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

“Then you're exposing your idea for people to go, oh, here's more that I know about that and hypotheses, or here's some data that you don't have, or here's another way to think about it. I think people can feel like they're not going to be critical, right? You have to come in, you have to come in confident, you have to come in knowing exactly what that solution is going to be. But I usually find that if you come in there open and you expose your thinking and where you could use some help on perspective, that actually that builds more credibility because everyone knows that you are not going to have all the answers and you're not going to be able to see the future. And so that can 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
“I think one way to sort of force yourself into that situation is to be clear about the hypotheses you have and the facts. So I think often people can present as, you know, this is absolutely the case. This is what I know and this is obviously the correct response to the situation where most of the time you've got a good set of data, you've got a good understanding with your knowledge of the space, but what is actually going to happen is a hypothesis. There's always going to be something you don't know. And oftentimes you don't know until you ship it. That is absolutely the best test of whether or not what you thought was going to happen will actually happen. And so I think when you come to the meeting going, okay, here's the top bag. So we actually know. And here's the hypotheses and here's my plan to prove or disprove them.”
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 in addition to that, having that mindset of being open to not necessarily coming up with the right solution, it's more about solving for the problem with the opportunity, right? So you want to be clear about like your hypotheses and what are your facts and what are the principles you're using to make a decision and just be open to not necessarily ending up with a solution you thought would be best.”
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 this much broader view, and that also creates people who will be an advocate for you once you get into that room, that final meeting. So I think all of those in the lead up, there's a lot of lead up work to getting buy-in that makes sure that you have a good time in that meeting.”
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
“As we got designs, as we got more data, as we tested things out with users, we kept coming back and we take their feedback on board. And so I think creating those partnerships is really important. And also the same can be true at the executive level. So often you go into these meetings where you're giving a proposal and you're trying to get that final yes on the decision. You've got a lot of people in there with a lot of different angles that they can look at that problem and so much good experience to draw on. So, you know, your CTO is going to have a totally different way of looking at something and different concerns from your chief marketing officer to your header design, right? They're all going to look at things differently and be thinking about it differently. And so if you know that you're going to be having a big impact in someone's space and you want to hear from them, it's good to set that meeting up early. You know, when you've got some party, but it's not fully fleshed out. And so that you can fold in some of their concerns.”
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
“Had this idea of we could crop more templates so that we could give people more a better way to start with very different use cases when they came into the product. And this could change everything from even just the front homepage where they started all the way to what's happening in product. It would create this really nice flow. Jira is also a platform as well as just Jira software the product. There's actually four different products built on top of it. When you want to go and change something like that, you're actually changing it for all of these different products. It's not just the one. And so what was really important there was partnering with a whole bunch of different stakeholders. So every product that this could potentially negatively or positively impact, we went to very early with the idea and the proposal and we got their feedback. And then we came to them again and again as we developed it further.”
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, this is, this can be a really hard to get right. I watch a lot of people struggle with this, and you're right, being fully remote can make it a bit more challenging. And then I think also, you know, you've got your cross-functional partners that you're working with as this tight-knit team. And how do you form that relationship? But I'll start with just general buy-in. Most of the time when people come to me and they want to ask how to get buy-in, they've got a date in mind. They've got a particular meeting and they have this idea where they're going to crawl this perfect proposal. They're going to present it. Everyone's going to give them thumbs up and they win. And that's the wrong attitude, I think, even to start with, to getting buy-in. It's here of a journey. So I'll give you an example where I was looking at how do people start their day in Jira and how do people get started in Jira?”
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
“But all of our decisions, strategies, kickoffs for projects, that's all really well documented when you start us or even if you're a year down the line and you're thinking, And I think the last thing is, you know, I work with people who are in the US, they're in Europe, they're all over the world. It's really hard to find a time that works well for an Aussie, an American, and a European to get together. You know, someone's waking up at 3 a.m. or something. So what's become of the big part of how we work is actually audio and video recordings. So I actually had someone reporting to me for a while who was in France. What we would do was record videos back and forth. And they're quick. You can, you know, just use colloquial language. They're really casual. You don't happen to wonder about someone's tone that comes across. So that's becoming almost like a completely new document type for us and has been really important in remote work. You can put at the top of a document and explain the document, which is really nice. There's a big part of why we bought Loom.”
