YouSaid · the spoken record

Megan Cook

lines on the record: 82
first: 2024-02-04
most recent: 2024-02-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, the best place to find me is on LinkedIn. I'm Megan Cook on LinkedIn. You can also find me if you're a customer in the Atlantic community if you want to have a chat. And I'm also on social media. So on X, you can find me there as well. And useful to me with any feedback. Absolutely. Any feedback on your software always hungry for that. Also really keen if you want to just chat about how people's ways of working are evolving and shifting and changing and how do you think that's going to turn out and how you see your goals for your team changing. I would love to talk about that. Please get in touch.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, you will get better, you'll start to see all of these things that you've never noticed before and get some friends, get some friends out there, get a surfing accountability buddy. To make sure that you're getting out there”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think surfing's really interesting. I've never done a sport like it in that it's something that you have to really feel. So I find every time you land and you think about surfing, you sort of feel it before you know how to do it. So even just being able to catch a wave, a green pist move, right? Your pally, your pally, you don't quite know where to be. You don't quite know how much to peddle for that wave. And you just have to sort of be successful a couple of times before you get the feel for it. And it's the same with trying to find the right way. When I looked at the ocean the first time to try and pick the wave and pick where to be, I couldn't even see the shape of it to find that right place. It took me, you know, just seeing 100 waves to be able to do that. So my best tip for surfing is get out there, keep doing it, do it over and over and over again.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something more joyful. And I think the other thing there is just I really value keeping great relationships and increasing those relationships. And so I always make time for these amazing friends that I have that live in London. And we have this pact where every time either one of us goes to the other's continent, we'll go meet them there. So every time I quit a Europe, which last year I was in Berlin at one point in Amsterdam, another point, they came over and we just hung out and had a great time. And so it's making sure that you make time for those important things.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Surrender maximizing joy, and what I mean by that is it's about finding what's important and leaning into it, or finding what's annoying and turning it into something I enjoy. To give you like a super small example is I'm terrible with keys. I will leave that thing all over the place. You'll find it in my cutlery drawer or whatever and I'll never find it again. And I think an obvious solution to that could be to put a hook on the wall or something where you can just leave them and you go back to that and it's easy to find. But what gives me joy is not actually having to have keys at all, right? And so now I have a fingerprint reader on my front door and I feel a little bit like James Bond every time I enter my house and I can let people in, you know, if somebody needs to leave the package or something, that's easy to do. So it was turning something in ring into”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, rather than destroy just throwing it out, it becomes something really cool and useful. The set of instructions has a six-pack of beer at the top, just helps you understand how far through you should be through your six-pack as you're constructing it. You get some tools with it and they're really good, actually. They're not like the usual kind of throwaway tools that you get in something to put. And there was a baseball cap, a baseball cap in there, which was unexpected and really cool. And then the whole experience of actually using it, you know, once you've set it up is amazing. So it's all connected to my phone. I can just head to the beach and have some brisket going and come home and it's beautifully done. It just works. It's integrated. It's got integrated recipes. Yeah, I love that.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you might have to stop me from going on and on about this, but I recently got a smoker, a Traeger smoker for smoking meat. And just the unboxing experience was incredible. So you get this huge box, cardboard box. You open it up. If you reverse the cardboard box, it becomes like a play saloon that your kid can jump into and just mess around in, which is”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the landings are, but also in the solution, you can also see how they tackle something like that. So are they the type of person who wants to go and forge something all by themselves? Are they the type of person who will pull together a community to figure something out? So you get that insight into their values and their approach from that question too, which is hugely useful.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's an old one, but a great one, you know, on the subject of failure. I love to ask people about their biggest failure. And I think it's a good way to get to know somebody because you can see how introspective they are, how much they think about what's happened and what they learn from it. It shows whether or not they can be vulnerable with you. You can see what they consider to be a big failure. You know, some people were with something that's not really a failure. And also you can see about whether they've got that growth mindset. So have they learned something from that? Have they applied it moving forward? I've found a weird, weird rule that I found is that a lot of the best hires that I've had have had big failure stories that they've worked through and learned from. And so I think I think that's great to see what they consider there.