" - that is worth money.

Anyways, let's go through the whole approach here. Everyone understands the big background. Originally, it was just Jira, right. And Jira was issues, projects, and workflows. That's all Jira was. Then we bought Greenhopper because it provided those issues in the board view. And all of a sudden, Jira became an agile product, and that thing took off. Largely between Starter licenses in 2008 and the Greenhopper acquisition made Atlassian what it is today. That is where Atlassian just truly inflected those to things back 12 or 13 years ago.

Then we had the marketplace where we continued to add more and more capabilities on top of Jira. So you have this Jira product and then an infinite amount of modules, plugins, or Apps - you know we'd call them 17 different things over the years - but they're all Apps now. And customers were customizing the hell out of it. We were quickly getting feedback that customers wanted and more guidance. I know all of you are very experienced community leaders who know all our products' ins and outs. We have 20,000 new customers coming in every single quarter that aren't as sophisticated.

Right, so they want more guidance of "Exactly what do I need to use? Don't make me have infinite configuration. Don't make me customize. Just tell me." For example, we'd get, "Hey, I'm a software development team; how do I use Jira properly?"

So that's what we really tried to do when we changed it from "Jira plus add-ons" to "Jira Software," "Jira Service Desk" - now Jira Service Management, and "Jira Core" - now Jira Work Management. So there will also be another Jira in the pipeline - Jira Product Discovery. And I generally believe we'll probably have more Jira-related products.

And the idea of that is to go after different potential market opportunities. As people are coming in the door with Jira Software and realize that it is not exactly what they want. It has the issues and workflows, but it's not for the use case I want.

So, who's in charge of all that? The good news is that a guy named Joff Redfern, our Chief Product Officer, is working behind all that stuff. There is a core Jira platform team that basically supports all the individual Jira product teams. Sadly, I'd say their job should be in the end to dictate what is common across all Jira experiences and what is unique to individual products. But, I'll be perfectly honest. The bulk of their energy has been over the last year to year and a half has been working on performance and scale to ensure that migrations work for people who want to go from Server to Cloud. So, but most of the time is ensuring we can get to 40,000 or 50,000 users on Jira Software, and that the common Jira platform is powerful.

And the other thing, so that you know, if Mike Cannon-Brooks were here, he would talk less about the Jira Platform and more about the Atlassian Platform. And that's the unique thing is that you have multiple Jiras out there, but all of our cloud products are increasingly powered by consonant Atlassian platform capabilities that are more than just Infrastructure. So like obviously Infrastructure, identity, commerce, security - that's all part of the core Atlassian platform, but we also have Atlassian shared experiences things like search, things like the APP switcher, things like "@" mentions. And hopefully, eventually level the whole common "team" concept that's powered across all Atlassian products: including Jira, but also Confluence, and so on. So you get more common Atlassian platform capabilities across these products.

I'll be perfectly honest; it's not crystal clear yet what capabilities we want common across all the Jira products and what will make common across all the Atlassian products this. This Atlassian Platform vs Jira Platform is both a strategic challenge and opportunity that we're continually pushing back on where that balance is. I know that we continue to over-invest in the Atlassian Platform to make all of this work.

My last piece here is the "interoperability of capabilities across the multiple Jira products" is top of mind. And the reason for that is, if you look at what we're actually trying to do, most of those Jira products are an expansion from the Jira Software customer base. So most people start with Jira Software with a software development team. Then Jira Service Management comes in when people say, "Hey are you tired getting all your feedback from customers and end-users in one system and then having to plug it into Jira? Why don't we have it all on the same product with your Service Management where you ingest requests, thendo all the work in Jira Software to close the loop." So there's much more work to ensure that that loop continues to close and link between the two - beyond issue-linking that we have today. So lots of work there. Increasingly, as Jira Work Management gets more and more adoption, you'll see that as well.

