Product Management Evangelism with Axel Sooriah at Atlassian Team ’24 Europe

This is Textron tv. Hey everybody. Mitch Ashley here.

Back in Barcelona. I haven't left. I'm still here at, at Atlassian, team 24 Europe talk team to great people.

You know, I was speaking to great people, someone who I met and got to talk with in Las Vegas at, uh, Atlassian team 24 North America is, uh, Axel Sariah. We're welcome. It's good To have you.

Thank you. It's gonna be back, it feels like Yes. Trip From France this time.

It is like, this is easier for me. Yeah. Uh, than the whole thing across the pond.

Uh, so it was a two hour flight from Paris. Super easy. And it feels like the last time we spoke was like yesterday.

I know. Yeah. It's, we were like talking to each other on LinkedIn.

Hey. Yep. I'll be there.

Hey. Yeah. Yeah.

And then poof, we See each other. Made it happen. So, So, um, product management evangelists, right?

So, correct. I think a lot of our audience is familiar with evangelists. Do, how do you evangelize product management to product management people?

I tell you, I'm not sure I've cracked it. Uh, Is it harder or is it No, no. It's actually easier.

I think, I think there's a, I like to say a lot of people might think it's a made up job, like evangelism because it's not a, like a widely, um, a standardized role. Right. Um, but I think it's super interesting because you think of the tech industry in general, going through like different phases of growth and trends and transformations.

A lot of people that are on the ground doing the work in these companies don't necessarily have an, uh, current, a current view of like, what are the best practices they should be adopting. Uh, the world is moving at an incredible pace in terms of innovation. Gen AI is the next, you know, is I was gonna say the next thing, it's actually is the current thing.

Yeah. And it's, it's, it's gonna be here for a while. Right?

So if you think about people in an organization, and it, to be fair, it doesn't have to be a tech organization, could be, you know, a marketing team, a finance team in a company. They want to figure out what are modern ways of working, right? Um, one of the things we see is a lot of people struggle with their current workloads because they don't necessarily know like, what's the best way to do this thing?

So it's funny you talk about product management, it's a relatively new craft. Um, different people talk about it differently. I think the level of maturity of the craft itself is still, we're still in the early days.

If you compare to, it's like there's A lot of variation of what people think product is. Correct. It is, yeah.

If you go back to, um, to Fordism even like, you know, uh, at that industrial age, uh, people talked a lot about project management. And then in retail, Proctor and Gamble started their version of product management. So you could argue that product management is not a new thing.

'cause it existed in different verticals sectors previously, but product management in tech was really popularized by the big tech companies, the Apples and Netflixes, uh, and Microsofts of the world, right? So they created, um, this, they basically like shun the spotlight on these jobs. The, the product management job, or the way I like to call it a craft.

The reason why I say it's a craft, it's because it's not something you will learn by reading a book. And you won't go from a state of like, being incompetent to competent after having read a book about product management. It's really something you refine through time, basically like craftsmanship.

So if you think about, you know, somebody who's, um, uh, back in the day, uh, in Japan, you would have these, uh, forge masters making these Japanese swords, right? And they would like perfect this art over centuries. This, there's a, there's a parallel there with product management.

It's something that you learn through lived experience. And the industry is going through like all of these different waves of transformation. And I think our customers need people like me evangelists to actually help them understand what are some of the things I'm seeing in the global Atlassian footprint around how people are operating, how people are innovating, and how can they make some of these practices their own.

That's where the value of my job comes in. You know, you mentioned kind of reaching back in time there, uh, about project to product, right? That's been a, I dunno if I'd say a big movement, but a big theme.

And I think folks are trying to figure out what that means. It seems like at the same time, you know, with all the things that Atlassian is doing around expanding into the organization, not just being an IT or a tech tech platform, um, it's one thing to, to say you're gonna go from project to product, but you have to be plugged into what's happening in the organization to help make that happen. Maybe we should first start with what do you think it means to be product rather than project?

That's a great question. Um, there's a lot of dimensions to it. Uh, culture is a big one of them.

But I think the, the biggest dimension that I see as a, like, radical difference between teams that are doing, that are operating in the project model versus the product model, is that if you think of a project, um, it has dimensions like time, quality, and scope, right? And often people that are working in the project world, they don't quite have a sense of ownership or accountability because a project has a start date and an end date, and you're building something the day it's shipped, that's over. You will hear people say, we are resourcing this new team, which means that we are taking people from different areas.

We are bringing them together for a little while to build this thing so it's not stable in time. One of the challenges with this is that the people that are actually building these projects and shipping these features don't build domain knowledge because after they've shipped something, they're moving to the next project and they might be building something in a completely different space, right? So the sense of ownership and accountability and domain knowledge isn't quite there.

So that's one thing. The second thing that I observe is wherein when you're in the project model, you think a lot about outputs. What am I gonna ship?

What am I gonna build? When in the product model, we think a lot about outcomes. How is this thing that I'm going to build eventually or ship impact the business?