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am so late to TV, but Foundation is the one that I've been binging lately. And I think it's just this huge world. And I'm not usually one that gets super into sci-fi, but the way that it brings forward some of these ideas, like from what new technologies could mean, if you haven't seen it, and this isn't really spoiling it, one of the main characters or three of the main characters are actually clones of this emperor who rules the universe and decided to clone himself at three different stages of his life so that those people could continue ruling. And I think, you know, even that idea just invites the idea of, you know, what if we stretch out human life? What are the impact? How do things advance when you've got that same mindset and same people continue on? And it's super compelling.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, look, I, you know, and I have a habit of sending books to everyone who reports to me every year just on a school they're working on. So I've got a huge list that I actually send out. But the one that I send out the most to new PMs especially is just inspired by Marty Kagan. It holds up really well. It was recommended to me by my first boss and it's just got a bunch of great tips in there. Just great foundational knowledge. More recently, what I've been sending out for my managers is scaling people by Claire Hughes Johnson. I think that just came out within the last year, actually, but it's just got an incredible amount of really useful tactical things, templates, all sorts of things that you can put into practice.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's 30 minutes every week, and it's just for myself, my engineering, and my design leader. And we get together and we know that we're going in there to have a conflict. I think often when there's difficult conversations or those conflicts come up, you can put them off until they become much bigger. Or if somebody is conflict adverse, they can try to avoid having it at all. But by having a specific slot of time in your week for something like that, then you're sort of in that mindset. You know you're going in there to solve a hard problem. You know that there's going to be a disagreement and it makes it much better. And I think the relationship we all have is so much better because we get on top of these things early.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will leave you with something and it's just this practice that I found really useful for my squad that we've implemented pretty recently. So I think, and especially with remote work and all of that, so like I said, we have limited time together. But what we put into place is something we called Fight Club. I'll probably get in trouble for talking about Fight Club. The first rule is you don't talk about Fight Club. But it's 30 minutes.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I should have caught that as we were building it because even when I think about the experience, so it was a really good proving ground for it for sure. But even when I think about the experience, Where that experience was designed in product limited its functionality, which is a real shame.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that where I drop the ball was more about what I should have realized about that future. So automation, it's super useful. It can be used by a whole slew of people who aren't just developers. It could be used in every single product. It's more than just moving things to a new status. And so I should have realized that we could have built this amazing service that every product could have moved themselves forward with. Years later, Atlassian actually acquired a company that did exactly that, this advanced automation. And it's in every product now. And so, you know, you can imagine how much it costs to acquire a company. That was a really expensive mistake on my part. So when I see a new idea, I'm always asking myself, how do we push this further? Is there something there that we can 10x? Can we apply it more broadly to more types of users, more products?”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got started through to Dun that'll totally skew things. So, this was causing a lot of problems. But we didn't want to make developers come back into the tool. That was obviously something that was getting in the way of their work. So we decided to build automation so they didn't have to. They didn't have to leave their ID or the command line to do that. They can just keep working. So an example is Jerry would detect that a new commit had been created and then it could automatically move your piece of work to in progress because there's code being written against it. And there are a whole bunch of these examples that parties integrated into it. And I made the decision to put into Jira as a user was editing their workflow and it and we shipped it and it performed just fine. People discovered it. They used it. It seemed to give a lot of value. People liked it, which doesn't really sound like a”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'll give you a bit of a different one because I think this one is harder to spot. And I think that's really interesting. It's something that I think about all the time though. So I missed a really big opportunity to move Lassian forward when back in the day. And like I said, I think about it every time I read view and UIEDR or look at an opportunity that we're thinking about. So I was on this team and I was improving the way that our products helped developers get their work done. And so typically we sell them start in jiro software. They pick up a piece of work and then they switch tools. They create a brand. They'd start writing code. And we noticed that they would forget to come back and update the status of their work. And this could create a lot of confusion in the team, right? Another developer could pick up that work thinking it wasn't started. And then there was a lot of wasted time or if you're trying to track metrics like how long does it take for a piece of work?”