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CLOSED: Ask me Anything (AMA) with Josh Devenny, Atlas Head of Product

Josh Devenny

✨ UPDATE ✨

Josh has been overwhelmed by the interest in this AMA and has answered as many questions as possible in one short hour! Thank you to everyone who shared their questions and insights.

He'll be back to follow up with any outstanding questions later, so stay tuned.

- The Atlas team

Hello Atlassian Community!

My name is Josh and I’m the Head of Product for Atlas. I’ve been a product manager for over 12 years and have spent over 10 of those years working on various products at Atlassian. I’m based in Sydney, Australia alongside the Atlas engineering and design teams. You can find me on LinkedIn here.

I’m especially passionate about hearing from our customers about how they use our products – I’ve heard some incredible use cases over the years! I’m very keen to answer your questions about anything Atlas and beyond.

I’ll be LIVE on Community on Thursday, June 15th at 3pm PDT / 5PM CDT / 6pm EDT / 8am AEST (+1 day) for one hour to answer all of your questions about team-to-team communication, alignment, and understanding how work drives outcomes in your org.

Send me your burning questions, upvote others' questions, and stay tuned as I'll be answering anything and everything that is on your mind about Atlas, how it integrates with Atlassian, our vision for Atlas, anything else about Atlassian, or even how we do Product Management at Atlassian!

Start submitting questions now below 👇🏻

Comments

Jerry O'Sullivan

When are we going to be able to track multiple items?
If an atlas goal is linked to a JPD Idea which is linked to an EPIC/Story will the goal details show up in EPIC/Story similar to how a direct Atlas --> JIRA link works?

Dan Keshet

Hey @Josh Devenny

How do you decide what's a project? Work is often embedded in hierarchies -- Project a contributes to Project A contributes to Project Alpha contributes to Goal Project Alphabet. How do you decide whether to track Project a, A, Alpha, or Alphabet?

Alexandre Krammel

For those organizations which do not have a supported Identity Provider (IdP):

Are you going to allow users to update their "manager" in their User Profile?

User may event change their organization and department, so why not allow for editing their manager?

Anish Deena

Hi @Alexandre Krammel

Thanks for reaching out. Which IdP are you on currently?

Alexandre Krammel

Google Workspace

Carlos Garcia Navarro

Hello! Sometimes high level OKRs (at the organization level) get broken down into smaller more specific OKRs (at the sub-org level) How can you link them using Atlas? Thanks!

Elyse Exposito

In rolling out Atlas for the past 2.5 quarters for OKR-related Goals and Projects, we realized it isolates business as usual and foundational work that is ongoing for some areas (i.e. IT & Security, People, Compliance). Is there an opportunity to expand the Goals menu to include a sub-section that could be custom categories by function?

Elyse Exposito

At Atlassian, to foster quality and consistent Atlas updates, how do you educate/train staff for best practices and hold Owners accountable?

Anish Deena

Thanks Alexandre, this is something we want to support. Enabling users to update their managers is a good idea and might help but we are currently figuring out how to support an extended set of IdPs so that the process of syncing and maintaining manager info is automated.

Brent Vierling

My development team runs in 2 weeks sprints. Giving weekly updates can seem too frequent and it is easy to start putting in meaningless updates.

What do you think of being able to configure how often updates are given for a particular project? In our case, I would like to make it every 2 weeks instead of every week.

Brent Vierling

Certain Atlassian products strike the balance of simplicity and usefulness very business users very well. I'm thinking about Confluence (versus Sharepoint), JPD, and Atlas.

One big opportunity in my view is what Atlas Questions is trying to do. Making Atlas Questions better and democratizing Q&A across the business and giving a way to "slice" the business into cross functional knowledge centers is huge. Existing solutions like Confluence forum/questions addins seem to be either abandoned or just are not quite there.

Do you plan to keep investing in Atlas Questions or will it stagnate like Confluence Answers?

Atlas Questions is a good start but it feels a LONG ways from Stack Overflow for Business. But a small amount of work could take it a long ways. In Atlas, the visual listing of questions is hard to read and comprehend. There is no way to mark an Answer as the Best Answer. Confluence Search should tie into it and show results.

