Upcoming AMA with the makers of Teamistry, Atlassian's first podcast!

Bridget
Community Manager
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May 11, 2020

Teamistry, Atlassian’s first podcast (launched March 16th), looks past the front page headlines to discover incredible untold stories of teams behind the scenes who joined together to do what no one could ever do alone. 

Join creators Christine Dela Rosa, John Ville, and Jamey Austin as they discuss Teamistry on Thursday May 21st, 2020 from 1-2 p.m. PDT. 

They'll answer questions about everything from brainstorming the initial ideas for the show and collaborating with a production partner, to the selection of topics, the making of each episode, the teamwork concepts covered in each, and more.

Ask questions like:
- Why did we decide to make a podcast?
- How did we select our production partner?
- Will there be a second season?
- Can future episodes cover a team or story you'd like us to cover?

Post your questions, upvote questions, and stay tuned as the team will answer everything that's on your mind about Teamistry. You can start submitting your questions below now, and tune in on May 21st from 1-2 p.m. PDT when we'll answer your questions live!

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Daniel Ebers
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May 13, 2020

Hi Christine, John and James,

congratulations to the great podcast! The format is entertaining - I like it very much.

Recently I discovered the extra material like the posters.
Is there any chance they are coming in a higher resolution? I printed the "sanctuary umbrella" to a poster 30x45 but it did not come very sharp out of the printer (the design software even predicted that .. whee!). :-)

I will put the one or another Teamistry poster next to my desk in the office nevertheless - as I consider the messages on them as pretty meaningful.

Keep up the good work!

Cheers,
Daniel

John Ville
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

Glad you like it Daniel. We enjoyed working on it too!

Christine P_ Dela Rosa
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

@Daniel Ebers! So glad you're into it =D

The Extras page definitely has some gems, including cards that embody the superpowers featured in every episode.

The site is meant to be simple (e.g. not a ton of sizes for different download preferences). But because we made these for you, we can definitely send you a file in higher res outside of the site so you can print it more sharply.

Hit me up at cdelarosa@atlassian.com and I'll reply with a higher res version of the cards you're interested in :)

-Christine Dela Rosa

 

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Jamey Austin
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

Hi Daniel!

Thank you, so glad you're enjoying the show. We've got some pretty amazing designers at Atlassian, right? I love what they've created for our team superpowers, like "musical chairs" and "pivot and commit." As Christine noted, there are loads of cool things to check out on the extras page.

Stay tuned... there are some great upcoming episodes on the way, starting on Monday 5/25!

Cheers,

Jamey

3 votes
Brittany Joiner
Community Leader
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May 17, 2020

Hi podcast team! Thanks for doing this! 

1) What's been the most surprising challenge with starting a podcast?

2) Planning to do any episodes on success stories of teams using Trello? Feel free to hit me up if you ever need someone to nerd out about Trello for an hour :) 

Jamey Austin
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

Hi Brittany!

Thanks for the Qs.

Re #1, as you can imagine, there are a number of challenges... but all of them pretty exciting, actually. (If all keeps going in the right direction, that is.) A surprising one? Naming! That was really challenging.

Re #2, nothing planned. But we're definitely open to suggestions about future episodes. If you've got a great idea, let us know! (By the way, our production partners at Pacific Content said they heavily relied on Trello when creating the episodes!)

Cheers,

Jamey

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Brittany Joiner
Community Leader
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May 21, 2020

@Jamey Austin @Christine P_ Dela Rosa 

Oh man, naming is the worst!! I once wrote a blog post called "i can't think of a good title for this", so I can only imagine consistently naming podcasts!

And that is awesome to know they're using Trello for creating episodes! That would be super cool to see. As for ideas, what about how to get your team "on board" with Trello? I can talk about how i got my team to start using Trello and boards that I use to work with others (specifically my ad request process is a board that has worked well and been easy for people to use and get started with!)