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decided to double down on ambition to deliver a world class cloud experience. And it was like hundreds of people just moved around in Atlanta to make that happen, which was in a very show period of time, which was impressive. And we're not shy about killing things off that they fell. So I'll give you another example of one of those products that was going through that we ended up killing off. So we had a whiteboard product that we thought would be its own product, sort of like a Jira product discovery. And when we came to one of those gates with the team, we realized actually, you know, this is more like a really useful document type. And so now you'll see that it's a feature in Conflorence, but it was very quick to make that decision.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another area is when we look at how we're investing, you know, there's always this pressure to invest in the core business, of course, but we also make sure that we invest in seeding future businesses. And like we're talking about, they might not always work out. So we had the compass in the Atlas example of ones that have worked out. But we also see things through Atlantic inventions. So if there are interesting ideas or technologies, these might support the product later on. That's something that we'll go and see it out there in the market. And that's led to a few acquisitions as well, which has been really useful. And the last thing is I think I'm just really impressed at the way that we stay agile to move towards these different shifts that come on. It always surprises me just how agile we can be. So for example, in 2020, we”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long time, but with the advent of ChatGPT, it was sort of like this huge move forward, right? There's this leak that's happening. And so in my team, I just carved off a small team to go and explore that and see what interesting things that we could do there. I think we don't shy away from tackling sort of subsets of the market that we're seeing that need a bit more love. So, you know, that like the Juro product discovery story that we were just talking about a second ago. And we also use our products a lot. And that helps us find all of those little problems and makes it really, real. We get really excited about the different things that the whole team is working on. We send lots of feedback to each other. I think that's also a really important part of it.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think how we stay ahead in other areas is just that the culture is super, super open to innovation, kind of invites innovation. So we had these hackathons. We call them shippet. Everyone, the whole company stops and everyone can play with new ideas or technologies. It's a competition. So the best idea is get visibility. It can get people working with other people that they wouldn't normally. And also the visibility of the ideas helps generate more ideas all over the place. Like I said before, innovation can come from anywhere. So anyone can pitch new ideas or products. And when we see new technologies emerging that we think are going to be really foundational and interesting will carve off a team to go and look at that. So I think, you know, we've had an AI team central to lasting for a while.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Canvas And so, like he said, they are integral to our success, right? We do obsess it over them. We think if we do right by them, then we're going to be going in the right direction. I don't think we've ever had this sense of, you know, arrogance of just no matter how big we are, we've always got those healthy dose of paranoia that we need to keep working on improving things and being better. To your point about customer feedback, that is a big part of it. We bake in these rituals just to make it super easy for everyone to do that. So, you know, the whole company gets an email every week and it's just got a random selection of feedback from our customers. It's got how they rate us and just a quote as well. And so everyone's sort of getting this dose of feedback all the time. We have regular sharing. Of all of the research that”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think the number of startups that enter this space just so shows how important the problem is that we solve and that that problem of teamwork and collaboration. We've got more than 125,000 customers around the world who start their day in Jira, millions of users. And the kinds of companies that use it, I just love hearing about what they do with it. They really blame me away. like NASA landing the Maz River, right? Or Canva building this design platform for 40 million people. It's just massive.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Differently, we found innovative way of looking at things that we can pull back into our other products. So, for example, if you look at Jiropark Discovery, just the way that it gives more of a spreadsheet kind of view of a list of ideas and things like that, you know, some of the experience there is definitely something that we'll be pulling into Jura software.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you want to protect them. And the second thing is just give them freedom to move really fast and solve those problems in a different way. So there are different expectations. They don't necessarily need to be a part of that process that I was talking about before. This team should just be running hard to prove whether or not the idea is going to work and whether there's product market fit. And for different approaches, if I want to add something to your software, we're talking millions and millions of users that thing has to be resilient. It's got to scale. There are all these things that users inherently expect from something like that. But for something small like this, we are proving product market. You don't need to think about that initially. So you've got to hold this to a different standard. Otherwise, we're just going to slow them down way too much. And actually we found that by letting them tackle problems a little differently.