Atlassian Team 2021 Q+A with Chase Wilson

[#1]

Hello Community members! 

Chase just gave a talk, What happened when we turned customers into design partners, at Team 2021. 

Now's your chance to ask him any questions that came up during his presentation, including:

• The customer feedback framework that helped Atlassian make faster and more informed product decisions
• How to solicit and interpret both internal and external customer feedback for transformational changes in your work
• Why pivoting the traditional Triad structure into a Quad helped bring new perspectives front-and-center
• Ways that internal Atlassian teams and customers are already using the new Jira product that was built through this process

If you don't have a question, feel free to post your #1 takeaway in the comments below. Chase will be around to answer your questions until Tuesday, May 4th ... so act quickly! 

[John Funk]

This perfectly described the process that I experienced as a customer through the design and build. The entire team was very helpful and professional and gave me plenty of time to provide feedback. 

The process was certainly a much better experience that most on my 20+ years working with software development teams and designers. 

Thanks again to @Chase Wilson and the entire team for the opportunity and your enthusiasm to actually engage with the customer!

[Andrew Kendris]

Awesome session @Chase Wilson - it was great to see the approach your team used to roll out Jira Work Management!  I really like how you broke down the entire process and gave us a look into the framework - we'll be sure to adopt some of those practices internally.

I was intrigued with your team's pivot from a Triad structure to Quad because it's a model I totally support!  With this change to the structure, I'm curious as to how you effectively grew the team and handled the various stages of group development (i.e. Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing). Were there any specific challenges you needed to overcome when it came to roles/responsibilities in order to achieve those fresh perspectives?

To share a brief use case, I've started brining our End User Training team into development/testing efforts for their thoughts/opinions.  Historically, they would only be onboarded right before launch after all the decisions have been made so they could learn the tool before training users.  Sure enough our training resources would find bugs in the "finished product" our testers didn't catch or spotlight workflows that aren't practical for users which would result in several hours of re-work and risk of delays.

Initially our decision to bring them on much earlier in the project was viewed as an ineffective use of their time because it wasn't common for Trainers to provide input at these early stages of work.  However, when it came time to build out training documentation and stand up a launch strategy, the lift was much easier because they had a full 360-degree understanding of the product.  Now, with their active participation, software rollouts are much more seamless and everyone is aligned!

🎉 Congrats to you and the team again on a successful rollout and looking forward to see what's next for Jira Work Management - it already has a solid foundation to build on!