If we could get closer to a StackOverflow for Business in the Atlassian ecosystem I think would be a big opportunity.

Tanya Grinsell

Is automatic Org-Chart (based on the Manager attribute, and auto synced with IdP) available? cc: @Gustavo Braga @Caroline Adams - Atlas Authority

Carlos Garcia Navarro

Hello, with Atlas, is it possible to aggregate the progress from subgoals to get an overall progress score for the main goal? I'm thinking of goals as objectives, and subgoals as KRs, really. Or what do you recommend? Thanks,

Carlos

Rebecca Morrow

I've been poking around in Jira Product Discovery and think the bulk creation of Jira Epics could be a huge time saver.

Are there plans to link Atlas projects to Jira Product Discovery in the same way? It would be incredible to be able to bulk create Jira Epics and Atlas Projects and have them all automatically linked.

Or, is there a future where we could use Jira automation to create Atlas projects any time a new epic is added?

Jessica Wernham

What plans are there (if any) for managing user permissions within Atlas? Anyone can edit any Goal or Project, but some Goals like OKRs that are defined by leadership should not be open to people editing them (same for some Projects).

Dan.Tombs

@Josh Devenny

Thanks for giving us the opportunity.

Will we be able to have more of a hierarchy of goals and actions etc?

While it is great having a flat list in some views, we also have a hierarchy of goals and it can be a little confusing.

Dan.Tombs

I think this should be a configurable option per project to be honest. There are those that should be weekly. There are those that could be monthly etc.

David Washburn_434ooi

As a passionate Atlassian user, and new-product-enthusiast, I still cannot figure out how to use Atlas. I can't tell if this is a failure of the product or of my organization's goal setting/OKR structure.

Could Atlas provide more practical examples in their documentation for how teams can think about leveraging the tool? Any real examples that could be shared from Atlassian on how it's being leveraged internally?

I feel that practical examples help inspire creativity a lot more than theoretical, but that's just the way my brain works.

David Washburn_434ooi

To clarify, I desperately want to use this tool. I think it would benefit our org if we could connect our goals and OKRs to clear projects etc. But I'm not quite clear on how. I've tinkered with it a number of times and each configuration I've tried still feels pretty tedious to maintain. I'm not clear which view I could show leadership to provide them insight.

Cyril Secourgeon

Do you plan to introduce the notion of Milestones in projects? As an example, if a squad wants to show what they commit to deliver during a specific quarter, they end up using workarounds such as breaking down the project into smaller projects, which adds clutter to the overall projects section.

Julien Béchade

Hi @Josh Devenny!

Goals are a great concept that we would like to be able to use across the board starting with JPD and JWM. It would make most sense to be able to use Atlas goals in JPD since the concept already exists there. I understand that you are under an exploration phase to integrate goals across. But is this actually officially on the roadmap? Have you committed to it?
Being able to use the same goals between Atlas and JPD then linking a JWM epic to an Atlas project would allow us to have a bird's view of our entire business. Teams could probably benefit from the same treatment than goals also.

Another thing we have been missing is the ability to have root goals without due date that links more or less to company values. Is this something you're thinking about implementing?

Finally, last question, could you share the Atlas roadmap? This would greatly help adoption to gain visibility and insights of where you guys are heading.

Cheers.

Julien.

Dan.Tombs

I think this would be a great option to include. Especially if you wanted to refer to a new release, soft release etc.

Vaclav_bkuhhp

Please how do I subscribe to the AMA broadcast, with Josh Devenny?

Alexandre Krammel

I have a "big project" (about 5 - 6 months) which has some milestones. The first one is the MVP release (3 months).

In Atlas each milestone for me is an Atlas Project and it is fine. I do not consider it as a workaround. It is good to keep atlas projects scope small. If a project is big in scope, there can be too much to say about it in each update, which will not fit in 280 characters.

PS: I have not used yet, but Topics (tags) may help organize related "milestones"

Alexandre Krammel

@Julien Béchade Since Atlas is focused on Execution, I think it is important that goals have a due date. SAFE recommends using OKR format even for high level Strategic Themes with due dates.

