Slides as presented at Defrag 2009

1. Innovation @ Atlassian
Bill Arconati - bill@atlassian.com
@barconati

2. ATLASSIAN
• 200 employees. 8 years old. 8 products. 4
countries.
• JIRA - issue tracking & project mgt
• Confluence - enterprise wiki
• 15,000 enterprise customers in 110
countries.
• “Product driven” model

3. “Because the purpose of business is to create a
customer, the business enterprise has two--and only
two--basic functions: marketing and innovation.
Marketing and innovation produce results;
all the rest are costs.”
Peter Drucker

4. Innovation Models
1. The lone genius
2. The boss is a genius
3. Copy competitors’ inventions
4. Cluster the geniuses in a lab
5. Make your people the geniuses
Scott Cook - CHI 2006

5. Innovation Models
1. The lone genius Atlassian 2002
2. The boss is a genius
3. Copy competitors’ inventions
4. Cluster the geniuses in a lab
5. Make your people the geniuses
Scott Cook - CHI 2006

6. Innovation Models
1. The lone genius Atlassian 2002
2. The boss is a genius
3. Copy competitors’ inventions
4. Cluster the geniuses in a lab
5. Make your people the geniuses
Scott Cook - CHI 2006

7. Innovation Models
1. The lone genius Atlassian 2002
2. The boss is a genius
3. Copy competitors’ inventions
4. Cluster the geniuses in a lab Atlassian 2012
5. Make your people the geniuses
Scott Cook - CHI 2006

8. Innovation Models
1. The lone genius Atlassian 2002
2. The boss is a genius
3. Copy competitors’ inventions
4. Cluster the geniuses in a lab Atlassian 2012
5. Make your people the geniuses
Scott Cook - CHI 2006

9. Innovation Killers
• Company growth
• Specifications from ‘on high’
• Date driven culture
• Not enough ‘slack time’

10. Atlassian Activities
• Fedex Day
• 20% Time

11. Fedex Day

12. Fedex Day - 2004
• 24 hour one-day coding exercise
• Start early AM, demos late afternoon
• One goal - “Ship & deliver in 24 hours”
http://blogs.atlassian.com/rebelutionary/archives/
000495.html

16. Learnings
• One day isn’t long enough
• “Winning” needs to be de-emphasised
• Get the whole company to watch demos
• Didn’t work outside development
• Works best with smaller team
• Retrospectives are important - “What do we want
to try to ship, and what’s required to get there?”
• Shipping code takes much longer than you think!

17. 20% Time

18. 20% Time
• The Google ‘myth’
Lawless innovation?
• Aim: discover the realities
Made up our own rules
• The $1m gamble
http://blogs.atlassian.com/developer/
2008/03/20_time_experiment.html

19. Why?
• Build innovative features
• Engineers’ jobs get less fun w/ growth
- further from product decisions
• Product Managers aren’t perfect
- fill hole in the roadmap
• The power of a built idea to shape thinking

21. How did we do?

22. http://blogs.atlassian.com/developer/
2009/02/20_percent_year_in_review.html

23. 20% Results
• Filling gaps as much as finding next big thing
• Hardest on tech leads!
• Tracking was a contentious issue
• Ended with per person, not project

27. Just Remember
• You can start small
• Failure is okay
• Sometimes weird is better than useful
• Build in slack time
www.atlassian.com
@barconati