Day One: The Heartbeat of Modern Work
It’s that time of year again where Atlassian takes centre stage hosting their biggest event of the year. Formerly known as the ‘Atlassian Summit’ which usually takes place in person and in an exciting international location (most recently Las Vegas), Atlassian have taken a different approach this year for obvious reasons – introducing the new, ultimate digital event – Team ’21, hosted by Atlassian’s ‘Work Futurist’, Dominic Price.
Humans at the Heart of Teamwork
The exciting virtual event kicked off in the traditional way – with an introductory keynote given by one of Atlassian’s Co-Founders and Co-CEOs, Mike Cannon-Brookes, as he delved into some of the company’s highlights over the past year. If you didn’t manage to catch this, here were some of the key takeaways:
- Heavy investment into The Cloud over the last year
- Atlassian has released Jira Cloud’s Enterprise payment plan, which includes enhanced security, unlimited instances, guaranteed 99.95% uptime backed by 24/7 support and many additional features
- New and improved Machine learning engine
- Built-in project automation
- Cross-product searching
- And many more
Another exciting announcement from Mike revealed 5 new Atlassian products, combined into the collective programme Point A – “investing in teamwork and empowering teams”.
The announced Point A products include:
Halp – Conversational request management tool, an ideal and lightweight solution for Slack and MS Teams
Jira Work Management – Collaboration tool designed for Marketing, HR, Finance and other business operation teams to track, coordinate and manage their work
Jira Product Discovery – Built specifically for Agile product managers to capture insights and opportunities, prioritise impact and rally teams
Compass – A bird’s eye view of the digital services across an organisation, connecting engineering output with the supporting teams in a single space
Team Central – Serves as your organisation’s connective tissue, allowing all teams to track and communicate progress frequently and frictionlessly
The Evolution of Modern Work
Mike was later joined by the CEO’s of Slack (Stewart Butterfield) and Zoom (Eric Yuan), the trio jumped straight into the event by discussing a topic which has been heavily covered over the last year or two: what will change as a result of remote working during the pandemic. Some great discussion points were touched upon, such as the changes the workplace has witnessed over the last couple of years, how large companies were forced to adapt around the pandemic and what the future of the workplace environment may look like.
The segment ended with the CEOs exchanging some funny lockdown Zoom-related stories and mishaps over the last couple of years – from chickens running loose in Mike’s garden, to Eric, the Zoom CEO, not being able to turn himself off mute on a Zoom call… (we’re not saying anything!)
Scaling Innovation with Atlassian Enterprise
Next up, Atlassian’s Head of Product for Enterprise Cloud, Bala Venkatrao, took to the floor to begin the next. Bala began by reinforcing some of the points touched upon earlier in Mike’s initial keynote, specifically around the importance of product accessibility, security and performance at a large scale. Focus was then turned to Cloud Enterprise and the great benefits that it comes with, as well as the use of Jira Align, Kubernetes / Bitbucket for Data Center and Atlassian Access.
Maggie Roney – Atlassian’s Group Product Marketing Manager for Enterprise Migrations – continued on from Bala. Maggie discussed some more of the key features introduced to Atlassian products recently, including Sandbox environments, additional user management capabilities and Data Center features such as multiple identity providers and OpenID connect. Maggie went on to highlight the use of Atlassian Forge to develop more customisable apps within the Atlassian Cloud and Atlassian’s acquisition of Chartio, the reporting tool with many fantastic capabilities.
Maggie finished by discussing some of the additional enterprise functionalities that have been implemented in response to user requests. Integrated SSO and user data is now available to enable better user management capabilities, there have been some great improvements to IP security and there is a data pipeline soon to be released – so keep an eye out! The main take-home of this session: Atlassian Cloud products are ready for any and all types, sizes or structures of Enterprise.
Thrive like a Hive: Elevate Business Team Performance
We jump straight into the next session with Atlassian’s Head of Product Marketing, Claire Maynard. The main theme of this session was working together collectively to create a collaborative environment to elevate team performance. A collective ‘hive’ is the sum of each of its individual components which are all just as important as each other, and Claire made use of many great analogies to highlight how important this is when it comes to working as an effective team.
Claire then focused on Team Central – one of the five new ‘Point A’ products discussed in Mike Cannon-Brooke’s opening keynote. Some of the benefits of Team Central include:
- Easily access to real time progress
- Connect with all teams across the organisation
- All teams being empowered to connect on company priorities
- Search for anything in one place, with cross-product searching
Claire touched upon some other new features to Confluence, such as a new personalised activity feeds, nudges and the long-awaited ability to be able to share confluence pages to users external to Jira. She also went on to discuss some new features of Trello, most notably the long-awaited Team-view of Trello cards – a real win for those managing many users across multiple teams and boards. The session concluded with a summary of how a hybrid ecosystem of Team Central, Trello, Confluence and Jira Work Management can be effectively utilised to form a hive where all users can thrive and innovate.
Modern Mindsets for Work and Life
The final session of the day was delivered by another talented trio – Atlassian’s very own Global Head of Innovation Programs, Molly Hellerman, who was accompanied by Jill Ellis, the all-time winningest football (or ‘soccer’, if you swing that way) coach in US history and NFL’s first female/first openly LGBTQ+ coach Katie Sowers – you go girls! The primary discussion point was the modern mindset required to build amazing teams – and who better to discuss it than these seasoned professionals.
Both record breaking coaches ran through how they managed to become as successful as they had in their roles, and how they managed to use a modern mindset to grow their teams and themselves both personally and professionally. Determination, growth and innovation were some of the key themes throughout the discussions. These women were trailblazers in their professions in so many ways, and I think it’s safe to say we all enjoyed listening to their insights and experience – we’ve certainly got a lot that we can learn from them!
“It’s awesome being the first, but what I keep saying is that it’s more important that I’m not the last”.
Join us back here tomorrow as we talk Team ’21 Day Two, it’s the place to be for all your need-to-knows, want-to-knows and simply fun-to-knows!