For the "company values", if you mean Competitive Strategies (which do not have a due date) it seems that JPD Goals are just that. So JPD Goals are not the same as Atlas "OKR" Goals

Alexandre Krammel

Adding up to #1

When are you planning to allow linking to other issue types? It makes a lot of sense to link to Initiative/Idea issue type (that has Epics as child issues), which is the equivalent to a JPD Idea (Item #2)

Dan.Tombs

@Vaclav Schmuttermeier

He will answer all the questions on here, plus those that come through within the hour I think. So watch this page for the updates.

Dan

Jason Baumgart

New here: Question on Atlas. I like the idea of Atlas; I'm curious about reportability. Regarding Atlas's platform for teams to update their statuses and communicate information about a project or scope of work. What about reportability, which goes hand in hand with status updates? Is there anything in the works that can reflect more context on the progress and statistics of success from within the Atlas product?

John Ickes

Atlas has been great for providing a way for our product teams to provide updates to stakeholders within the company. However, we also have other teams, such as product owners, development, and departments like marketing, sales, and support. While it is easy for the product team to provide updates, I would be interested in a way that the other teams and departments could use Atlas. I know they could create a goal, but often what we need is just an update to have some understanding of what our coworkers are up to. For example, the product team might speak to how they have started using Jira Product Discovery and the development team might want to mention how they are looking into AI to generate unit tests and data.

We ultimately have a lot of other things that we are working on that are not necessarily tied to a project and may be too small for a goal, but we would still want to share an update with everyone. Having all of that fall within Atlas would be ideal.

Daniella Latham

Hey @Dan.Tombs @Vaclav the live AMA will be tomorrow, Thursday, June 15th at 3pm PDT / 5PM CDT / 6pm EDT / 8am AEST (+1 day)

Hannah Meneley_6686k5

Hi Josh!

I love the fact that you can link a singular epic to a goal to track where the work is being done. I have 2 questions in relation to this:

What are your thoughts on supporting more than one Jira issue being linked to a singular goal? Is this in your roadmap somewhere?
Will there ever be functionality built in to Atlas to sum up the total number of story points associated with the Jira issues and how many of those are in a done status to give metrics on how far along on the goal we are?

Thanks!

Dan.Tombs

Adding to point 2. Id love for there to be some sort of calculations done against all linked epics (since I think a goal/project should also connect to multiple issues) and their child tickets. A lot of teams would want to ballpark size based on previous projects. If we could T-shirt size it as medium and look back at other similar medium projects we may be able to better predict timings etc.

Alexandre Krammel

@Dan.Tombs For sure looking to previous issues (Epics, Initiatives etc.) allows for better future estimations.

I just think that such features are much more related to JSW instead of Atlas.

Jira Plans (former Advanced Roadmaps) provides just that. You can have a issue type with Epics as child issues, so you can have a consolidated view of Epics. BUT it is available only in Premium licence. What would be nice for those that have the Standard licence, be able at least to have the Issue Types Hierarchy Feature at JSW to have this Epics Parent issue. This parent issue type also aligns 1:1 with Idea from JPD.

Brent Vierling

Sorry for my ignorance, but where do we join? Is there a link or something?

Josh Devenny

Hey there @Jerry O Sullivan and @Alexandre Krammel - thanks for the questions.

1. Enabling more than one where is the work tracked item is something we want to do and are discussing. Given that there's a "sync" between an Epic and an Atlas Project, we can only allow one link to be "synced" - but are interested in enabling you to add more than one link there. Can't commit to timelines just yet.

2. We have just recently launched Goal linking and auto-syncing between Atlas and JSW. You can link Goals directly to a JSW Epic, or if you link a Goal to an Atlas Project that is synced with a JSW Epic, it will automatically show up. More details here. Re: Goal -> JPD Idea -> JSW Epic. Definitely something we've spoken about and are discussing with the JPD team - nothing concrete yet, but I hear you on the use case!

