Enhancing Asynchronous Communication with Janie Lee at Atlassian Team ’24 Europe

This is Textron tv. Hey everybody. Welcome back to Barcelona.

I'm Mitch Ashley here we are at Atlassian, team 24. You're enjoying ourselves at, uh, kind of the second half of team 24 here in, uh, European continent, having a lot of fun, really kind of catching up what happened since Las Vegas and new things that are going on as well. I had the pleasure talking with the CEO of Loom in Las Vegas.

Now I get to talk with, uh, Jamie Lee, this group Product Manager Loom. Welcome. Thanks so much for having me, and Mitch really excited to be here and share a little bit more about what we've been up to over the last six months.

Yeah, you've been busy, from what I hear. You've Been busy. Good, good.

Well, tell us about yourself and, uh, tell folks about what Loom is. Great. So I'm Jeannie Lee.

I have been at Loom for about four years, and now part of Atlassian and Loom is an asynchronous video platform for work that really enables people to share not only themselves, but also their work through video. And really excited to make asynchronous communication a part of everyone's tool stack, especially in this day and age where more work is distributed and people are going through meeting fatigue. Very good.

So, you know, video, we use video for everything now, right? A lot of, a lot of synchronous video, but also asynchronous recording, demos, messages, all kinds of different things. How, how does this fit into the Atlassian product ecosystem now?

Because when we talked last time, or I talked to Joe last time, which at the beginning, you know, we're now an i an item you can select from a menu or somewhere in the product. Now it's really more integrated in. Yes.

So we're really excited at Team Barcelona and and Europe to talk about some of those great integrations. We have gone really deep with both Jira and Confluence to seamlessly fit into people's workflows today. Uh, JIRA, we know that a lot of people take way too much time filing bug reports, creating tasks.

The common pain points we hear from engineers, product managers, designers, are that it's too kind time consuming and a lot of context easily gets missed and is miscommunicated. Mm. So we've made it really easy to go from video to a Jira ticket.

We'll have users in one click starting to record a bug or a design walkthrough. And through our AI in transcript, we will easily summarize the bug report into easily reproducible steps. And within a click in seamless integration within Jira, you can file that ticket in two minutes with what would've in a previous world taken 10 to 20.

That's a great use case. Sometimes it's really hard. It takes a lot of effort to write it down versus just describe it.

Exactly. A lot easier to do that than to be precise in language. But Loom is more than just a, let me send, insert an in a video in the middle of my, you know, confluence page or my Jira ticket.

Right. I mean, you're, you're transcribing the content of it that's now searchable as part of, you know, the larger, uh, search capabilities Yep. With the robo Yes.

As well. And, uh, talk about how that fits into the workflow since you've got more than just a video there. You've got really the content of the video as part of the workflow.

Exactly. That's such a good point. With all of our transcripts being searchable and spread across and integrated with all of the data, whether it's your Confluence document, your Jira project, or any of your other contacts from third party data, it makes it really easy for customers to know exactly what's going on in their work.

We have had customers express a lot of pain in tracking down what's the latest status of a project? Do I have to find that latest a Slack message, or is it somewhere in a document? And now within one search box you can easily find across all data sources what's happening.

Something that we're also extremely excited about is our, uh, the recent rewatch acquisition by Atlassian, which allows us to start incorporating some of their AI enabled meeting assistant technology such that come a few quarters we can start to integrate and digest all meeting content via transcript as well. And you can imagine a world where I go into Roho and search, Hey, catch me up on all the meetings I missed last week around this project, and instead of the three hours of meetings, I can consume a few bullets or maybe a highlight reel. That's fascinating when you think about the team graph.

'cause now you can say, well, I care about the meeting parts of the meeting that matter to my work. Right. I don't need to hear everything that happened, what's relevant to me.

So that could be part of the video or part of the what's written up in the notes, either through AI or a person. Yeah. We, there are so many customers who say they need to attend a lot of meetings because they have the fear of missing out.

Yes. And ex missing any important or relevant context. And usually that might be 5% of a meeting and not the entirety of the 30 minutes or an hour.

