Meet your community

[Miles Tillinger]

G’day, Program Management Community friends!

I’m part of the team of Atlassians who’ll be helping to run this new community, and I’m excited to learn and evolve my understanding of our craft through the combined experience of our community members.

I'm on Atlassian’s Ecosystem Platform team. We support thousands of third-party Partners to build, deploy, and sell their apps, plugins and integrations for our products on our extensible Connect and Forge platforms.

I am a Group Program Manager, managing a portfolio of programs across various strategic initiatives for our team and Atlassian. I am a rock for my peers, radiating resilience in the face of adversity and building their confidence to find creative solutions to our shared challenges.

I love that Kaizen culture is baked into Atlassian's values. Succeeding in my role relies on continuous improvement, learning, and evolving through the shared experiences of my peers across all crafts.

What type of team are you on? What’s your specific role, and what do you love about it?

[Megan Barrie]

Thanks for the warm welcome @Miles Tillinger ! I totally empathize with the feeling of being that rock for your peers, that's a huge motivator for me too, it always feels good knowing even if you don't have the answer you know where to go to keep folks on track.

I'm on the Marketing Program Management team here at Atlassian working closely on our Work Management products like Confluence, Trello, and Atlas. My main stakeholders are Product Marketers who partner closely with Product, Sales, Creative, Comms, Demand Gen, Legal, and other teams to bring new features to market and help customers better utilize our products.

I really enjoy digging into the nuances of what it means to keep a program on track. Whether that's helping connect dots, identify risks and helping triage, or allowing the team to better communicate and celebrate their work, it's really rewarding to simplify the things others find complicated. 

[Penny Lew]

Hello, Everyone! It’s awesome to see the launch of this Program Management community!

I’m a Principal Program Manager at Atlassian and have spent my time on both the platform and product sides of the house during my 6ish years with Atlassian. My role has been focused on end to end program lead delivery to enable specific Atlassian launches, some of which have been Atlassian Access, Cloud Enterprise, and Atlassian Together. So, I bring together tons of cross-functional teams (product management, strategy and biz ops, analytics, engineering, design, commerce, legal, marketing, sales, support… to name a few!) to smoothly and incrementally plan and deliver against our ambitious goals as a singular program team.

I’m currently in the Work Management department, focused on delivering an overarching Confluence program enabling new features and capabilities. You’ll be hearing more at Atlassian’s Work Life (Feb’24) and Team (Apr/May’24) events. It’s going to be exciting!

What do I love about my role? I love getting a team into a flow. As the storm clouds brew throughout the strategy → execution → delivery phases of a program, program management is the calm voice throughout that constantly brings the team together through alignment and focus on the bigger picture goals. And that can be in the form of driving decisions, whacking down risks, connecting the dots (and thus teams), while being five steps ahead to try to keep the path clear. All of this helps to provide flow for the team so we all can get the most important work done.

[Tiffany Scolnic]

Hi everyone! I'm really excited to be a part of this group not only because of my involvement in the program management space, but I have the joy of being the Community & Learning team's program manager. My main area of focus is supporting the strategic growth of Atlassian's community. We have tons of great things in store in partnership with our learning team and I am excited to be a part of a portfolio of work that will drive the value of the community and elevate people's careers through education and networking. 

If I had to describe myself in one word, I'd say I'm a connector. I enjoy bringing people together and bringing a sense of harmony and clarity to all things. So ditto to the comment about being the rock and supportive member of the program/portfolio team. I feel like a big part of our role is fostering shared understanding and aligning on our "why" - just some of the things that bring people together to accomplish our goals. 

@Megan Barrie I really resonated with what you said about how it's rewarding to simplify the things that cause blockers in our work. 

Excited to connect with other program managers :) 

[Jake Carroll]

Hey all, thanks for creating this community!

I was in Project and Program Management for about 5 years and the past few years have been focused on Strategic Design. My Strategic Design work involves working with teams on creative problem solving, navigating uncertainty, and decision making in ambiguity, so still a lot of overlap with the Program Management world.

I have 3 values that I try to align with the work that I do: creativity, community and impact.

Creativity in terms of complex problem solving, community in terms of contributing to likeminded groups, and impact in terms of finding ways to amplify others. This work (and this community) hit on all three. Thanks again, looking forward to meeting folks!

[Miles Tillinger]

It's a really nice comparison to draw between your values and what we're aiming to achieve with this community.

Your Impact value really resonates with me.  In my role, I also strive to amplify others, and that includes having an impact on the Atlassian customers who are the ultimate beneficiaries of our successful programs.

Welcome, Jake, and thanks for sharing!  

[Penny Lew]

Great to hear from ya, @Jake Carroll ! I think you hit it on the head that you can be doing project and program management even if it's not directly in your title.

I've got an upcoming post to ask how folks got started in project and program management and I'm guessing a good number of us didn't start out with that role as our official job title. (I certainly didn't!)