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think my advice is sort of skewed towards the Atlassian case, right? Which is where you're in a 12,000 strong employee company. And how do you seed something that you want to run with more of a startup kind of mindset? So when you go to this size, you've got like what are we planning and business reviews and all of these different processes? And you don't necessarily want to put your seed startup through that. It's not quite ready for that kind of thing. So I think the key things here that make it really successful is starting really small with the idea and solution to be proved. And don't add too many people. Don't feel pressured to add too many people. I think it's easy to really excited about the potential and just want to throw, you know, four or five teams at it, that can, you know, like we were talking about this stuff, that can make things run slower.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so make us where you'd actually build it. So the prototype is pretty simple, could be a bit cobbled together. Make is actually building the product and see if you can get more and more customers. That's where you'd start to make it with those customers”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go for it. Yeah, impact could be, you know, I can be self sufficient in the revenue that I'm generating and scale is just like really launching into technology.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It might be someone who's looking after that particular market. Yeah, at each one of those stages, there's that check on whether or not we continue to go ahead.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And building something that really works for them before expanding it to more and more customers and finding that product market fit and then upping the investment. And so we've had a couple of new products recently that have gone through that sort of stage rollout. So there's zero product discovery. There's Atlas that I mentioned before. And I think Compass is the latest one.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a look at, you know, here's a prototype, here are some customers that would be interested in it and could help us think about this some more and put together what the roadmap looks like. And then when you get to make, that's when you get a full team. But, you know, a full team is going to be full people or so. It's still not huge. And I think that's really important because at each stage, you're getting validation. You're getting more customers who are interested and invested in helping you develop what that solution looks like. So you asked about whether we went and partnered with”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they've been successful, but have been really hard because large parts of the company process and those checks were optimizing for the success of the bigger products like Jira Software. And so we changed that to create really small groups with stagegates that we call Wonder, Explorer, Make Impact, and then getting to scale. And that meant to assess those bets at a restage. And the idea was to iterate really quickly either to it not working out, improving that it couldn't be a business, or iterate really quickly to, yes, it could, and we should invest more in this. And so with each stage, there would be, you know, a little bit of investment. So say that for a stage of wonder might just be the person with the idea and then explore you might add on a couple more people, like three people, to go and really.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. So, for example, actually came from our product in general innovation program in that we let anyone pitch an idea for a new product in the company if they want to. So we had this wonderful product manager, Tiny Christen, who saw demand for a solution for product managers to build their roadmaps a bit better before ideas get committed. As you know, there's all of this fuzzy area, right, before you actually start building something as a product manager where you're looking at lots of opportunities and ideas and you're prioritizing them. And it's not really confirmed real work yet. And nobody wanted to put that in JIRA because once it was in JIRA, then everyone just expected it to happen. And so this is where Jira product discovery came from. And in the past, we tried things like this before in new products that”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teams, you know, the finance, the marketing teams, even design teams was sort of cobbling together the right solutions. Jira Software is incredibly flexible, which is a massive pro of it. But these teams were seeing software teams get more effective, that the way they were getting work done and collaborating better. And they wanted that same benefit. And they started using Jira. But we hadn't set it up well for them at all. So it was quite difficult for them to do that. The positive was that there was this really good signal from our users that they were looking for more from us. And we knew that your marketing team is going to work differently from your developer team. That's how it should be. And so we started your work management to be more focused on all of these other use cases outside of the software team that our users were asking us to go ahead and solve. So that was a really great way to discover the need for a new product where these really strong”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was my mother in law's favorite thing. It took us forever to get her off that onto something better. But there's a lot that's changed since that time, right? There's been agile, there's been cloud. And what we