
How Atlassian Built a $10B Growth Engine - AliCollins
https://producthabits.com/atlassian-built-10-billion-growth-engine/
======
pletnes
Most comments revolve around JIRA as an issue tracker. I think those miss the
point. Atlassian products are never best in any given category (in my
opinion); however, they all integrate easily and (almost) out of the box.
Choosing JIRA over another product might not be meaningful, but you need
source control, chat, build servers, etc. Having them play nicely together
without fiddling with tricky settings is a huge benefit.

~~~
tablet
What if you have a product, that integrates best tools in any given category?
Slack, GitHub, etc? Can this solution beat Jira?

~~~
maratd
> What if you have a product, that integrates best tools in any given
> category? Slack, GitHub, etc? Can this solution beat Jira?

No, it can't. Atlassian's tooling is used by large teams. It doesn't make
sense in a small team environment. In a large team of say a dozen people, can
you imagine managing accounts/permission/access to a dozen services? That's
over 144 accounts, plus billing, plus all the other stuff needed to make
everything play together. Nobody wants that headache.

That's just the tip of the iceberg too. Atlassian already plays well with
Github and other services. So you can have your cake and eat it too.

~~~
qaq
Large teams generally use SSO solution like okta, oneLogin etc. so not really
an issue

~~~
toomuchtodo
We use JIRA and Bitbucket in an org with thousands of users. AD SSO support is
mandatory.

------
nunez
I've developed against JIRA and used JIRA pretty heavily at several companies
now. JIRA is a really nice product, but one's experience with it heavily
depends on who "owns" it.

~~~
wwalser
Finally, someone makes _the_ point in a thread about JIRA.

JIRA's most powerful feature is that it affords for mapping businesses
processes onto software. This is incredibly compelling to enterprise
customers. Software that enforces workflows, procedures and requirements can
be an incredible lever and JIRA's price point makes build vs buy decisions an
absolute no-brainer.

The down side for the true end-users, those who actually use the software day-
to-day, is that most business processes are awful.

If your experience is the hellish existence that I see strolled about on
threads where JIRA comes up, I can say with near absolute confidence that it's
because of one of three things:

* Your admin(s) set it up once and hasn't bothered to iterate on those workflows. * The business mapped their autonomy stripping processes onto JIRA intentionally. I'd guess that most of your work experience is similar. Process stifled nonsense. * You're on an instance that is serving too many people with too few resources. Shard your instances folks, the money for extra licenses is wildly cheaper than the human time you're wasting waiting for stuff to load.

~~~
brazzledazzle
Exactly. Conway’s Law doesn’t just apply to software you produce but also how
you configure things like JIRA. If JIRA sucks chances are you’re probably
looking at a reflection of your organization’s dysfunction.

~~~
seanjregan
Learning from Conway's law.

------
athenot
In the eary days, Jira was an awesome bug tracker (free for OSS), compared to
Bugzilla or Trac. But they focused on adding lots of features without much
thought on the overall user experience. Their latest UI revamp only made
things worse.

Somehow, they managed to accumulate the negatives of a flexible product
(resulting in poor/incoherent UX) and the negatives of rigid assumptions
regarding workflows (try modelling staggered deployments in different
datacenters/environments spanning multiple sprints... good luck!).

Going forward, I expect Atlassian to cater to rigid organizations and neglect
those who design their own processes (whether lightweight ad-hoc or complex
custom ones that don't fit what Atlassian Sales can understand).

~~~
dmitriid
I also "love" how they re-designed the issue UI. What do you need in an issue?
Obviously, issue description. Now even on largest monitors issue description
starts below the fold. Everything else is taken up by nice crisp white-space-
separated "important" information: the sprint name, the epic link, number of
hours projected, who it is assigned to, etc. etc.

~~~
liveoneggs
how many points is this outage going to be to fix? we'll need to bring it up
to the project committee to see if we can allocate it out of the next sprint

~~~
justinator
"Points" the gateway drug of JIRA. It's honestly the most difficult/simple
concept to understand, since it's all about "don't think intuitively, because
in JIRA that's the wrong way to think."