How's it gonna impact the bottom line? So if you think about it, it's more of a long-term view of like, where do we want to go? Uh, Simon Sinek often talks about finite versus infinite games.

So in product, you're playing the infinite game, right? You're looking forward in the future and decomposing the value that you might wanna bring to a customer in multiple iterations. And it's a life cycle that doesn't quite end.

It's like a perpetual movement where project is start date, end date, here's a budget, here's a bunch of resources, go and build this stuff. And you have to meet this deadline. And you know what, one thing that I like to say is there isn't quite a thing as one is bad and the other one is good.

No, They're just different. They're just different. And in fact, like project management for specific types of work, workloads are actually like, it's actually a better way of working than product management.

I'll give you an example. If you have a workload with low uncertainty, so you have a pretty good idea of what you're here to do and why you're doing it, for example, build an integration. Like you don't need to set up a product stream to do that.

You can run it as a project, start date, end date, fix budget, get a team together, build the integration, done. It's very low un uncertainty. When the uncertainty high, and you are working throughout that process to trying to reduce that uncertainty during product discovery, for example, is a term we use quite frequently to say, how do we go out there and collect evidence that this is going to impact our customers positively?

And do we build confidence in our own decision making? All of this takes time building a product, and it's a, again, a perpetual movement. And that's more aligned with product management.

Well, Let's do this out there and then we can, I'd like to talk about discovery, but one model I've used is there is software development for an internal captive audience to solve a problem, automate a process or whatever. There's building software for someone on a contract kind of basis. Yep.

Then there's building a product that is gonna be used by whoever that has to deliver on a promise of the value that it can create. Um, and it may or may not be used in the way you intend it to be, correct. I mean, they're gonna take it outta the box or, you know, off off the network and who knows what they do with it.

And it may be some really inventive things that may kind of take it down a weird path. You have to figure out how to help the customer. So it's a very open-ended to your point of what is the outcome, what's the promise we made to that customer that they departed money with, right.

That we have to make sure we deliver on. So, so let, let me transition to discovery. Discovery.

Didn't you have passed like 10,000 customers or? Yeah, so that Recently We, uh, launched, uh, JIRA product discovery in general availability, uh, over a year ago. And since then we, we've recently actually passed the 10,000 customer mark, uh, recently, and it's the fastest growing product in Atlassian's history.

Really? Yeah. So people really get and understand the value of the product quickly because they're moving from trying to do these workloads in places where it's really difficult to keep people aligned.

And on the same page, typical example is in spreadsheets. The moment they move into the Atlassian platform and onto Jira product discovery, suddenly everybody's working off live information. So one of the, one of the features that we have that people find a lot of value in is their ability to use living roadmaps.

So in the old world, your head of product, your VP of product or your CEO might send you a message and say, Hey Mitch, uh, we are doing a leadership offsite next week. Can you send me the latest version of the roadmap? What do you do?

You might go into slides or, you know, into a spreadsheet, Refresh, update 'em, Say like, trust me, I've even drawn slides from scratch before. Yeah. Like using boxes and shapes and text boxes, right?

We've all been there, it takes us hours and, you know, takes us away from what really matters from our customers. How many timelines have we drawn? You Know, and the moment you share the slides, they're out of date.

Yeah. Because the teams are moving saved, They're out of date. Correct.

Like the teams are moving, like constantly with Jira product discovery, you have the ability to publish, for example, a roadmap and share a link, A URL to anyone across the company, could be your leader, for example. And every time they're consuming this roadmap, they're looking at it, they're looking at live data. So if you change something in one of the ideas on the roadmap, it will impact the view that they're consuming instantly in real time.

So no more time spent trying to, you know, send new version of slides which go out of date, the moment you share them. Basically, this means that product teams claim back a lot of their time and a lot of their autonomy, and they can invest that time and energy in what truly matters for their customers. Plus a game changing thing for product teams.

Oftentimes you're building software, but you're not sure what it's for or who it's for, or what if it's a part of a bigger hole, right? It's in some system and I know what my part does, but it's all kind of a mystery. Whereas when you have a product roadmap, you know, okay, I'm, I might be delivering a feature or a, you know, some, some enabler for a new market, but I know it's part of this bigger, I know what it is, How does it fit in the bigger picture?

Right? Yeah. At the end of the day to use that phrase.

So, um, what is it about discovery? Is it because when you use discovery, you're connected into so much of the other, the rest of the ecosystem of Atlassian around Confluence and Jira and other tools. Is that, is that it's almost like putting on a pair of glasses for the first time.

Like I can see what's going on. So it's a great question. I think part of the success of the product is it's incredible.

It's, sorry. It's incredibly u uh, easy to use. So usability is a big aspect.

A lot of our customers are actually non-tech personas. Um, so they might be from, uh, marketing team or basically different stakeholder groups across the organization, finance ops, and they'll come into Jira product discovery to collaborate with product managers, designers, and tech leads on a particular idea. An idea might be a problem to solve and opportunity.