3. We will soon be enabling linking to JSW issues above Epic in the hierarchy (i.e. Initiatives, Programs, whatever custom name you use). We haven't built Atlas to be a tool to model hierarchy, so won't be building a visualisation of it - but will enable you to link those levels above Epic -> Atlas Projects so that you can communicate on them.

Josh Devenny

Hey @Dan Keshet - great question. Atlas started as an internal tool for Atlassian's called Project Central. We originally hacked together a Jira project, but realised that it would work far better and be much simpler if it was a separate product. When we used to use Project Central we had a simple internal rule -- if it takes 2 or more people 4 or more weeks, then it should be tracked as a Project.

When it comes to hierarchy - we're letting JSW Premium be the engine for that. We will be supporting connection of Atlas Projects -> higher levels in the hierarchy above Epic in JSW, but will try to keep things relatively flat on the Atlas side and link to Jira to see the hierarchy.

We use a combination of Goals + Topics in Atlas to group work into buckets that helps us to see what's going on and whether we're driving the right outcomes and deliverables. We're currently working on showing more information on Goals in Atlas that might help here, too. You can see more from our designer @Kristy Donaldson here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlas-Group-articles/Get-a-sneak-peek-into-what-s-coming-soon-Using-Atlas-Goals-in/ba-p/2380656

Josh Devenny

Hey @Alexandre Krammel -- I think you've already seen @Anish Deena response below, but just commenting to point to it for others who may have not.

Josh Devenny

Hi @Carlos Garcia Navarro - great question. @Nicole Tang did a presentation at the Atlassian annual conference, Team 23 that spoke to how we use OKRs at Atlassian and how we model them in Atlas. You can read more about that here: https://intercom.help/atlas-by-atlassian/en/articles/7856498-how-to-use-okrs-to-track-goals-in-your-company

I'm assuming that your question is - how do we link goals to other goals when they're not in the same hierarchy. i.e. a sub team wants to ladder up to another goal but doesn't necessarily want to "nest" that goal. We often just paste the link to the related goal in the Description field on the About section of the team level goal - thanks to the Atlassian Editor, you can choose to render that Goal as a link, a smart card, or fully embed the goal.

Here's an example:

Screenshot 2023-06-16 at 8.25.27 am.png

Alternatively you can always nest goals under one another all the way down to the team level - there's no limit to nesting goals.

Josh Devenny

Hey @Elyse Exposito - great to see you here! I can see how that might be a challenge -- that type of work is so important, you don't want to lose it or make people in those teams feel like it's not valued!

We are in the process of building Custom Fields for Atlas (you heard it here first). @Anish Deena in my team is the PM leading that effort. I suspect that you would be able to use a custom field to display which goals are related to Company vs foundational vs BAU and then group / filter by them as needed.

For anyone who's interested in providing feedback on custom fields, please comment here - I'm sure @Anish Deena would love to chat to you!

Josh Devenny

Hi @Brent Vierling and @Dan.Tombs - I'd say this is currently our top feature request - but we're a little stuck between two philosophies on this one:

1. A lot of customers love the weekly cadence, that it's fixed, and that it's simple. One of our core beliefs is that teams should communicate often and openly - and that's why we built The Loop concept into Atlas. The most important thing about communicating often is that it drives the behaviour of picking up on things earlier than you otherwise would - this drives a series of minor corrections over the time of the project instead of a blowout at the end.

2. Another set of customers ask us for more customisability on two things - the day of the week, and how often updates should be created (i.e. fortnightly or monthly instead of weekly). I hear you on this one - I get that not everyone works weekly.

Thanks for the feedback. We'll continue to discuss it internally - I'd say if we did build a solution here we would limit you on which timeframes you can choose (i.e. weekly + fortnightly only). Keen to hear from others what would work for them.

Josh Devenny

@Elyse Exposito - I love a question about practices! We often use the content in The Loop to help Atlassian's understand what a good update looks like. One of my favourite lines on The Loop website is "Write an update people will actually read" - which is a great shorthand for getting teams to think through what they are truly communicating about.