------
jmcqk6
Growth is great, but I've never met a single dev that is excited to use their
tools. Management loves their app because they can spit out numbers, and don't
care how good or meaningful those number are.

Jira is a painful to use, especially compared to trello. They own trello now,
so I hope they don't mess it up.

~~~
sz4kerto
> Jira is a painful to use, especially compared to trello.

If you're using JIRA for stuff that Trello works for, then sure.

What JIRA does and does exceptionally well: grows with your organisation. You
can start using JIRA for a simple ticketing system with 3 devs, then continue
using it through 100x growth and still use it with multiple product teams,
multiple development teams, overlapping projects, CI, code review, wikis,
reporting tools, and so on.

If you think that all these tools and sophistication is bullshit, then that's
a different conversation -- but a non-negligible number of smart people think
that these integrations worth a lot.

JIRA is like Excel or Word -- 80% of people use only 20% of the functionality
(or less), but it's a different 20% for all of them. And it's really-really
painful to realize that Trello/GH Issues/etc. works great with a slick UI,
except that it can't do that single stuff you'd really need because of your
special situation.

~~~
jmcqk6
>If you think that all these tools and sophistication is bullshit, then that's
a different conversation -- but a non-negligible number of smart people think
that these integrations worth a lot.

If you can point me towards someplace visible that is using these tools well,
I'm more than happy to be wrong. Every time I've seen them used, they're more
like rorschach number generators for management, so I have naturally assumed
that my experiences are the normal. That is, of course, a fallacy, so if you
can point me to such a paragon of use, I'll be more than happy to check it
out.

~~~
sz4kerto
You seem to be talking about JIRA reports. JIRA != Trello + fancy reports.

The strength of JIRA is that if your company suddenly needs a different
development flow (whatever it is -- new tooling, new workflow, more teams,
awkward regulatory requirements etc.) then you can stay with JIRA because
whatever you want to do will be possible with JIRA.

(Uh, I sound like an Atlassian shill, even though I dislike the lagginess of
their UI and also how they handle Bitbucket. :) )

~~~
ravitation
> The strength of JIRA is that if your company suddenly needs a different
> development flow (whatever it is -- new tooling, new workflow, more teams,
> awkward regulatory requirements etc.) then you can stay with JIRA because
> whatever you want to do will be possible with JIRA.

This actually seems to me to be the biggest _problem_ with JIRA... JIRA allows
for the creation of arcane processes that very easily become burdensome
because JIRA is very loose in its opinions. And, on top of that, the
management of that process also often becomes a burden for the same reason...

And you're also stuck carrying around all the features you don't use...

~~~
gregmac
You can also build flexible, low-overhead workflows using JIRA. The key is to
keep managers out of the admin section, make sure the dev team is in full
control, and tend towards saying "no" whenever anyone asks for changes to the
workflow.

~~~
ravitation
I think anecdotally that may work, but I'm not convinced that dev teams are
_that_ much better than "managers" are at creating or managing process (nor
are they often very interested in doing it)...

But I think this does get to the core issue with JIRA. Whether you "like" JIRA
or not is more a reflection of your organization than it is a reflection of
JIRA as a tool.

~~~
sdoering
Just anecdotally I can confirm that different development and product teams
work good with JIRA and Confluence in conjunction.

The agency I work at uses these tools together with ovur clients, as well as
internally on different levels.

We have an internal project were we are just using tasks, subtasks with 3
states in a team of 9 in three to four locations. And we have a client, being
served with about 100 people in different teams working on multiple projects,
spanning multiple locations. Here we use the same tool. In one case with just
a basic setup. One a 'little bit' more elaborate and customized...

------
ndh2
Some facts in the article that was linked are definitely not correct. Fogbugz
was out there before JIRA. Spolsky wrote about JIRA multiple times, yet the
article never mentions it.

So what is this site anyways? There's no About page, no contact, no ownership
information, no author, nothing. Looks like an advertisement to me.