Christine P_ Dela Rosa
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

Happy to connect, @Brittany Joiner !

The most surprising challenge for me was how quickly stories change. After preliminary research, we had a great angle into a story, but then upon interviewing people on the team, the story changed to something exciting but different than we expected, and then after interviewing subject matter experts, even more helpful information colored our lenses.

I'm personally into structure and outlines, but when production gets started, you don't really know what you have until you finish your research. And even then, I wish we could have kept going back to our sources for even more clarification. Puh, but timelines, y'know? What I like about this surprise is that we went in unassuming and came out with the most compelling story to share. Too bad so much ended up on the cutting room floor. There's just so many good tidbits and not all fit our story structure.

As for episodes featuring teams using Trello, we don't have any...yet. We used Trello pretty heavily to make the podcast happen, so look out for some behind the scenes content on that. Would be interesting to see what you think there :)

Thanks for asking your questions,

Christine Dela Rosa

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Christine P_ Dela Rosa
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

@Brittany Joiner - if ever we do one featuring onboarding we'll keep you in mind. 

But I'll also say that in our research, outside of the podcast, we learned that onboarding is really hard for most companies. In fact, in research you can read about at atlassian.com/open/research, we learned that onboarding is one of the areas that has been cited as most difficult. Which means, most teams are probably looking for help on how to do this. So I bet any way you can share what you've learned will only level up other teams...at the very least, as inspiration for new ideas if not specifics on using Trello.

-Christine 

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1 vote
carolyn french
Community Leader
Community Leader
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May 20, 2020

Hi Teamistry Team,

I've been following along with your podcasts, and really enjoy the different angles you've taken in these past episodes.

Have you thought about doing an episode about teamwork in sports? There's a lot of already told stories out there, and I'm not really a sports guru so I don't have a scoop for you, but maybe the US women's soccer team in their fight for equal pay?

At what point in the process of researching and producing the podcast, do you come up with the teamwork concepts for that episode? Has it ever changed when you are in the middle of production?

Which episode so far has surprised your team the most in what you thought prior vs what you learned about the situation after you researched it?

Also wanted to say I really enjoyed the clips from the people who were at Fukushima- fascinating episode, and congrats to the team!

Carolyn

John Ville
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

Hey Carolyn, yup we did look at sports teams. In fact you could probably produce a whole season just on this topic – I'm sure someone already has.

 

The thing is, we wanted to find the hidden teamwork stories, and because sport is so ubiquitous, we had trouble finding a story that hadn't been covered already by other media – ESPN's 60 for 60 being the stand out for us.

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John Ville
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

As for concepts: we were tweaking ideas right up to go time. And in fact once the research came in, it often did take us down a different road. That's the beauty of this kind of storytelling – it's kind of fluid.

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Christine P_ Dela Rosa
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

The "Saving Fukushima" episode is one of my favorites of the season, @carolyn french !

The US women's soccer team angle is interesting, because it's not necessarily about the gameplay and more about their fight for equal pay. What other ideas do you have that we can look into?

-Christine Dela Rosa

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John Ville
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

For me, the surprising episode was Team Taurus. I'm British and don't know much about US car design. So to find out that it was locked in this timewarp for such a long time – and it took fresh thinking from Europe and Japan kind of blew my mind.

 

Plus I love RoboCop....

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John Ville
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

And the heart and soul that went into the Fukushima response... amazing and inspiring

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Jamey Austin
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

Hi Carolyn, thanks for these great questions. I just wanted to pile on here and echo what Christine said about "Saving Fukushima," and especially what you called out about the clips. Our production partners at Pacific Content included the Japanese interviews, with English translation, and I really appreciated that touch.

Guess what? Some of my favorite episodes are still yet to come! But so far, if I had to choose one (very hard to do!) I'd go with "The Brilliant Success of Shackleton's Failure." Fascinating stuff!