At the same time, we're a big company and each department has their own thoughts and guidelines on how to write a good update. I saw a page the other day that detailed what the "gold standard Atlas update" should look like - unfortunately it had SO much detail in it that it would take someone 30-60 minutes to write. That's not our intention with Atlas. You have 280 chars - make it short and sharp. Get your main points across the line!

It's also worth thinking about the audience you think you're communicating to (upwards, to teams who depend on you, just to people who are curious).

Regarding how we hold owners accountable - this is where fostering an open culture (built on trust) where anyone - managers, other teams, members of the team can ask questions in a radical candour style on the update. Asking questions in the open is the best way that I've found to drive accountability - and not from a tops down perspective - from an everyone holds everyone else accountable perspective. We're building things for our customers and it makes sure that we collectively hold a high bar.

Josh Devenny

Hi @Tanya Grinsell - great question. Yes, we have a "Reporting Lines" feature on People profiles that will show up when you sync a manager field in from your IDP. Here's an explainer of all the features that this enables: https://intercom.help/atlas-by-atlassian/en/articles/6153892-see-exactly-how-teammates-fit-in-your-company

We don't have a full org chart for an entire company right now - but it's something in our vision for the product!

Josh Devenny

Hey @Carlos Garcia Navarro - when you're writing a Goal update, Atlas will show you the sub-goals + their scores to help you with the score + update of the parent.

However, Atlas doesn't currently automate this and score the parent goals for you. Thanks for the thought though - I'll add it to our idea backlog in JPD.

Josh Devenny

Hey @Rebecca Morrow - thanks for the question and welcome to the Community!

Currently you can link Atlas Projects (and Goals!) to JPD. But you need to ask the JPD team to turn it on for you. We're working on getting this switched on for everyone, but currently it's still in beta. You can ask for access here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Product-Discovery-articles/Upcoming-product-improvements-Atlas-integration-ready-for-early/ba-p/2195274

When it comes to bulk create and automation - love the idea. Something we will absolutely consider as we build out deeper integration with JPD.

Josh Devenny

Hi @Jessica Wernham - thanks for the question. I had a similar question through our in product feedback collector just last week.

Atlas is built on the premise of trust and openness between teams, and that trust extends to people not editing Projects or Goals that they aren't responsible for. One way that Atlas limits this ability today is that you have to be an Owner or a Contributor to make any chances -> so this limits the accidental edit case.

When it comes to locking Goals + Projects from being edited by anyone except the owner for example (and we'd also have to limit people from changing the owner) - it's not something that we're looking at in the near term.

Atlassian is ~10,000 people and we store our company level OKRs in Atlas - I don't think we've run into the challenge of people editing them.

Josh Devenny

Hey @Cyril Secourgeon @Dan.Tombs @Alexandre Krammel - thanks for the thoughts - we've heard this one a few times and have discussed it internally on a number of occasions.

@Ash Ahmad - one of our developers is particularly interested in this, too!

Couple of questions back to the three of you:

1. Our recommendation normally is to split bigger projects down into multiple Atlas Projects. Other than clutter, I'm curious what challenges you run into doing this?

2. How do you think about the difference between a Project that has milestones and an Initiative that has multiple Projects? Are they different in your mind?

Thanks!

Josh Devenny

Hello everyone! Thank you so much for all of the great questions. I've been working through them this past hour, but unfortunately haven't been able to answer them all. I have to run to a few meetings, but promise I'll come back and answer everything this afternoon or Monday next week.

If you have more questions, please feel free to add them - always happy to answer!

Thanks again
Josh

Josh Devenny

Hi @Brent Vierling - I love the thinking. Long term, I agree. Definitely a big opportunity for Atlas!

Short term - I'll be straight with you - we're not investing more in Questions right now. We're prioritising Projects, Goals, and Teams - all of which have a huge potential for helping customers across the Atlassian tools.

I'll keep you in mind as our first beta tester for when we decide to come back to it!

Sing Chen

Hi @Josh Devenny, we've discussed this in our group. The Friday reminder/Monday digest works very effectively for us, as it aligns with how we work, and more importantly, how our senior leaders and executives think about things.