It might be an experiment you want the product team wants to run. And these stakeholders as they come into that workflow and collaborate with the product team, realize that this is super easy to use. So usability is a big one for us.

The second thing I would say is the surface area of collaboration based on our licensing model, means that you can invite a majority of people in your organization to collaborate with you in Jira product discovery without necessarily having to pay for a paid license. That changes everything. It changes your capacity to collaborate with people across the entire organization, whether they are close, collaborated to you or they're a stakeholder that you might interact with only once.

Right. The third thing I would say is pricing. So Jira product discovery is about 67 times cheaper than our competitors.

And in this current economic context, it matters a lot, especially as leaders are trying to consolidate their spend, uh, across it in general. That's a big, big difference. Is it customer acquisition trying to gain market share?

Is that what your objective is? Yes. And we are also very conscious that, you know, um, our tagline is impossible alone.

So if we want to get people to collaborate and change the future of teamwork, we need to get more and more people invested in collaborating and removing some of these obstacles, which is why we've built the licensing model like this, uh, to invite collaboration with the product teams. Right? Um, so we don't want one, one of the things you hear a lot, um, when you're not part of the product organization inside the company is you'll hear people say, oh, product is like a black box.

We don't know what's going on in there. Like, people are like doing their own thing, almost like on a secluded island and they're isolated from the rest of the company. So we're trying to change that, and the way we do that is by inviting the rest of the company to collaborate.

An example of that is how we create views inside your product discovery for teams to do collaborative prioritization. So instead of me saying, this is what we should build next, or, you know, the highest paid person's opinion is being weighed in saying, as an exec, I think this is what we should do next. I'm inviting the rest of the organization to come in and weigh in and give me their view on why they think this is what we should be prioritizing.

It creates this space for the team to have this conversation, which is really important. Good. Um, there were a lot of announcements around, uh, AI and agents and, um, you know, uh, doing strategy planning, things like that seems to me the, the product, the discovery process kind of fits right in the center of all of that.

Correct. A lot of our customers right now, we are, uh, at the end of 20, 20, 24, right. A lot of our customers right now are doing 2025 planning.

They're trying to figure out what is it that we are going to do next year. I'm sure you're familiar with this process. Like every company everybody's ever worked in, a company has gone through something similar at some point in their career.

What that really means is that you have to create a structure where people can contribute ideas and have some form of framework where they can share like, what is our long list of everything we could do? What does the medium list look like and what is the short list, which is a curated view of the workload that we could potentially do look like, which is what we call a roadmap. Right?

So one of the things that's really important to us when we think about innovation, collaboration, you talk about strategy and planning, is to remove a lot of the perception from this exercise that this is something that should only happen at the higher altitudes of the organization. So the moment you say strategy, some people are like, oh yeah, but this is for the, you know, the leaders in the company. Yeah.

So, Yeah. Correct. We believe it's sits at multiple levels.

So we use the term altitudes to describe this. So you might have the leadership altitude, which is a leader looking at a business line, and then you'll have a product team or head of product altitude, which is, um, somebody who's, uh, responsible for a product domain or, or focus area. And then you'll have the squad, the product squad or the team altitude, which is the product manager, the engineer, the tech lead, working on a specific set of features, right?

So depending where, where you are based on these altitudes, you will contribute differently, right? To the strategy and the planning. So we think of this as an inclusive exercise, not reserved to the elite per se.

Another thing I will say about this is you talk about AI and you know, we, there's, there's been a number of announcement, uh, uh, around Rvo, um, being available in general availability. One of the things that we are currently exploring in the Jira product discovery team is how can we help teams go even further left in their workload? Mm-Hmm.

So we often say Jira product discovery is for everything that happens left of code before any commitments are made before the first line of code is written, right? So you think about what is the next thing we are going to invest in? Why is the next thing we are going to build that happens in Jira product discovery?

A part of that that we are not entirely addressing today is ideation. And that sits even further left. And I think AI is gonna help us there.

It's gonna help us make sense of all the feedback that we are collecting across multiple sources and help us generate ideas for where we might wanna focus on next. Well the team here is giving me the little bow peep hook, you know, exit stage left, so we could talk for another two hours. I know.

Sure. That's always fun chatting with you, Axel. My pleasure.

Um, where can people find out about discovery? Where they can they discover discovery? I see what you did there.

com. Uh, you'll find in, uh, the software, uh, rubric. You'd find a section, uh, dedicated to Jira Product Discovery.

Uh, please add me on LinkedIn. I share a lot of content there, uh, around, uh, product management best practices. And we just released, released our product discovery handbook here at team.

Um, so if you head to, uh, a search engine, uh, type Atlassian product discovery handbook, it will take you straight there, Great lasting website handbook and check you out. You do, you publish a lot of great stuff on LinkedIn, so follow Axel Axel's a pleasure. Thank you.

Talking with You again, as always. Talking about product management for product managers. There you go.

What an idea. We'll be back here with more great conversations from Barcelona at, uh, Atlassian, team 24 Europe.