The Evolution of Jira with Dave Meyer at Atlassian Team ’24 Europe

This is Textron tv. Hey everybody. Mitch Ashley here in Barcelona at Atlassian, team 24 Europe, talking to more great people.

I'm joined by Dave Meyer, who is head of product with Jira. Yes, I am. Okay.

I really put emphasis on a Jira. We'll talk about why I'm doing that in a minute. So tell us a little bit about yourself.

You've been at Atlassian for a little while, maybe a little bit of your history with Atlassian and what you do as head of Jira. Yeah. I guess at this point, I'm a Atlassian lifer.

I about 12 and a half years, uh, in, I joined, uh, as a product marketing manager for our marketplace the week we launched it. Oh, really? Wow.

And spent several years working on the marketplace and developer relations. Moved to the Jira team, uh, spent four years as a PM on Jira. I took the opportunity to work on, uh, what is now Atlassian guard and a lot of our enterprise cloud readiness, uh, over the last few years as more and more of our customers have adopted cloud.

And then took an opportunity, uh, at the beginning of calendar year 2024 to, uh, rejoin Jira and, uh, take it into its, its next phase, which is a tremendous opportunity that I am, feel very blessed to have. But it, it is an interesting time to, to be at the helm of Jira. You know, I was mentioning to you, I started using it pretty on early on when Jira came out.

It, and just observation. Jira has gone through so many transformations, you know, started as a ticketing system, started to do more development, uh, process work more, uh, Kanban, agile, DevOps, you know, kind of evolving then, then to be more of a workflow system. And now, you know, you're taking it cross organizational, so non-technical users.

What, what does that mean? What, what, what, how does Jira need to evolve to be able to do that? Yeah.

I love that you, uh, were able to trace the history like that, because I think one of the things that makes Jira unique and has allowed it to have such a long lifespan is that it was always a little bit more flexible, a little bit more accessible to different types of teams than whatever it was competing with at various things. And it's, uh, various points in its, uh, evolution. Today we really see an opportunity to connect two different threads.

On the one hand, uh, Atlassian is when we talk to our customers, they're looking for our help to solve bigger business problems for their organization. So it's not just, oh, we need to make our software development teams a little bit more efficient. We need to get our operational processes a little stronger.

It's, we need to deliver more business outcomes to our companies more efficiently and more effectively. And so we're looking at how can we solve that problem? And we've realized, and this is, uh, underpinning a lot of our system of work philosophy, is bringing everybody into, uh, a single set of tools where we can share knowledge and, uh, collaborate on goals and plan and track work in one place.

And then exogenous from Atlassian. There's a trends among business teams to become more sophisticated in how they track their work. And, uh, whether it's, uh, Trello or Monday or Asana, uh, you see more and more business teams getting away from spreadsheets and email is their project management finally.

Yes, Yes. And so, you know, those two things are coming together and there's a really, uh, we'd be crazy not to take this opportunity for, for Jira. Well, you know, it is interesting.

I, I think I heard, heard from Matt Schwimmer, uh, that, uh, you don't have to call it, uh, tickets anymore or issues. You can kind of call whatever that object, that work object is that fits your organization. Sounds like a small thing, but people don't, it doesn't make sense to somebody who's not, it's not a ticket or it's not an issue if that's not the kind of work you do.

Yeah, exactly. And we did, we do a lot of customer research, user experience, uh, investigation. And at the end of the day, we know that there's a lot of folks that, you know, if they don't come from a software, technical product development, background issues sound like you have little problem.

There's an old Atlassian t-shirt, uh, from the mid two thousands that Jira, because you've got issues. And I think developers think that's funny, but the average marketer in 2024, who's Yeah, that's right. Doesn't get the joke.

Yeah. And so we need to make sure that, and I don't think it's really gonna cost, uh, our developer audience anything if we start talking about work rather than issues. Yeah.

Interesting. Mm-Hmm. So it, it's remarkable, and I don't, I'm not just being nice and saying this, I mean this, it's remarkable for a product to go through so many evolutions like Jira has, it's still, you know, not only be standing, but really well positioned for the next evolution of work.

Alright. Sometimes flexibility can be a curse, right? Because it can cause complexity make, I mean, things more har harder to use 'cause of just too many things.

Why do you think Jira has been able to kind of carve that balance to be able to continue to evolve? I guess I'll take that as a compliment. It's ly a Double, that's a massive compliment.

No, you've threaded the needle really well. Why do you think JIRA's been able to do that? Uh, I ultimately, when I think about the fundamental problem that Jira is solving for our customers, it's work is complicated.

Work is this, especially collaborative work among multiple people and organizations. It's, and it's this ethereal concept of like, you're doing this because, uh, and those are the steps to do it. And this is the information we need to know about it.

And what Jira solves for a customer is a digital manifestation of that ethereal chaos of, of work. And the thing we ultimately got right back in the early days of Jira was providing a core set of objects, uh, issue types, work types, uh, workflows, fields, screens, uh, and the collaborative, uh, elements on top of that that allow people to represent lots of different types of work in lots of different types of ways. And I think that people underestimate at their payroll the importance of not just saying like, oh yeah, we've got, uh, tasks and we've got marketing blog posts launches, and we've got it operation incidents.

