Marketplace Partner Spotlight: Quirk
Hello Community members! As a Community Leader and Marketplace Partner, I’m happy to publish the latest instalment of the App Central Partner feature with Brad Quirk, the man behind the eponymous Silver Marketplace Partner.
I’ve had a chance to get to know and work with Brad, and I hope his story might inspire you turn your ideas into apps (or at least go have a look at the apps he’s released 😉 ).
What's your role at Quirk?
Brad: As my name suggests, I’m the Founder and CEO of Quirk, an which up until recently was a solopreneur business based in Melbourne, Australia that focuses on bridging the worlds between agile coaching and Atlassian App development. Our mission is to turn our customers' chaos into clarity by providing Agile at Scale solutions, with our flagship Jira app being the Dependency Mapper for Jira.
And as proof that I’m Australian, here’s a video of a kangaroo hoping through my yard!
How does your team come up with ideas for new apps?
Brad: The whole reason our Jira app development business exists is because we work closely with our customers day-to-day in the coaching space, and felt the pain and frustration first-hand when their teams could not fully realise the capabilities we were trying to embed because of limitations in the work management tools they used. Case in point, we worked with several clients who could not find a solution to handle their dependency management needs, so we took that collective feedback and built our own solution.
Having been through this feedback cycle several times now, I can safely say we excel at rapidly converting customer pain points into products they love!
What do you think has been the secret to your success so far?
Brad: I think what others have perceived as our weakness has actually proved to be our winning edge. By trade, we are a customer-led product development team. This means our primary focus has always been on finding the fastest possible route to providing a customer need, and only then reinforcing the product with best practices in the technical space when we’ve proven the pain point has been addressed.
We don’t take fancy tech and reverse-engineer solutions after we’ve played around with it, but instead we recognise new technologies as enablers to provide better, smarter iterations on our customer-led products.
What is your most popular app? What problem were you trying to solve for customers when you created it?
Brad: In true agile fashion, I released 3 MVPs to the Atlassian Marketplace, each focused on testing a different assumption. Ironically, the MVP I spent the least amount of effort on, the Dependency Mapper for Jira, gained the most traction early on! Given I was still working solo at the time I decided to quickly retire the other 2 apps in favour of maturing the Dependency Mapper, and it’s only been recently as the team has expanded that we’ve re-released the other two (Scrum Master Assistant for Jira, and Backlog Explorer for Jira) in an effort to test a new set of assumptions about our customers' needs.
What’s next for you?
Brad: We’re incredibly fortunate that we’ve built an initial collection of Jira apps that grew organically in the Marketplace, but going forward we recognise that we needed a like-minded partner to help us reach the next level of creating and promoting world-class products.
To accomplish this, we’ve recently partnered with the amazing team at Seibert Media with a mission to create kickass software and services to our Agile at Scale customers. Here I am with Martin Seibert when I visited the Seibert Media offices in Germany.
We at Quirk are super excited to be starting this journey together, so watch this space!
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Laura Campbell _Seibert Group_
About this author
Product Marketing Manager [Siebert Media]
Toulouse, France
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