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 probably noticed about blocking a bunch of deep work time is that you don't have as much time for meetings. So that meeting time becomes really precious. And what we do there is I personally hate having status updates as a meeting. So make it really clear that if we're having a meeting, this is to solve a problem. And if it's just a status update, that's fine. But I can read that asynchronously at a time that works for me and sick and everybody else in the team if they want to do that. We actually use our own tool for this, which makes it really easy. So it's called Atlas and it lets you or the team put in status updates for a goal or a project regularly and then it'll bundle it all up into an email so you can quickly get across everything that you're interested in which has been really helpful and then that just makes the documentation rigorous as well so you document things and we use”
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 the idea is that it's deep work time and it's your time to be protected to do that work. What I found that works really well, I think in the manager and report kind of relationship, so I have these really quick, punchy one-on-ones with my reports, but every week. And then I make sure that I've got space in my calendar because something will come up where even if we had a longer one-on-one, that might not cover it, right? They might just need an hour to run through something. There might be a really difficult strategy problem they've run into. And so they all know that they can ping me for more time and I'll have that flex in my calendar for 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
“Both at different times. So the first ones take you up one afternoon and the second one's taking out all of the time in the morning, depending on what kind of person you are. One is going to see you better than the others. So we just went for 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
“So we end up having these long stretches twice a week, all at the same time. And so we all get a chance to do this deep work. It means we get less time for meetings, but it also means that if something comes up that's unexpected that we all need to work on together, then we've got that time there so we can be a bit more relaxed about it. We know we can get to 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 the second one is to be really intentional. So I mentioned that we went through sort of a bit of a few stumbling blocks at the start. One of those was immediately everyone sort of filled up, everybody's calendar with all of these meetings, like straight away. It was almost as if, you know, Lenny, if you and I were working together, I used to be able to just like poke my head around my monitor and ask you something and people were afraid that now that I can't do that, how do I get those answers? So I need more time with everybody. And that definitely does not help productivity at all, right? And so, you know, as PMs, we need time for creative work. We need that deep work time. And that doesn't happen when you've got all of these meetings with 30 minutes in between each of them. You need sort of, you know, three to four hours to get that going, to get into that flow state. So my leadership team and I, we actually sync up our calendars.”
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
“Just working together as you normally would, but it desks and just having those little, you know, water caller type conversations, it builds the relationships again. Other times we're doing workshops, an important piece of work where it's easier to do when you're all in person. And sometimes we're just having fun together. So call that a bit of a festival.”
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
“Okay, great. So the first one is just making time for connection. So that human connection is definitely built in person, but what we found is that it doesn't have to be something that happens every single day. So we found that connection and productivity, they both get boosted by about 30% when you bring people together, but intentionally. And it lasts for months. So we found that you can do it on average like three times a year. And so that's why my PM team are getting together every six months. But in addition to that, we get the entire team together every other six months. So we end up all getting together every like four times a year. So every other six months, what we do is we get all of the engineers, designers, everybody who's working together, we book out entire floors in the office, and then for an entire week, we're just there. And for some 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
“Remote work, which folks can go and buy on our work like blog under research at elastian.com if they want to dive in there more. But I can give you a couple of tips from that and what we found from some of our research”
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, absolutely. It's a really good question because it's not easy. And we definitely went through a whole bunch of pitfalls at the beginning. But where we're really firm believers that you don't need to be in the office to build world-class products. So we call our approach team anywhere. And this means that anywhere that lasts in, anyone at Lassin can choose where they want to work every day. We think it's a bit more human that flexibility shouldn't be a perk, that it fundamentally can change people's lives depending on what else they have on outside of work. And so we think less about where do you work and we think more about how to be productive and effective in your work. To your point, you know, we started doing this right when COVID hit. So it's been about three years. And actually, we just released a guide with our key learnings from that. It's all about a thousand days of”
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 know what? I'll give one more thing that we do. So we've just started trying something new called the $10 game for priorities. And so that's where I think people might have played the Tyndall game for your priorities when it comes to a strategy or something like that. We started trying it out with your individual priorities. So you and your manager might come in and you can list out all of your priorities and then show you through just dividing up $10 where you're spending all of your time. And I've done this with people and we've sort of gotten down to like I'm putting 10 cents here this week. Oh, is that what is that 20 minutes, 30 minutes? But I think I didn't think that's actually moving right. And so it's been great to see where people are overloaded and alignment on, you know, do my priorities stack up, but also am I spending the time on?”
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
“Probably when we got into really different sort of streams of work that were happening where people didn't have as much of a reason to interact with each other. So I think that was probably around even around 15, we started to see a little bit of that. Yeah”
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, absolutely. And I think, you know, as a product leader, it's really important to model the behavior you want to see from your teams, whether that's getting out there, teaching, presenting, explaining different concepts, explaining the business, or just being vulnerable and talking about when things haven't worked out.”
