Atlassian Launches Focus, Talent, and Align to Revolutionize Organizational Management with Asha Thurthi

Hello and welcome back to Atlassian Europe and we're having a chat here with Asha and we're having a discussion about strategy collection, which is a set of tools that Atlassian has developed for well changing the way we manage our companies and our organizations. Asha, welcome to show. Thank you.

So explain this to us a little bit. I know it initially came out at the US conference, but now you've updated it a little bit and it's generally available to folks, but there's, as I understand it, three applications. But walk us through the portfolio a little bit.

Yeah, totally. Strategy collection, first off, helps leaders do strategic planning, also helps you do talent management and helps you track your strategic initiatives all the way down to your day-to-day work. We have three apps in the collection.

First is focus, it's our app that helps you do strategy planning and helps you see your strategic priorities in real time. Then we also have talent, an app that we just gad a couple of months ago that lets you do knowledge workforce planning. What I mean by that is you can always make sure that right teams are working on your most important priorities and we also have the Align app as a part of strategic collection where your teams of teams can plan and track work and you can make sure that work ladder us up to your strategic priorities.

So that's the strategic collection offering that we have and we continue to add improvements to the collection as uh, time goes on right On the face of it. That sounds almost intuitively obvious, but what were people using beforehand? It seems like what did they have a bunch of spreadsheets that they were just trying to manage stuff with it?

Totally great questions. Guess where most companies document their strategy? Take a guess Word document.

Uh, Close Word documents and PowerPoint. Like when I ask customers where are your strategies documented, you know, majority of them will say that, which is like it's in a PowerPoint, but we all know that strategies that go into PowerPoint end up becoming shelfware. I kind of always joke that they go there to die.

So that's where the focus app actually comes in. It helps you convert like a static plan into like a living, breathing strategy. So think uh, you are a company, you have a couple of liner of business units, so each of the business units can have their own strategies and then the departments under can have their own strategies and then you have execution priorities under, so focus lets you map the entire strategic planning hierarchy in the app.

So you no longer have to worry about it being dead in a PowerPoint or a spreadsheet. It's always tracked in real time And that's kind of important because at least in my company, the strategy kind of continuously evolves and communicating that to everybody is often difficult and then they have to align their department strategy. So as part of the whole effort here, some way to kind of streamline the communications of the intent of the strategy.

Yeah, totally. And also track it in real time, which I don't think like a customer of ours said this really well. Um, for example Lloyds, let's say where they say there's not another tool where you can actually track your strategy, your goals and your work as well as the funds think budget all in one place.

It's the one collection that lets you kind of manage the entire portfolio. Mm-hmm And at least in my experience, we don't always know who we have working in the company and what skills they have and what expertise they have. And sometimes we go out and hire somebody else when we already have somebody who has that skills and expertise.

So as part of the exercise here just to manage my talent better. Totally. And that's what the talent app does, right?

So think about your traditional HRIS tools, which are amazing, but they give you job title org structures, all valuable information but not real time information and not what projects they're working on. So none of the HRIS tools have the work and the people mapped to the work. So what Talend does is it maps every person in there and what funds does is it actually, sorry, what focus does is it manages all of your projects or your initiatives or your strategic initiatives.

Now you can see your talent mapped against the initiative that's in funds. So that's what strategy collection lets you do. We've been talking about AI all week here.

How will AI get applied to all of this and what should people kind of expect going forward? Yeah, like you heard in our keynote, RO is also in strategy collection. So RO helps you bring insights.

It also gives you like predictive recommendations and the system and strategy collection where it helps leaders basically figure out what is the next action that they need to take if they figure something is off track. So it helps you summarize as well as give you predictive insights into what you have to do next about it. Yeah.

So will I be able to, I don't know, ask ro which projects that we've funded that are not aligned to my strategy and therefore maybe I might wanna reallocate those resources to something else? Totally. So what Roho will let you do is it'll kind of say, Hey, these are the initiatives that are off track.

Mm-hmm. And it'll help you identify smart recommendations as well. So for example, it can tell you, hey, this initiative is off track and to bring it back on track, you may need to add senior engineering talent in US West, let's say.

Then you go into the talent app and you can filter down for the very first time on, give me all of the senior engineering talent that's in US west and the talent app will narrow down that list for you and now you can identify what focus areas are they working on. If all of those focus areas are on track, it probably gives you an opportunity to say, I'm gonna identify some people and bring my other initiative back on track. So that's the beauty of strategy collection.