So the idea is that as we're trying to go after these new market opportunities, we want to ensure that in general, everyone wants that tied back to the work in Jira Software, and how do we make that sophisticated. I can't commit to "here's the roadmap behind all that," but it is part of the strategy that you can track work items across multiple Jiras and the multiple teams working on top of Jira. The only thing I'll add on top of that is now let's extend that out to Opsgenie, and let's extend that out to Confluence. Like it's beyond just the Jira world that we're thinking. We're thinking all of your work is managed across Atlassian products powered by the Atlassian platform, and how do we make sure that work is tracked outside of Jira as well.

Will we see a return of an in-person Team in the EU in 2022?

Jimmy Seddon: I've seen it mentioned multiple times and chat now, I'm going to just jump ahead and ask this now. Are there plans for an in-person event in the EU in 2022?

Cameron Deatsch: I would love it but not yet. But just expect a whole bunch more from the Atlassian event strategy. I wish I could commit to that right now, but no, we don't have a place. Believe me, I'm pushing not just EU but worldwide. I want to go more to where our customers are, I want to be in Nigeria. And maybe just two years to sit in on zoom not traveling at all that is making me want to go everywhere. So I'll continue to push for it, but I can't make a commitment.

As all of you know, the in-person world is still a little bit, uh, you know, hazy and, in general, Atlassian is extremely conservative and will watch out for the health of our employees and our customers.

Will there still be a Data Center option in 5 years?

Jimmy Seddon: So this one might be a sticky point but chat has asked, "There are still no plans to end data Center within five years, right?"

Cameron Deatsch: There are no plans to end data Center within five years, right. But honestly, we have very, very, very big government customers operating Atlassian products in bunker's that will never touch the Internet. That said, maybe there's one day out there where that part of our business is so small that we don't need to support it, but the reality is that will not be in the next five years.

Hopefully, each and every one of you will keep looking at the new stuff we release in the Cloud and go, "Oh, that's pretty interesting." And it doesn't all have to be "lift and shift." Just try the new stuff. From a "Technical Blocker" perspective, we've unblocked 60% of our on Prem customers today. You know you got Fedramp moderate coming out, you have HIPAA, you have SSI coming out, you'll BYOK encryption coming out, you have data residency in like four or five more countries in the next 12 months. You know that pus us on par with 90% of the top SAAS vendors out there when it comes to handling all the compliance objections.

The next big blocker that all of you will tell me about after compliance objections and scale is extensibility. We have to have 2700 on Prem Apps and 1400 cloud Apps; costumers say they need every one of their Apps and have also built a bunch of custom Apps. This is where you can see us and investing a ton in Forge to allow you all to build customizations on top of the Alaskan platform in our infrastructure as well as on our marketplace do that. That's obviously going to be a journey as well, it's one of those places where plenty of investment to ensure that you get all the extensibility customization you need in the Cloud.

Sorry, that's always the trail on after everyone asked about the future of Data Center.

What's Atlassian's threshold for asking on user requests for functionality?

Jimmy Seddon: Chat has asked, "What's Atlassian's threshold for asking on user requests for functionality?"

Cameron Deatsch: Just keep voting on tickets in https://jira.atlassian.com (JAC).

The threshold. Okay, being a product manager, there is no threshold. It's not like, "Okay, once it gets 1132 votes, we're going to build that feature." All of you have been around long enough to realize that's not how we do product management at Atlassian. Which is why JAC, where it's like, "here's our public roadmap and here's our public issue request," is this great double-edged sword. There have been huge internal arguments and debates about it. JAC has a great ability for customers to get us feedback on what's most important, but it's also the greatest tool for our customers to get really angry when they say, "That JAC tickets been open for 15 years, why haven't you done it yet."

The reality is, as all of you know, we will get more feature submission requests than we will ever be able to deliver. That's an inherent nature of having an open forum - whether it's powered by Jira or something else - any ideation forum will basically make it so that we inevitably set our customers up for disappointment because will always get more requests than we'll be able to go actually solve. When product managers make decisions, you can think of it like this. Being a PM is a rough job at Atlassian - and most of you who work for technology companies can understand this. The Product Manager has a strategic direction for the product. For example, "I want to make Jira Service Management, the best IT service management product in the industry - across all SMB and Enterprise customers." So that's the direction they are taking the product.