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carolyn french
Community Leader
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May 22, 2020

Thank you all for the insights! I will be sure to post if I have any lightning bolts to the brain for new ideas.

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carolyn french
Community Leader
Community Leader
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May 22, 2020

Also, I don't think you covered this. What is each of your roles on the team Atlassian side of creating this podcast? @Jamey Austin @Christine P_ Dela Rosa @John Ville 

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1 vote
nina_schmidt
Community Leader
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May 19, 2020

Dear Podcast Team,

Congrats on your great podcast! 😊

I am (im)patiently waiting for the „new episode online sign“ every other week. 😉

What I would love to know:

  1. How do you chose the stories /teams?
  2. What are your Top 3 learnings from these stories - I assume even you as team specialists had some? 😉

Thank you and keep up that great work

Nina

Jamey Austin
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

Hi Nina!

So glad you enjoy the show, and thanks for these Qs!

Re #1, great question. It's a fun, tricky process. We – that is, our Atlassian team and our Pacific Content partners – did many, many rounds of brainstorming, researching, reviewing, and final selection. As the tagline suggests, we were really focussed on finding "unknown" stories of teams "behind the scenes."

Re #2, OMG! Learning cool things about these stories was definitely part of the fun. I really did always think of Edison as this "lone genius" in his lab by himself. And finding out about the huge chances Ford took when making the Taurus was fascinating. Also, I've always loved Shackleton tales, so to find out more details was really cool. Btw: upcoming episodes are some of my favorites... stay tuned!

Cheers,

Jamey

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John Ville
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

Hi Nina, glad you liked it!

New episode coming Monday so not long now... lol

We spent a lot of time as a team sifting through ideas with our production partners, Pacific Content. We really worked hard on finding those unsung heroes. So if there was already a lot media about a particular team then they didn't make the cut.

 

For me, i learned a lot about sacrifice and humility. And that new ways of thinking can really enhance a project. And that Jamey and Christine are just wonderful creative thinkers who really pushed me to be a better version of myself. SIckly sweet, maybe? But so true!!

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Christine P_ Dela Rosa
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

Jamey and John covered your first question, but I'll add my $1.99 on your second question, @nina_schmidt...

  1. From a collaboration perspective, I can't believe how critical it is for respect to come up so profoundly. From a couple hundred years ago through more contemporary stories, the price for admission is acknowledging that others have expertise that you don't and it's important to respect their ideas, even if you disagree with them. The best teams trusted each other. I think we take those ideas for granted, and to speak on a personal note, I think there's a bit of lip service today on respecting teammate expertise. But the teams we dug deep on, they either didn't have time to second-guess what others thought or couldn't risk undermining others' perspectives or else the conversations wouldn't have bred innovation. So it's really a blocker to not fully respect teammates' opinions. I guess that means we should hear each other out on relevant topics and then ensure that if we disagree that we do so vocally, vulnerably, and without discounting the source opinion.

  2. From a production perspective, every piece of the production is important. For example, "The Team That Saved Ford" episode, the sound designer recreated those Robocop sounds and kept the 80s flow going. But besides sound cues, the tone really set the stage with musical transitions and background layers. Prelim research really made or broke a decision on whether to do a story. I kept finding myself wanting to go back to sources and not having the foresight to see an angle on a story beforehand. Or even the narration. Gabriela Cowperthwaite is an amazing storyteller in her own right, but in addition to her voice over talents, her personal connection and interpretations of the stories helped her be the voice of the audience. Oh, and transitions and recaps of what guests said were so important. We can include a clip that exposes a truth, but we find saying it again through another example and then having our host, Gabriela recap it once more, be important in getting deep enough on the lesson learned.

    These are all mentioned for illustrative purposes, but like our show concept, every role and every way in which we worked together were integral. Nothing was linear where once a bit of work was complete, we didn't go back. So in a way, the process required a pretzel-shaped road in putting everything together. Nothing could have been half-a$$ed and nothing was done in a silo.