~~~
wwalser
producthabits.com is a lead generation for whatever Hiten Shah sells next.
He's fairly prolific in the software startup and product marketing spaces.

------
hyperpallium
> While a lot of companies make acquisitions, most don’t execute well on
> integration.

I have a theory that much of the success of web-based companies isn't due to
the internet's reach itself, but because they can actually harness programming
to business. Make something happen; check for something; modify everything. Of
course, there's always problems with programming but it's so much easier than
doing it any other way.

But traditional businesses cannot reap these benefits, because they cannot
make IT central. They can't be IT first. And they lack the talent and
experience to handle all the problems of programming. Therefore, it is the new
web-based companies that know what they are doing (with programming) that win
this.

The quote above is a great example: it's hard to integrate acquired
businesses, they usually just become a messy "conglomerate". What if you could
actually integrate other products and services _into_ your products and
services? With programming, it is _possible_ , whereas it wasn't really
before.

There are still problems - and other commemts highlight how the UI has
suffered. Indeed, enlarging a codebase inevitably has much in common with a
messy "conglomerate". But it's so much easier than doing it in any other way
than with programs (i.e. traditional businesses).

(Atlassian's products also help other businesses run on programs, but that's
not my focus here).

------
liveoneggs
we just moved from jira hosted to jira cloud and it is, shockingly, worse! As
a user I've always hated JIRA and as an admin it is shockingly bad. There must
be some alternatives that are still viable.

~~~
darethas
May I suggest a crazy idea? Ditch it and just see what happens.

We are a large organization, and had an end of year crunch so naturally when
you need to pinch the absolute most productivity out of your workers,
typically process is the first thing that goes.

We just had our most productive 2 week sprint in over a year, by a mile.
Instead of Jira, we busted out the dusty whiteboard, and used this amazing
technology called an expo marker to write down what we were working on and who
was working on what. It had amazing visibility too -- our manager could stop
by at any time and see with his own eyes what we were working on -- all
without having to log in! The best part? We got to ditch the meeting to plan
the planning, the planning to plan the week, and the retro to go over the week
to start of the next week's meeting to plan the planning. We got back like two
entire days, and we didn't have any 9:00 AM context switches when most of us
were in the zone already having to give a benign update that could have just
been communicated via slack!

Some of this is sarcasm and I do understand why managers and leaders reach for
Jira, but seriously: Why did we stop using the whiteboard. If you need
visibility into this crap, hire someone to do that. You have analysts for your
business, why not have an analyst for your tech? It doesn't make us more
productive.

~~~
solatic
> Why did we stop using the whiteboard?