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
“We have a real mix, actually. So, yeah, we'll bring an outside expert, or we'll get there's a lot of knowledge and a lot of skill within the team itself. So, you know, you'll have different product managers who have different strengths. We have totally different teams. So someone on a growth team, for example, might want to teach everyone about how to create great hypotheses. Well, we'll get someone external from the team, but internal until I say he has those skills who can come in.”
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 this long squan, I actually had some senior leaders from all over the organization come and saw, share their stories of failure. So just to get everyone used to that idea that it's okay to fail. And actually, if the learnings are really good, maybe it should even be celebrated. And it's not something to be scared of and taking the big swings isn't a bad thing. It can be a really powerful way to learn 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. One of the other things we do is we get everyone together just like every six months. So all of the product managers get together in the same place. And the idea is to have a bit of it on site. Now we start off with just doing something fun because everybody, as you might know, Lassian is a remote organization. So everybody works remote all the time. They can work from anywhere. And so people often, they're not used to necessarily being all together in the same place and can take a little while to warm up. And then after that, we talk about strategy. We do workshops on different elements of craft, boosting that craft together. And so a similar kind of thing. People get to build relationships together. They get to sort of seal these different ideas bouncing around, which can help uplift their own ideas and help them be more innovative.”
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, absolutely. And I think it's just a lot of it is just building that muscle. You know, you might go through an experience once every quarter or once every six months and that can feel really stressful. But if you're doing it again and again, you get used to it. You get used to what to expect. You get a bit more practice. It can feel much more comfortable.”
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 it's really open ended. It can be anything. It can be here's a new experience for Likia Launching. Here's a new strategy I've taken my own strategies in there and gotten excellent feedback, surprising feedback from the team. It can be in your experiment that people think of running and anything to do with the”
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 because we've got people in there who are different leadership levels, it's a really good opportunity to model the kind of feedback that's helpful and the culture there is one of everyone lifting that person up to make their work stronger. So people can get in there. They can show that you can show work that's really in the early stages and feel comfortable with that. They can see they're getting feedback can actually be really positive. And they can see how all of these people together, they can rely on them and forge those relationships so they can rely more people to help them out.”
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, one of the first ones was my team at PMs is big enough now where not everyone necessarily gets to know everyone else. And when you don't have that relationship, it can feel a little scary. You don't have that trust that you understand how people are going to respond to you. And you're not sure about reaching out. So we divided the team.”
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
“Product managers together, and we sat around and discussed it and all together came up with some ideas that we've implemented seam then since then, which has had a really good impact. So I'll give you 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
“Of flow, you know, where everything is going really well and new ideas are coming, and you're making progress, you've got great momentum. And you talked about how to be in that flow state, there needs to be this sense of play. And that's, you know, things are fun. Your mind's open to new ideas. You feel really present. You're not stressing out and thinking about a ton of other different things. And it's funny because when I thought about play where my mind went to the opposite of play's work, right? We often hear work and play as opposites together. But his point was actually that the opposite of play is fear. And I realized that's what I was seeing a lot of in my team. And that's why the ideas were getting more incremental. So took that decision and went, okay, we need to look at psychological safety in that team or we're never going to get to some of these bigger, bolder, more innovative ideas. And so I brought my group.”
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
“Give feedback on it was just sort of painfully polished. And I think once it gets to that level, that's a really bad time to give feedback because it probably means that a whole ton of work has gone into it and you might waste a whole bunch of work if you have to correct direction or make significant changes. And so I was looking at my team and thinking, yeah, something doesn't feel quite right here. And then I went to this leadership upsite and one of the speakers there was Ben Crow. And he's an expert in having the right mindset. See, he works with Olympic gold medalists and Ashbardi is another one. He is a tennis player. She's the number one tennis player in the entire world. So these athletes here have to really perform under a lot of pressure in front of a lot of people. And he talked about how to be in that state.”
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, absolutely. So I think especially recently in the tech industry, it almost feels like we're going through a bit of a wake-up call at the moment. We were in this time of plenty and everyone was hiring like crazy and then COVID hit and suddenly people's behaviors had to really change. You know, people couldn't travel. They had to work from home. There's a whole bunch of industries that got highly impacted by that. And it created this time of high ambiguity. Where people weren't a little comfortable to speak up when we'd had really open discussions with Miss Junior person or the most senior person were happy to talk about anything. There was more anonymous nullity in feedback. Every time things were coming to leadership,”
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 we put into place is something we called Fight Club. We're probably going in trouble for talking about Fight Club the first rule is you don't talk about Fight Club, but 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, you know, like 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