    3. From a business perspective, it's really, really hard to grow an audience. We truly want to support people by giving them inspiration and real-life examples. But because so many other folks say they're doing the same thing, it's tough to cut through the noise. Especially in today's changing landscape. If you have any suggestions, we're all ears.

Thanks for asking your questions!
Christine Dela Rosa

nina_schmidt
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 22, 2020

Thank you for answering my questions @Christine P_ Dela Rosa @Jamey Austin and @John Ville 👏

Can‘t wait for Monday now. 😊

And regarding the top 3 learnings:

I definitely agree, observe your team members different ways of „seeing“ and examining a task is really important. To be able to accept „other ways of thinking“ and get involved is sometimes hard, but worth the struggle to get new extraordinary things done. 🙌

Keep up your great work!

Nina 

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1 vote
Danny
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May 18, 2020

The podcast is great, thanks for outputting this content. I cannot wait for the next one.

  1. Question: What is your process for selecting and expanding on episode ideas?
  2. Question: How much time goes in editing an episode and what is your process?

Keep up the great work,

Danny

Christine P_ Dela Rosa
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

Hi @Danny !

Of course. Next one comes out on Monday ;)

Our process for selecting each idea evolved over time. At first, we had different themes we hoped to capture and tried to look for stories that embodied them. But we quickly realized that we couldn't work from that direction as it's not easy to know how teams worked through preliminary research, especially if we hoped to uncover it. So then, we just went after interesting things that happened and did the work to figure out how those things came to be. Every time, of course there was a team involved, but we had to pick and choose which ones we thought would be most interesting to our listeners. It was also important not to duplicate topics and to ensure that we would be able to access enough contemporary guests and legally air source material.

From start to finish, each episode took about six weeks. Of course, we worked with our production partner, Pacific Content, on multiple episodes at a time. So, we didn't have to wait for one episode to finish before starting another. The back-and-forth with editing was really interesting. Not only did we have to find the right story to tell (there are a number of stories within stories), but we had to be selective about which interview bites and narration best flowed into a cohesive episode. Sometimes, those two things were hard to accomplish at the same time, and even harder, was being able to dissect how the people worked together without derailing from the storytelling.

Compelling storytelling came first. Then came the narrative, that we hope, helps listeners take insights back to their own teams.

Thanks for the encouragement and the questions!

-Christine Dela Rosa

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Jamey Austin
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

Hi Danny!

Thanks for your great Qs. I wanted to jump in and add to Christine's response about your question #2. The editing process has been one of my favorite aspects of this project. The creative collaboration we've enjoyed with Pacific Content has really been a highlight. They've told us that we've been their most engaged client in terms of edits and feedback, which is cool to hear, but what I've loved is how open they've been to it, to all our ideas and feedback. The iterative (sorry, buzzword) process has made each episode better, and I've really appreciated the open and honest exchanges we've had, and continue to have. Editing and refinement are the keys!

Stay tuned for some great upcoming episodes!

Cheers,

Jamey 

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Danny
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May 21, 2020
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Christine P_ Dela Rosa
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

@ohseongkooi - not sure if you meant to put context around your comment, but if we're sharing links, here's the link to the Teamistry podcast.

https://www.atlassian.com/podcast

Have a good one,
Christine Dela Rosa

0 votes
Sumit_Bhutani May 19, 2020

Why you waited till so long for the podcast? 

Christine P_ Dela Rosa
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 21, 2020

Hahaha, I believe the sentiment behind your answer is that you wish this was out earlier. Do I have that right, @Sumit_Bhutani If so, we didn't want to do a podcast for the sake of jumping on the podcast wagon. We wanted to make sure we had the right show concept, and then later, the right stories to tell.

In fact, we're thinking about what the future of the podcast will look like if you have any feedback or ideas for us. What's working and what could be improved?

-Christine Dela Rosa

 

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