saw recently was more in the expansion of software teams. So they used to be extremely developer centric. And I think most people, when they think about Jurisoftware, they think, oh, you know, that must be like 80% developers that are using it. But actually, it's more like 50% or maybe just shy of 50% are developers. And the rest is this huge mix of support and operations and sales and marketing, finance, design, HR, legal, just this massive mix of everybody, all the roles you could think of in a company, basically that get in there and record happen. And so what we saw years ago was, well, software teams aren't just developers anymore. And we saw this in our own teams as well. But we saw these other”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what? It's not like we added the first product and got it just right way off the bat say yeah 15 we've had a lot of shots at this so I might talk about two examples so I think the first one you know if I think about Jiro software it started just as a really humble bug tracker that was it there was there wasn't as much to it And then it sort of weathered these massive changes in how people build software. So it launched in 2003 and if I remember correctly, like just to date this, the mobile phone that was most popular at the time was the Nokia 6100. I don't know if you ever had one of those, but I don't know.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's really important when you keep it scrappy and small in the beginning, it doesn't feel like it's as big of a bet, that that gives you the opportunity to really prove that the direction that you're going in could pay off. And so it's sort of like this little inroad to getting more investment.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At one stage, the team picked off something that was pretty impactful throughout the whole thing. So that was Dark Road. That took a lot of Coordination around the whole company to make that thing happen. But it was well overdue. We loved it. And then, you know, the feedback that we got as well really helps with that. So I actually just yesterday, I saw some feedback on one of the changes we'd made recently. And this customer said it was the best quality of life improvement they've seen in a long time, which just the way that's phrased even, you know, that gets you excited about the impact that you're having on that person.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to use it and what they thought of it. And that just really brought that emotional aspect to it. It helped get people on board. And the issue, the new experience, which is just far and away miles better, you know, might cut out like 20 clicks or whatever. And so all that worked together to get the investment that we needed. I think the last thing that was useful there actually is that we started pretty small too. So I think if you have a hypothesis and you can start small, you can get that investment more easily. You can show success. You can always build on that in the future to get more and more. But in this case, we got about 40 people to come in and join onto this. And then as we ship things, we just made sure that it was quite kept being quite small. And so we got that momentum really quickly. We kept with regular updates. We kept up the excitement about what the team was doing.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would make sure that they weren't causing any issues and were doing reviews and reviews of designs and things like that. And so getting that buy-in, finding the data to support the reason why this was important. And then we constructed the roadmap so that we found this sort of like a low cost, like very cheap way to have some impactful change early on. I think that was really, really important. And so we put together some of the designs for what the experiences were going to look like. Our head of design, Charlie, sat in at the moment, has this great mantra of show, don't tell. And in this case, it was just at the core of getting people excited because you could show the initial experience. You could show the pain. You could bring in a video of a couple.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I also found was that we have a lot of dependencies. So we've got all of these platform teams and a lot of the improvements that would be really good to make to sort out this problem depended on many, many teams around Atlantic. And they all had different goals, right? And other products that they had to serve too. I don't know if you've ever tried to align three or four different roadmaps so that the timing is just right to get some improvement through, but it's basically impossible. There was no way that was going to happen. But we did find that they were really passionate about this area improving usability. So we worked together to find a low-cost way for those teams to help us make the changes that we need to, but they didn't have to bear the brunt of all the development costs. So each of those teams put forward, like we called them a shepherd. So then as our developers came in and made changes in the code base, that this ship”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is this going to impact? And so logically, what we found, well, what we found was that usability was one of the key reasons, like I said. And logically, if your product is hard to use in places, if some of the core actions are hard for people to do, then a new user to that product or a new customer is going to have a longer ramp-up time, right? You've got a harder time showing them that there's value. And even for an existing customer that's using your product really well when they bring on a new user, that user might have a really hard time getting up to speed and using it and just completely slows them down. So from a business point of view, it can impact your new customer acquisition as well as your ability to expand. So there was some good revenue connections in there as well.