I love the simplicity of the rituals in Atlas. That's what makes it hugely accessible to diverse business groups. When I think about business groups (Sales, Services, Customer Success, Risk, Legal, Pricing, etc.) that's how we define a 'project' - it goes beyond a technology deliverable or a set of technology deliverables. There isn't a week that goes by in our projects where there isn't anything 'reportable'.

This dovetails into the topic of linking to different hierarchy levels in JSW. Our projects (even the technology deliverables) aren't distilled into a single epic and some aren't even captured in a single Initiative - especially when I think about huge cross-functional ones, cutting across multiple scrum teams in multiple product areas, some of whom work on different sprint cadences.

IMHO, a weekly reporting rhythm in Atlas decouples how we report on status and context from the internal agile practices of particular teams, in a similar way to how Atlas is not where the work is done (use whatever tools you want for tactical work management, but report in a consistent way).

Sing Chen

Hi @Jason Baumgart, just sharing my two cents on the experience in our company.

We've had this discussion and where we landed (and it could change, I'm almost expecting we'll revisit this soon), is leveraging:

More detail section of an update to convey additional info and context
Combining this with the ability to add rich media to an update
And drawing attention to where other information can be found.

A few examples:

A project with a high severity risk may have a portion of our risk log (which lives in Smartsheet) linked in the update.
Similar for decisions that need to be made. Attach or provide a link to where the details can be found so the audience can get appropriately oriented.
Linking to a Jira issue which has test coverage/completion metrics.

On a similar note, in an Atlas project's "links" section, our plan is to link to one resource only - a Confluence landing page for the project. This is used to jump to the Comms Plan, RACI, RAID logs, and includes embedded Jira Advanced Roadmaps, Smartsheet project plans, etc.

Sing Chen

Hi @Josh Devenny , I'm not sure if this is a general opportunity or one that sits with Atlas or with Confluence, but I'd love to see greater control when embedding links.

Something I've been looking at for our business is to provide an executive-style view of everything in our business area (PMO). This latter part we'll accomplish with topics. However, when I embed a live list based on a topic, the rendering gets 'interesting': 2023-06-16 11 31 36.png

It's a long list which then leads to two scroll bars. Being able to control the height as well as the width of the embedded view would make an impactful difference.

Thanks,
Sing

Sing Chen

Hi @Josh Devenny , full disclosure, Jessica and I work in the same company. We've discussed this and I think the evolutionary change for an organisational culture to one of complete openness and trust that Atlas is founded on (which I love btw!) could feel like a step-change too much and potentially be a barrier to adoption.

For our team (PMO), we'll likely use the launch of Atlas as a "forcing function", and look to model the behaviors and standards that we would look for from the rest of the organization.

On a broader but related point about good practice, which I note you responded to in a question from Elyse above, I'd be keen to get your thoughts on how updates are shared. One of the primary use cases for our PMO work is to provide leadership reporting; the idea being that a senior leader, over breakfast on Monday, can get up to speed from their digest email with those short, succinct updates.

If I have a project with dozens of contributors (Devs, QAs, BAs, Customer Support folks, Sales, Education, Product Marketing, etc), adding them in as contributors to an Atlas project could lead to the "I just had a meeting with Jeff" update, followed by "I'll be scheduling a discussion with our vendors about XYZ".

What then happens is, a senior leader/executive jumps into their Monday digest or even goes into (what I have to say is the absolute game-changing) reading mode and instead of that short, consumable update from the project owner, they are faced with a scroller's paradise of micro details, conversations, meetings.

The concern here is less about trust and openness but about Atlas becoming a conversational tool and turns into a "stream of consciousness" like is so often the case with something like MS Teams.

Taking the approach we have taken (only adding PMO folks as either owner or contributor) prevents us from using the notion of contributors in the way that it is intended and that we would like to - to give a clear view of who is working on what.

Elyse Exposito

Sounds great Josh, thank you for the exciting update! Custom fields for Goals would be an immediate value add; @Anish Deena happy to chat further if needed.

Jason McDermott

@Anish Deena I'm keen to chat about custom fields in Atlas

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