Second, is, I need to make my customers happy. My customer happiness comes from CSAT - in-person service, feature requests - JAC, Customer Support from my Team. So customer happiness is a bit ticket. "Make my existing customers Happy."

Then I have Atlassian Platform capabilities, or what Atlassia-wide corporate strategy thinks that are pushed out. So cloud migrations, Ecosystem, Atlassian Platform (Provide common search). So the PM's have a number of Atlassian Roadmap Items effectively forced upon them, like Atlassian ID and commerce, that also requires Development work to ensure that it is aligning with the rest of Atlassian and Corporate Strategy.

Okay, so it's basically that trifecta - existing customers, Market Direction Strategy, and Atlassian - that product managers are constantly balancing internally to define their roadmaps and deliver new features. This inevitably comes down to them not delivering every JAC feature or because of strategic direction, that JAC issue that has 3785 votes up and it's been around for 14 years doesn't match the strategic direction of where they're taking that product. But that's largely how they do that, and we try and empower product managers to make those decisions. It's not an algorithm - if it was an algorithm, we wouldn't need product managers, we would just shove it all on a spreadsheet.

I think, also getting Joff, our Chief Product Officer on the horn here and other product leaders to discuss the whole art around this. We call the product management a "craft" because it is a craft. so it's an art and science to ensure that we are prioritizing things correctly.

But the threshold is 1400 votes on JAC tickets, then you get that feature.

What is the most "Amazeballs" moment you've had at Atlassian?

Bridget Sauer (Atlassian): We're running out of time. So I'm going to jump in to call on "Fun Man" Andy. His question has been approved after being audited by me, but go to the last question.

FUN MAN ANDY: Yeah, Cameron, a nice fun question. I even change my background for it because it's super relevant with the background. ((Note from Rodney, he really did!)) Looking back on the long career at Atlassian, what was the most "Amazeballz!" moment?

Cameron Deatsch: (Laughs) That's great. There's a bunch of them that I give. So there's not going be one answer on that. So internally, Atlassian has transformed the lives of literally thousands of people. I feel I am one of the luckiest people on the planet, and most of you work in technology, it's like you know to be part of just being in the tech industry over the last 10 years we're naturally just very, very lucky. It's just been an "up and to the right" place to be in the world. To be able to do that at a company like Atlassian that has grown to be one of the most successful software companies in the world - with $100 billion market CAP two weeks ago - that's just such a rare thing.

And then the last piece on that is to do that at a company - and I know we're not perfect, Okay - but at a company that has the two founders, who were just two Dudes who didn't want to wear suits to work. Who gets up at 5am every day to do one-on-ones with me, who are still so entrenched in this business and just care. And they're not perfect, but they truly care about their employees, teams, and customers. It is absolutely amazing, and I've just seen people in this own company continue to grow, like myself. And I've seen his company open up doors for massive careers outside the business where people just wanting their lives have been transformed, and like that is always that was one thing, but as long as like man I look back those last 10 years ago, while we've changed, you know a lot of lives.

My external one is like I really loved it; it was a Tea..well, the Summit. Must have been Summit 2018 or 2019 when we launched Jira 8.0, back when I was in the product organization and got to launch products. I remember doing that launch. We put so much in that launch it was like two years' worth of innovation into 8.0. We finally had our Data Center performance and scale was done, and we had a bunch of new features to launch. And I remember Launch Night on stage, and the crowd was Crazy Happy. And then we had a big Community event - Didn't we have a whiskey tasting? I sort of remember it. For those of you who are there, I was just like everyone was just in such a great mood. Like we had launched a ton of innovation, I just remember that the customers were happy, and you just felt the energy. So that was one of my most exciting things.

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