Uh, but also being able to say, and we need to know different things about those different pieces of work. And, uh, the definition of done for those things is wildly different. And so, uh, giving users the ability to kind of model those processes has been ultimately the key to our success.

Interesting. And the willingness to change And the willingness to change, right? Yeah.

Not being stuck, no. Has to be issues, you know, or whatever. Um, so there's been some changes to Jira.

You've, uh, done some work on the user interface. I don't know if refresh is a good way to describe it. I think it's, you've done more work than Just, oh, we call it a refresh internally.

Okay. All righty. I didn't wanna underestimate what, but tell us what you said.

Oh, We actually called it make Jira pretty internally. Okay. Well, I was, I was teasing somebody.

I said, is that a facelift or a makeover? Which, which did we do here? So tell us about what's changed in the user interface.

Yeah. Uh, so we started with probably our most fundamental usability problem in Jira, which is as we get more and more, uh, users into the system, uh, and there's more and more work being tracked there, it gets harder and harder to find where the work that you need to do is, uh, is located. And so, uh, na navigation was a, a natural starting point for us.

Uh, and so we started with, uh, navigation across software projects and business projects and rolling it out to, uh, it projects and making sure that it's consistent not just internally within Jira, but across all of Atlassian and bring in some new functionality that helps users not just, uh, find their work faster, but also, uh, manage the complexity of Jira. So the ability to star the boards or projects that I work on most frequently. Uh, the ability to reorder and hide or remove, uh, elements in the product that you're, uh, not using or that you are using.

Um, and then we need to make sure as we try to reach a new generation of, of Jira users, uh, hopefully not literally, uh, we're only, we're only, uh, getting users under 25. Just keep it rolling in. Rolling in, right.

It's actually the opposite. The, there's a lot of folks out there that have a, a certain picture of Jira in their mind. Yeah.

And they, maybe the last time they looked at Jira was a decade ago. And so we need to make sure that Jira makes a great first impression. And so there really is a genuine focus on can we make it more visually appealing?

Can we make the colors better, the page facing layout better, the fonts, uh, uh, feel different than what somebody might've thought of, of Jira and then make, uh, users feel more at home. And so there's little tweaks, like the ability to set a, a custom image as your board background. Our Jira marketing team, uh, you know, we were working on our big marketing project over leading up to, uh, team Europe here today.

And, uh, it was the middle of a Charlie XCX bra brat summer. And so the Jira marketing team's, uh, board is brat, summer green, brat green, which is tough on the eyes at first, but, uh, It's like an Apple Adjusted over In Apple green now. Exactly.

Um, but especially, you know, when you think about the Atlassian portfolio, we have a lot of folks coming over from Trello as they, uh, become more sophisticated in their project management. And so these are some of the most loved features in Trello. And so we can bring them over to Jira, along with a great Trello to Jira importer, uh, to help make that transition more seamless.

Interesting. Yeah, there's a lot of personalization that's been added to, in, i I label it that you can customize, right, the nav in the left hand side and take things out. It doesn't apply to you, or it's almost like kind of your favorites or starred type things.

So your work is right there as opposed to the mountain of things that might be happening across all the J users. The sum total is we wanna make j more, more visual, more friendly, and ultimately, uh, more fun. If you move a, a task to done in a business project, you get, uh, confetti, uh, but drop Down competit, now We have, uh, dropped 780 million pieces.

You'd be Surprised how you wouldn't, We have a dance How popular competiti is. People love it. Confetti flies when you get something done.

Work, work should be fun. Jira doesn't, JIRA can be serious about work without making people feel like J work is only serious. And, uh, and it's part of what we ultimately believe makes healthy collaborative teams.

Lemme ask you, uh, I don't know how to, how you, uh, how you would answer this question, but how do you add AI into, uh, the capabilities of agents and, and, uh, being able to create agents, uh, summarizing information? How do you add AI into the interface so it doesn't look like, yeah, they kind of slapped Aon AI into this and, but it's not really ai it's not that helpful. We'll wait till the real AI shows up someday.

How do you, how do you build AI into a product like Jira One day at a time? Yeah, one day, very carefully. Uh, yeah, we, we thought really hard about, uh, how can we layer progressively more, uh, powerful use cases on top of it.

So, you know, the, the first, uh, implementations were probably the low, what we've considered the lowest hanging fruit. So, alright, can we help you generate, uh, a better issue description? Uh, can we, uh, make some of the features of Jira that are harder for less power users to, uh, access like JQL, uh, for searching and creating automation rules and let users use natural language to, uh, generate those types of strongly typed, uh, information.

And then we can say, okay, let's go to the next level. Uh, can we break down work intelligently into smaller, uh, bite-sized pieces? Because we know from our teamwork research that work is more likely to get done if issues are well described, if they have all of the context and if they're broken down into, uh, uh, the right size, uh, issue to rationalize in your, your head.

And then we can say, okay, how can we go farther? Well, if we have all of that and we have well-described issues and we, uh, have them at the right size, then we're able to generate high quality code. If you, if the, uh, story just says, build this new thing because it's important, uh, without any information on what the thing is, you're not gonna, the code generation is not gonna work particularly well.