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no worries. Yeah, so he can't really deeply about this, asked me to look into it. Even though this request was coming from the top, that doesn't mean that it gets any sort of funding. So we went through a couple of different steps to see what was worth investing in here. So first of all, I mentioned we had that survey. And so we had really rich feedback. So it's not just eroding for what we get. We get people talking about why they gave that rating. And that can really help us zero in on what are the key aspects that's bringing this down. And we also had great conversations with our customers. It was, you know, the kinds of conversations that are really rich and really helpful, but so painful to listen to and go through because you're seeing some of these really struggle with something that you thought was going to bring them so much, so much value. And then we had a look at, well,”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely, of course. So CSAT means customer satisfaction. For us, we actually have a survey so that we can measure CSAT. And it just asks customers to rate how satisfied they are with the product and then different aspects. So we can see for different tasks that they need to perform or different aspects of it like the reliability or the speed or the usability. How do customs feel about that?”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a really good example, actually, the CSAT example, because sometimes you can get caught up in, let's add value add value, add value to the product. But if the customers aren't satisfied with what you built, or in our case, we found that one of the core reasons was the usability wasn't where it needed to be. The Mekon access that value anyway, it doesn't matter. Sometimes it can be hard to get investment for things like that because it's so like, you know, the shiny, exciting new thing. It's, I want to work on the features we already have.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. So the first one is to find people who are affected or negatively or positively or might have a really good point of view and partner with them as you develop the solution or the response to the current situation. And the second one is to come at it with this mindset of being open, of being really key on what is the core problem or the value that you want to deliver and just being open to how you get there and things that you don't know, which might adjust still in the way. And the last one is just setting up the meeting role. So coming in, making sure that it's very clear what you need. Do you need a decision or something like that and making sure that you've got very good supporting data to build that credibility with your audience?”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Situation, what has changed, and what are the implications that you now want to, we mean we have a problem to solve and opportunity that we can go often. And the last thing is just making sure you've got your data. And the people, there's executives, there's people in the meeting, you know, they usually across a whole ton of stuff. Just hearing about maybe they've got 10 proposals a day, right? And they're across all different areas in the business. And so they're not going to have the detail that you do. So being really thoughtful about what you bring, what are the key points that are going to help them understand the situation as clearly as possible, but then really knowing your data so that you can dive in in more detail where they need it. And that also helps build your credibility and builds people's confidence in the plan to go ahead.”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other thing I would say is that setting up the meeting when you finally get there can be really important as well. I often see people go in there and they've got a big document or a presentation or something and they just launch into it. They're really excited. But actually you want to take a step back and you want to be really clear on what are you looking for from that group. You can ask for the decision. You can ask for feedback. You can ask for you can expose where you're not quite sure about something and you want them to be thinking about that angle in particular and helping test that hypothesis with what they know. And so setting that early, you can put that in people's heads as they read through your document or listen to the rest of the proposal. Then I find it's really useful to have a narrative that just encompasses everything that you're going to talk about. So just really brief, like what's the current”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Acquisition or not, that doesn't really matter. It's more about being able to get that value back to our customers. That's what we're solving for. And so it was really about coming back, not falling in love with that solution and that other company. It was just taking a step back and going, okay, well, really it's just, what are we here to do? What's the real goal at the end of the day?”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An example from my post is there was this potential acquisition that we could have made. And I was really, really keen on it because it wouldn't mean adding a whole bunch of much needed capability really quickly to the product. And I just love that momentum. And I didn't see any other way that we could do this. So I'd looked at a bunch of other options about building it in-house and it just didn't seem possible. And there were a few people that I needed to convince, you know, my boss, but also the head of engineering for the area. And when I took it to them, what I learned was the head of engineering was able to pull a bunch of people from other areas within the company to come and bolster this effort who had all of the knowledge that we needed. So what seemed like the impossible task, he actually had this extra knowledge to make possible. And in the end, you know,”
2024-02-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source