And I think this will enable people to really get some of their time back with also not having to, to worry about meeting fomo. How is, uh, the way people use video change since you became part of Atlassian? Yeah, it's been really interesting.

I think generally speaking, we see Loom used horizontally across all departments everywhere from our C-suite. We have Mike and ANU sharing out company-wide announcements all the way to really casual use cases. What we've been really excited to do as we've become part of Atlassian is actually share some of our more, uh, atypical use cases more broadly within the company.

One of my favorite personal use cases that we're trying to do more broadly across recruiting is using looms to help recruit people. Uh, at the beginning of a recruitment process, I, alongside my recruiting partner, will actually record a loom about the role I'm trying to hire for. And instead of doing email cold reach outs, uh, the recruiting partner will send my loom to candidates to give them a sense of who might the hiring manager be, what is the job actually about in the hiring manager's own words.

And as we get to the end of the recruiting process, as we're trying to close candidates, we'll have everyone who interviewed a candidate send out a one to two minute loom that talks about why they're excited, what they loved about the interview process, and why they'd be a great fit. And I have to say, as someone who was on the receiving end of this four years ago, goes such a long way for helping candidates feel like they're, they're really wanted. And so it's a, a small interesting use case, but you can imagine in every part of the workflow where video can really add that extra touch of, of expression that goes a long way.

Seems The impact of that could be very, very big. I can, I mean, I can't imagine getting a video get, getting to watch a video of the hiring manager, them speaking out loud, thinking out loud what they're looking for, why they're looking for that, what the job's about. You know, it's different than reading it on a page or a recruiter kind of reciting to you.

Yeah. The warm fuzzys you feel when 10 people tell you why they're so excited to have you, I think really helps close the, the process out. Interesting.

Um, what are some some of the new uses of Loom that you're kinda looking forward to? Are there things, some things on the horizon? Yep.

You might expect? Something that we're really excited about is continuously making video more accessible to people. Asynchronous video is still in its early days of becoming an everyday part of how people work and communicate, and we think it's a key part of the tool stack if people want to be more productive and get their time back.

I think a big part of what we've seen with customers is actually playing a video back. Hearing yourself, seeing yourself can be really quite daunting. And from a core product and technology perspective, if we want end users to really adopt this, we have to make it so easy to not only record, but also to edit and, and share.

A lot of our investments are really around the auto editing. How do we make someone look and feel their best and make someone's first take their best take? So some investments we've made already are really around AI and auto polishing.

A video will auto summarize it at a title, will remove your filler words. And I think the next step here is making the editing process just as easy as editing a text document. Hmm.

I think a lot of consumers today, they don't wanna spend their time in a wave form. Yeah. I, for one, get really frustrated if I'm spending 30 minutes trying to edit a one minute video.

And now with our new transcript based editing experience, you can delete text from the transcript, we'll automatically edit the video, and we're continuing to make AI investments with text to speech and lip sync technology. So that becomes a more and more both natural and accessible way to, to edit video in as easy as it is for a consumer product. So just kind of think of what you, we were talking about fear of video, right?

Not all of us, you know, we're working everywhere, right? Yep. Who knows, we're sitting in a robe or just walk the dog and I'm, you know, just got from a hot weather outside, I don't wanna be on a video.

Do you imagine that that's part of sort of, uh, editing of the video that filters and things like that? We'll get to a point where it's gonna smooth out the rough, rough parts of what I didn't say well, and take out the ums and all of those kind of things. And maybe, you know, Mitch doesn't look like he just got through working out and he looks kind of normal.

Is that part of that process that let us do a little massaging to the video before you put it out there in front of everybody? Exactly, yes. Our job is to make you look and sound your best.

And so editing filler words ums like even long silences is something that we do today. We also help remove any background noises. So if you have the dog barking or your kid running across the video, uh, we can also smooth some of that out.