Because whiteboards aren't visible outside the rooms they're in, and they
don't save histories of what was written on them in the past. If your org is
scaling beyond a single geographical location, then you need some kind of
system to communicate status to stakeholders elsewhere. Email and Slack are
nowhere good enough for that; a ticketing system is absolutely vital.

~~~
jimnotgym
Whiteboard + webcam?

------
iamleppert
Having worked extensively with JIRA in the past, I will say that whoever
designed it had to have done it with clear intention.

JIRA has an uncanny way of attracting to it a very specific (and valuable)
person inside organizations.

I mean the person who is obsessed with the creation and quantification of
knowledge worker processes that are subtly complex. This complexity naturally
gives plenty of fodder and massive surface area for engagement and features —-
one can spend hours tweaking JIRA workflows, running reports, and playing with
the query builder. And we all know that once a user is engaged past a few days
you’ve got them, almost like a kind of pair bonding. They have bonded with
your software, and they’ll be forced to spend their days in it. If there is
some ritual like work involved all the more better.

I’ve seen these guys come in from other organizations where they’ve used JIRA
and the first thing they do is push for its adoption and use. There could be
plenty of other things to tackle and I’m not here to make the case JIRA is or
isn’t a good tool, has value, or is more or less important, I’m just sharing
my observations. When you’ve literally made it your job to be the JIRA master,
you are in fact more concerned with the performance of the work than the
actual work product itself. It’s like the difference between introverted and
extroverted personality types. Some people come in and want to get their hands
dirty with the product and code, while others want to setup JIRA and start
tweaking workflows.

Another brilliant thing I noticed they did was to optimize the scrum display
for large TVs. Many issue trackers and other tools simply don’t look good (not
readable) or are not functional on a massive 70” screen. The purpose of this
is clear: for standups and planning meetings where it is used in a group
setting (usually by the JIRA advocate/master).

Another big thing is the daily e-mails. It’s a way to show your boss and co-
workers you’re doing something without telling them directly. And it makes
people feel good to see activity, regardless of what is actually being done,
it’s often times more important that people are working together, as 90% of
all work done in JIRA is irrelevant anyway.

People talk bad about JIRA and despite its flaws you’d do well to study its
workings if you are at all interested in building a similar B2B or enterprise
app that requires a certain manipulation of the end user.

------
lazyjones
> _The thing that made the product challenging to learn was what developers
> loved most about it—that it did everything needed for issue tracking, and
> they could customize it to work precisely the way they needed it to for
> their specific teams and projects._

I don't believe this. There were plenty of competing Open Source tools out
with the same problems. I hated every single one of them and so did other
developers I know. Perhaps developers preferred Jira because the management
could be told they'd have to pay a qualified contractor for customization
instead of torturing the developers with that kind of work?

~~~
hinkley
This is the lie the industry keeps telling itself, especially in print.

Vendors come in and bullshit your bosses and the purchasing authority about
how awesome their tools are and all the things it can do.

By the time the developers catch wind of it the check has already cleared, and
they -have- to use this tool because someone with firing authority paid for it
and you're not going to get away with embarrassing them by calling them on
their bullshit (young me tried, young me failed).

I'm not aware of any development team that consciously picked Atlassian.
Atlassian gets picked for them. Their success is in selling to the management
chain, not in being a good product. Because they aren't (but then neither are
many of their commercial competitors).

~~~
braderhart
Couldn't agree with you more.

------
bedros
What differentiates JIRA from other issue trackers is that it's very popular
with Chip/Asic companies; they have support for all chip design phases, which
other issue trackers lack.

in other words, they found a market need others ignored, and they served it.

~~~
godelmachine
Where can I read more about this? Would you kindly refer me to some web page
or anything ? Also, do you know which ASIC/ Chip / VLSI companies use JIRA?

~~~
bedros
I know Intel uses JIRA heavily from colleagues

I work at another ASIC company (Storage Industry) and we use JIRA as main
issue tracker; JIRA feels very tailored for ASIC, at least the version at our
company

------
qaq
The amazing part Jira is most basic tool many of us use daily . As evidenced
by huge number of posts here people really hate it yet there is no good
alternative. So instead of uber for pancakes maybe someone will be inspired to
build one :)

------
ttul
How they built a $10B growth engine was by being precisely on point with their
timing and then having pretty good product execution.

~~~
dannyw
Not just product execution but GTM strategy, pricing. Jira is cheap. It’s a no
brainer.

Disclaimer: ex-Atlassian

------
polskibus
They sure did outsourcing well, I wonder how has that contributed to their
success. There's a big dev shop in Poland maintaining and developing large
bits of their core offering - Spartez.

~~~
wwalser
Most of their dev is done Sydney and SF. They also have offices in Austin and
NY now.

Spartez has obviously been a great partnership but "large bits of their core
offering" is inaccurate. That's not to deminish the efforts of the people
involved. It's just materially untrue for most values of "large" and "core".

------
tablet
The more interesting question is "Who can beat Atlassian in productivity
market?" What properties this product should have? What Atlassian weaknesses
should it attack?

------
jasonmaydie
it's the SAP of development management tools. Everyone hates it but everyone
uses it

~~~
hb3b
I came for this comment. The big difference between JIRA and SAP is that SAP
is a "batteries-included + kitchen sink" package (which tends to require
molding business processes around it). My problem w/ JIRA is that anything
beyond the simplest workflows/BPM requires purchasing a ton of paid plugins
that tend to be abandoned over time. Atlassian knows what users want but they
are dog-slow at bringing them to fruition.