The other thing that business leaders routinely struggle with is there's dependencies between projects. And so suddenly I think that you know, these projects are moving along but then I discover that there's a bottleneck because this other project is way behind and nothing's gonna move forward accordingly, but I never know that until it's too late. Can I see that Now?

A hundred percent. So we have a app called Jira Align, like I was saying earlier, that's the app where across your enterprise you can do work planning. So that particular app has dependencies and ask in there as well.

So you can see not just your projects, you can also identify what is the dependency that each of the projects have on each other. And then VU on top of strategy collection helps you draw insights, um, which make all of our leaders a lot more intelligent. So I kind of always look at it as Atlassian's mission is unleash the potential of every team and I think of strategy collection as unleashing the potential of every company.

So what does it take to get started with all this? Because to your point, I do have all these PowerPoints and spreadsheets and Word documents. How do I get from there to this strategy collection that you're talking about?

Do I import all that stuff that I already have or do I gotta reenter it or how does that all come together? Yeah, totally. Um, our vision ultimately is that VU one day helps you just upload all of your PowerPoint and spreadsheets or wherever your structure is, both of like people as well as the strategic priorities that I'm talking about.

And the product, you know, during the onboarding phase helps you set it up, but for now you can also choose to kind of manually set that up. So as we onboard customers, we actually work with them on what is the structure of their company, so what are the lines of businesses they have, what are the portfolios under each one of them? What are the biggest strategic or marquee projects as customers call it that they're working on?

And then we also map the work in Jira to each of those initiatives. We then help the leaders identify their goals and they can set up goals against each of those initiatives as well. And then the product tracks that end to end and then VO on top of it helps you give insights.

Every company that I know has owners and investors and there's usually some sort of quarterly meeting where we all get ready for and we give these giant preparations for and, and we, we spend an inordinate amount of time getting that together. Will that become easier? Because it sounds to me like all those documents are now living documents within your system and I can be ready for that meeting in a couple hours.

A hundred percent. I promise I didn't plan this question. Uh, but totally.

So what strategy collection lets you do, and we do this in Atlassian. So we run Atlassian off strategy collection like I was saying earlier. So every month in our monthly business review, all the leaders in their respective portfolio put in their updates on what's working well, what's not working well, how are they tracking against the portfolio's goals.

And we actually run our monthly exec reviews of the product itself. So that's how we have been running Atlassian on Atlassian on strategy collection. And most definitely it gets easier because now these are not documents that are one and done and they get lost in a shelf where you can track progress in real time.

And more importantly, I'm also excited to introduce, we have strategy events within the product. What that means is every quarter, or it could be every half, or it could be every year depending on the planning cycle for the company, every company looks back, let's say at the last quarter, which I always call as an inspect phase, and they adapt the next quarter or the next half or the next year. So what strategy events lets you do is every portfolio or every leader or every unit leader can make proposals that cannot get tracked within the system, be it proposals for change in headcount, change in goals, change in projects, and then the leaders of the company can decide to approve or not approve.

So even the quarterly planning has gotten a lot more structured and efficient with both strategy events as well as the product as a whole. Yeah. The only other activity that's similar but even less fun is a lot of organizations are public and they have to deal with auditors and all kinds of folks come through.

Is that gonna get simpler too because all this stuff is already organized and kind of easier to present? I would definitely argue that strategy collection is the organizational capability that you need to help yourself get organized to lower the leaks in the system, and most importantly, unleash knowledge and insight. So you kind of know how is your company's operating model actually working?

Is the company efficient, not efficient? And like our sharing with the funds view, you can now track budget versus spend too. And when I say spend, you can truly understand how much of your spend doesn't change the business versus run the business.

You can double click into your spend into labor and non-labor costs, as well as double click into your labor spend so you know how much of your spend is in product versus data engineering versus let's say marketing versus sales. So it gives you insights and visibility that you have never had before. There you go.

Hey folks, you heard it here. Running companies is stressful. There's no two ways about it, but it could be a lot less stressful if we had different software to manage the workplace and everything that goes with it, including the talent.

Asha, thanks for being on the show. Being A pleasure. Thank you.

All right. And we'll be back in a minute.