I think as we look into the future with some of the AI capabilities on the market today, you can also start to imagine a world in which, if people aren't comfortable speaking, um, how do you help bring that comfort, whether it's through avatars, uh, voice avatars, video avatars that also, um, help customers feel a lot more comfortable. Very nice. Um, is any of the, uh, the agent technology, does that work with Loom yet, or is that things coming?

Uh, definitely things coming. I think with the robo release today, we wanna make it such that anyone can self create their agent using Loom in their workflows. Then I think there are a ton of interesting cases, especially on the go-to market, whether it's marketing and sales verticals where Loom is part of an easy workflow or agent can be really, really compelling.

We've recently invested a lot on both the AI and core video front to enable go-to-market teams to do customer outreach at scale. And you can imagine a workflow in, in VO that allows you to quickly understand the context of a customer and start to use that in a workflow that reaches out to customers in a really personalized way, even if the creator's only recording a video once. Mm-Hmm.

You know, sometimes video to text isn't a, isn't a faithful translation, right? There's so much more visually to, uh, what what we're communicating as well as what we're saying. Do you think that that's part of what AI can help us add to how it translates?

Maybe it needs to change the words a little bit to get the, the sentiment or whatever it is you're trying to, you know, if I'm really excited about something or kinda a little hesitant, you know, how I'm presenting or talking on a video, you could read it either way and not know Yep. That that was there. Do you think those kinds of things will, will start to make it way its way into the content?

Yes, and I think it has to, and I think that's the power of video is, uh, there's such high fidelity when you can see the facial expressions, the tone in someone reading over the exact same text, and I think that expressiveness is what really makes Loom and asynchronous video so powerful. The misunderstandings and the back and forths get dramatically reduced. When you can start to incorporate that, I think we can do a lot to help customers prepare for the video that they want to record.

You can imagine a world where in Confluence you are writing your thoughts down and trying to prepare for a video that you want to record. And based on how you want that content to come across, you can start to use AI to help you with the tone and type of writing, and also make sure that it, it gets conveyed and, and vice versa. How do people accept the idea of recording videos as part of their work, but they may not work there forever.

Right? Those things kinda live on now, not on the internet, but inside the corporation. You know, I hadn't really, I, I thought about code I've written that's still running somewhere in some business, but not a video I made, you know, is that, is that a consideration for people like, oh, do I wanna leave that behind?

Yeah, that's a such a great question. In terms of video content, we see a pretty wide range of type of content. We see the femoral type of videos that people will send one off on a quick update or a quick message, and then you definitely have the evergreen content that you see, whether it's an announcement, a product demo that kind of are more long lasting for those videos, we wanna make sure that first and foremost admins have really, really tight control of what happens to that content and for smaller customers to make sure that users can choose whether they keep that data delete or archive that data and understand where it really lives.

Well, not asking you for any commitments on product releases, but I hope we get to a day where we can natural language, uh, interact with the video editing processing, take that part out, you know, you can do it with words now, Make it three minutes shorter or yeah, Three minutes shorter and, uh, you know, summarize that beginning or whatever, or, you know, or start here instead of sliding the, you know, like we do in waveforms and audio now with video. Right. Just to make it easier for folks that don't, aren't, don't know that skill.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's definitely the broader ethos and trend we're seeing, which is consumerization of enterprise software.

If we want asynchronous video to truly become a part of everyday life, that's where we'll need to be, which is, you don't need to be a video editor to use asynchronous video. I think it really should be as easy as editing a doc. And whether it's telling us that you want your video to be branded with your brand guidelines, or to your point shorter or more effective, or to strike a specific tone, definitely want to be at that place where consumers can quickly tell us a few ways to make their video better and they'll never have to rerecord or, or edit that content again.

Just Tell 'em, I wanna make, make my my video better, make it more professional, whatever. Jane, it's a great pleasure talking with you. Congrats on the, uh, becoming part of Atlassian, the acquisition and the incorporation of Loom into more seamlessly into Jira and Confluence.

That's the great stuff. Thanks so much, Mitch. It was great talking to you.

You bet you too. We'll be back with another great interview, just like with Jamie, Jamie, excuse me, and, uh, having a lot of fun here in Barcelona. So stay tuned.