So if we can, uh, help connect the dots between, you know, if you have the spec for the, um, for the feature in Confluence or in, uh, Google Docs, and you have the information about historically, here's how we've broken down other epics of this level of, uh, complexity. All those things can feed into a, a more intelligent, uh, JIRA that can ultimately solve the really hard problems like co-generation, uh, at a higher level of quality than other con competitors in the market. Yeah, it seems like you've really picked specific thing.

Let's find something it can do for the user, not shiny objects to, you know, look, look compressive, but not really be that helpful. Yeah. Uh, you know, we're talking a lot about goals, uh, this week.

I can tell you that the, uh, Atlassian, the Jira AI team's goal is measured in amount of actual users, uh, using our AI features. So if they're, if people aren't actually using the AI capabilities in Jira, then they're not doing their job. So Click, click a lot on those AI features.

Um, We're a little bit more sophisticated. Yeah. I'm sorry.

I am sure you are. Um, one of the things I found interesting, um, I was in a session, we were talking with your CEO and president and, uh, found out that agents are actually users in the system. They're not scripts or some other odd thing kind of behind this, but they're actually agents that can be signed work, can assign work to other people.

Because I was wondering about this idea of, um, you know, you have human teammates and AI teammates and how would that, what would that look like? How are pe how do people receive that idea? The one of the users is, I don't know what the, what the name was in the demo this afternoon, but the name of some, uh, some agent Issue organizer, agent Dave, or probably need to give them better brands.

Uh, the, oh, the Guardian, uh, guardian brand. Guardian Guardian, yes. Brand guardian.

That, that said a lot right there, but yes. Uh, well, even in a, uh, phrasing like brand guardian, uh, there's an implicit, uh, connotation with guardian around safety, right? And so I think we'll be pretty intentional, at least in the Atlassian, uh, provided agents around kind of using branding to help, uh, our customers feel like it's a more natural experience.

I think it'll take, uh, time for it to feel normal. And then as you know, you saw the customer quote during the keynote today, it's hard to imagine you can't living without it. So, uh, you start to use it and then you can't imagine doing it any other way.

And that's true, whether it's, uh, agents in, uh, VO or, you know, I've worked at Atlassian for 12 years. We've had Loom at Atlassian for two and a half. I cannot remember what life was like before Loom.

And honestly now I can't remember what it was like to have Loom without Loom AI to give me a transcript to edit all of my, uh, ums. As I say, uh, I had a funny experience. Um, our who's now our CEO, when she first started, she was working on Trello and uh, and Slack and some other things.

And we had a system account, and we called it Sbot. A lot of people didn't know it was her. They thought it was an automated something, and then they found out Sbot was Kim.

They were shocked. They didn't know there's a real person. So as long as you don't name our agents, you know, Bob's your uncle or something, some human name, you, You can call your agent and name it whatever you want.

You can name whatever you want. Be careful. You might confuse People.

We'll see how it goes and see if we need to put in place some restriction. There You go. So one of the things that can happen is as you evolve a product going after new customers, new market, whatever it might be, the current, the people who helped you get there, the developers, the ops folks, ITSM, you don't want them to say, Hey, what happened to us?

You know, you've changed things and you forgot about us. How do you keep, how do you keep the generations of of users that you know, know, love, work in Jira every day happy, as well as being able to support the p new, new kind of users? Yeah, that's a great question.

We, uh, the message that I, uh, preach to the Jira team is we are building Jira. We haven't moved from building Jira from technical teams to business teams. We are building Jira for all teams.

And ultimately that's in Atlassian's DNA from day one. Confluence was built for all teams. Loom is built for all teams.

Robo is built for all teams. So Atlassian knows how to build project products for every type of, uh, team and a product and feature set that's universally, uh, appealing. And so our goal is not to only build for a non-technical, uh, user, but to build for everybody.

Uh, and the features that we're investing in most heavily are things that we do think are going to, uh, benefit not just the non-technical audience, but that the technical audience is gonna love too. Like technical users want you to feel fresh and modern and easy to use and be able to find their work faster. And, uh, we rolled out, uh, our list view, uh, first in our Jira work management product, but then in Jira for software projects as well.

And we're seeing tremendous adoption of the list view, uh, among software teams as well. So, uh, I think technical teams are benefiting just as much from these investments as the business teams are. Well, it's a heavy responsibility being in charge of Jira, but I think they got the right person.

It's a tremendous privilege. Oh yeah. It's a big f It is.

There aren't a lot of software products that are still kicking after 22 years. I know. It's, it's, uh, pretty awesome.

Well, wish you all the best and, uh, as we continue to move Jira into the future and doing new things with new users as well as old things with old users, appreciate all the above. Right. So thank you.

It's been great talking with Dave Meyer, who's, uh, head of product for Jira. Like I said, JIRA. Now you know why I said Jira because it's, it's, it's, it is kind of the center of the universe that in Confluence within Atlassian.

So thanks Dave. Thank you. Take care.

We'll be back with another great, great interview with another great person.