How Atlassian powers Atlassian
The secret to aligning 12,000+ globally distributed employees
500k
meeting hours freed up in the first two years of using Loom
85%
of the Fortune 500
20+
years in business
300k
customers worldwide
Our mission is to unleash the potential of teams
At Atlassian, we’re passionate about teamwork. For over two decades, we’ve been woven into the fabric of the world’s most innovative companies.
Over time, we’ve come to deeply understand the challenges modern teams face.
Work has changed.
How teams work together has to change, too.
Teams are playing telephone instead of using technology
Within many teams, information is buried in one person’s head, stuck in email attachments, or hidden on slide 7 of a deck saved to the wrong folder. That means teams waste time tracking down knowledge or making uninformed decisions.
Worse, they can’t use AI to work smarter. When information is scattered, AI can’t proactively scan all sources to generate insights. Teams are left reinventing the wheel in silos instead of building on each other’s learnings.
1/4
Executives and teams alike spend a quarter of the workweek searching for information1
98%
98% of executives are worried their teams aren’t effectively using AI to eliminate silos1
2%
Only 2% of organizations foster fully effective teamwork2
At Atlassian, we build the future of work for our customers by living it ourselves
Drawing from our unique expertise, we developed a new philosophy to make cross-functional collaboration function. We call it the Atlassian System of Work.
Our philosophy rests on a core principle:
To stay competitive, modern companies need to connect every team across the business.
Organizations that align all their teams innovate faster, have more satisfied customers, and accelerate revenue growth.
The secret to exceptional teamwork
We use our own Atlassian System of Work to help teams easily:
Align work
to goals
Plan and track work together
Unleash collective knowledge
Align work to goals
We make sure that everything we do aligns to goals and that all goals are visible across all teams.
Goals are our North Star. Making our individual, team, and company goals visible to everyone is key to working in lockstep.
Anu Bharadwaj, President
Our practices
1. Set clear, ambitious goals
We set company Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in the Atlassian goals app, where we outline both what we will accomplish and how we’ll know we’ve succeeded. Teams and individuals set goals that all ladder back up to our top-level OKRs.
2. Make goals visible
We document goals in the Goals app so they can be viewed by anyone in the company. We track progress via weekly and monthly updates that make it easy for all Atlassians to stay informed and for relevant stakeholders to jump in if needed and move things along.
3. Use goals to align work to priorities
Teams align every project to a goal, which lets all Atlassians see how specific work fits into the bigger picture. On Mondays, managers often share a Loom about how the team’s priorities that week tie into larger goals.
We rely on Rovo to connect teams that might be working on similar things. Instead of reinventing the wheel in siloes, we’re able to build on each other’s insights.
How
Loom
helps Sales align work to goals
When sales leaders set goals, they send out Looms to rally and align their teams. Those Loom videos live in Confluence sales enablement hubs and help everyone stay focused on top priorities.
For weekly project updates, managers share Looms in the Goals app. It’s often faster and easier to talk through something like a customer win analysis than to type everything out. Plus, if anyone has a question, they can comment (and get answers) on exact moments during the Loom.
The Goals app makes it easy for all Atlassians to stay informed and build on insights from sales.
A recent learning?
Sales team members who use Loom to create personalized video messages in prospecting have 20% higher win rates!
Plan and track work, together
Great teams turn goals into work. At Atlassian, we’ve developed rituals and AI agents to help us execute on exciting visions.
Jira makes it easy to see what work is happening across the company. That drives clarity, confidence, and speed. Plus, since everyone has access to every piece of work, we don’t need pesky status meetings.
Leith Stevens, Head of Product
Our practices
1. Create an understanding of the plan and purpose
We start each project with a Confluence page (or a Loom that AI turns into a page) that explains the problem being solved, who it’s being solved for, and why it matters. We then use Rovo to automatically convert this brief into Jira tasks.
Jira Program Boards make cross-functional planning even easier by clearly showing the dependencies, objectives, and milestones that everyone has agreed on.
2. Get clear on what needs to be done
We make sure every Jira task has a clear owner and states what “done” looks like. We track progress by updating task statuses in real time.
Questions and explanations happen in Jira and include links to Confluence pages that contain important context. That means every discussion stays tied to the task, so our team’s knowledge grows with the work. No sorting through long email threads or digging in folders.
3. Iterate to maximize impact
Rovo lets us quickly discover insights from other teams that may impact or inform our work. Loom also makes it easy to scale what we’ve learned. If several teams are stuck, they can often be unblocked by a single, 2-minute Loom.
To ensure we’re applying those insights, we review progress as a team every two weeks.
How we built the new Jira on Jira
At our flagship Team ’24 event, Atlassian unveiled the next evolution of Jira: a shared place for every team to plan and track work.
Behind the scenes, 20 teams (including engineering, marketing, and sales) across six time zones came together to plan, build, and launch the new Jira in just three months.
Where did it take place? Naturally, on Jira.
The new Jira works for every team by bringing flexibility and customization to support any work style.
The *new* Jira is here – Work Life
Goals in Jira kept everyone aligned andclear on the status of specific tasks, which reduced the need for meetings. Jira’s flexibility also let each of our teams work how they work best. Software teams used sprints while marketing teams used a business plan and calendar that everyone could see.
Teams also relied on Loom to collaborate and update each other, ensuring calendars didn’t slow down their ability to execute. Confluence came in handy for strategy development, launch plans, and messaging.
Unleash collective knowledge
Generating insights from a vast knowledge base gives you a massive advantage – especially when that knowledge is accessible to AI.
Rovo allows us to search without leaving our browser and find the most relevant answers in one place.
Holly Tompkins, Head of Sales, Business Value & Trust
Our practices
1. Answer questions with AI
Because we do everything within the Atlassian portfolio, knowledge is centralized. That means we can easily chat with AI or collaborate with Rovo Agents to surface and build on existing insights.
2. Share more knowledge async
Meetings don’t scale. To effectively hand off work across 12 countries, we document context and key decisions in Confluence, share ideas or demos with Loom, and rely on Rovo (not on another person being online) to find the exact information we need. Sharing async also helps us continually add to our knowledge base.
Bonus: We love that Loom makes video communication two-way. When our CEO shares company-wide updates in a Loom, he can see exactly where people are excited or have questions. And Atlassians can stay in the loop, no matter their time zone.
3. Turn ideas into knowledge
We brainstorm in Confluence whiteboards and collaborate in Confluence pages. We make sure to mark whether a page is an early brainstorm, in-progress, or final. By working together on every part of a project, we keep everyone on the same page (literally 😉) and make it easy for all Atlassians to build on each other’s ideas.
How Rovo saves time and drives impact
Our Customer360 Rovo Agent saves us time and lets us have better customer conversations.
Instead of Atlassians spending hours tracking down information, we rely on Customer360 to instantly answer questions like, “What are this customer’s key projects and priorities?”
Because Rovo can surface relevant Looms, we’re also able to watch a quick video to get additional context or if we don’t have time to fully dig into a Confluence page.
Atlassians find agents so useful that we’ve created more than 3,000 of them! Our engineers save 1-2 hours each week by working with Rovo, which adds up to more than 500 hours per developer, per year, that goes towards building the next big idea.
At Atlassian, we’re using our own philosophy and our AI-powered platform to deliver Atlassian solutions.
We don’t just do it for us.
See how the System of Work helps our customers succeed.