------
olingern
As an unhappy Bitbucket user, I have my fingers crossed for better Github
enterprise pricing (does not scale for dev agencies with many repos), but
mostly for AWS Code Commit.

It's somewhat scary the breadth that AWS has in their ecosystem now; however,
Bitbucket is wrought with issues like:

\- no large file collapsing, i.e. lock files

\- random downtimes ( I wonder if they actually meet their SLA )

\- feature requests on boards where Atlassian members ask _why x is needed_ ,
followed by a slew of +1's, to only see someone ask 3 years later, "where is
this at?"

I'm a jaded Atlassian user who believes they buy competition and then stagnant
the product's evolution.

~~~
jschumacher
> I'm a jaded Atlassian user who believes they buy competition and then
> stagnant the product's evolution.

What product do you think Atlassian has bought to stifle it's evolution?
Bitbucket specifically was a product with 50k users and Atlassian has grown it
to Millions. Buying a competitor just to let the product stagnate and die
makes rarely sense in business.

~~~
SanDimasFootbal
I’m certain no one at Atlassian wants to stifle Trello. Trello is Atlassian’s
Instagram.

By the way did you see Trello is now part of Bitbucket as a default?

What exactly was HipChat competing with in the Atlassian portfolio when it was
acquired? Nothing. HipChat was three people when it was acquired. It was over
100 not long after. That space grew so fast that you could argue maybe
Atlassian should have put 200 on it. Regardless, it got the biggest investment
of any group chat tool in the game at that time. Slack did an amazing job in
the viral growth front. Credit to them. Atlassian is beefing up HipChat for
enterprise/BTF and launched Stride for everyone with an email address and a
need for something more focused than slack.

------
stuff4ben
Funny, they don't mention Bamboo CI. But probably for the better since there
are tons of better tools out there like CircleCI, Shippable, and even Jenkins.

~~~
wwalser
One thing to keep in mind is that Bamboo was first released in 2007. Less than
a year after AWS was initially launched and well before things like Travis or
CircleCI existed to make the cloud side of the CI equation obvious.

I agree that there are better services if you don't mind running on other
people's infra. Behind the firewall Jenkins I'm not sure about, I haven't
tried it in ages.

~~~
Rapzid
Team City is great IMHO; at least compared to bamboo.

------
whoisjuan
Good for them, but JIRA still sucks.

------
kchoudhu
I didn't realize there was so much money in to-do lists.

~~~
dajt
There is obviously more to it than that, but it was my thought way back when.

I interviewed with Mike and Scott when there didn't seem to be many other
people involved. A few days later the company I worked for started the process
of getting acquired.

I tossed up what I thought my share options might be worth against two guys
who seemed to be just out of uni with a bug tracker.

I called them back and said I'd stay where I was. My options were worth
nothing. Joke was on me big time!

Later on lots of my dev team ended up working for Atlassian and I thought it
might be time to check it out again. I went for an interview and was told I
wasn't smart enough, despite the fact I'd already mentored a bunch of their
devs.

At least they gave me an interview. Most places don't 'cause I don't have the
book learning to get past HR.

------
ngrilly
The title, mentioning $10B, is misleading. As of 2017, Atlassian revenue is
$620 million.

Source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian)

~~~
pm90
Market cap is different from revenue:
[https://www.marketwatch.com/story/atlassian-heads-
toward-10-...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/atlassian-heads-
toward-10-billion-market-cap-with-a-story-to-tell-2017-10-19)

~~~
ngrilly
You're right. The title is probably referring to the market cap. I didn't know
Atlassian was listed.

