Atlassian Team '23 Founder Keynote: Charting a new era of teamwork

The Atlassian Team '23 Founder's Keynote, delivered by co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar, set a clear tone for the event: a deep commitment to unlocking team potential. Addressing both a live audience and a vast online stream, Farquhar outlined Atlassian's core beliefs and unveiled a series of significant updates and new products designed to empower teams in an increasingly complex and distributed world.

The Power of Teams and Atlassian's Growth

Farquhar began by emphasizing Atlassian's foundational belief in the power of teams, asserting that "their own genius is a myth" and that the most significant achievements are realised through collaborative effort. He acknowledged the current global landscape, highlighting both challenges and opportunities, reinforcing the adage that "tough times don't last, great teams do."

This focus on teams was underscored by the proud announcement that Atlassian has surpassed 250,000 customers. Farquhar also highlighted the impact of Atlassian's Pledge 1% movement, with over 17,000 companies committing to giving back and the Atlassian Foundation having distributed significant community licenses, volunteer hours, and financial donations.

Embracing Diverse Ways of Working

A core tenet of Atlassian's philosophy is the recognition that there isn't a "single way of working." Farquhar stressed the importance of autonomy for teams, allowing for different cultures, rituals, and practices. However, he also highlighted the critical need for alignment and the ability to track work across an organisation. The Atlassian platform, with features like Smart Links and Atlas, aims to bridge this gap, enabling teams to work flexibly while maintaining overall visibility.

Distributed Work: Here to Stay

Addressing the evolving nature of work, Farquhar stated unequivocally that "distributed work is here to stay." He cited Atlassian's own experience with their "Team Anywhere" policy, where 40% of their employees work remotely. Recognising that effective distributed teamwork requires more than just tools, Atlassian has compiled their learnings into the "Atlassian Team Anywhere Playbook," offering practical guidance for fostering culture and shared understanding in remote teams.

Every Business is a Technology Business

Farquhar then shifted focus to the increasing role of technology in all businesses. With examples ranging from self-updating cars to AI-powered assistants, he argued that "software is eating the world" more than ever. Building successful technology teams requires collaboration across development, IT, and business functions.

This led to the introduction of new products and features showcased at Atlassian's recent "team-focused events":

• Jira Product Discovery: Launched at "Unleash" in Berlin, this new product aims to revolutionise how product managers and business analysts collect insights, prioritise ideas, and collaborate on new product development. Features include easy data capture from various sources, impact assessment for prioritisation, customisable roadmaps for stakeholder communication, and seamless integration with Jira Software for delivery.
• Jira Service Management (JSM) Enhancements: At "High Velocity," Atlassian addressed the challenges of "bad service management." Highlighting the cost inefficiencies of siloed IT operations, Farquhar championed JSM as a solution for comprehensive ITSM needs, from request management to incident resolution and asset management.
• Atlassian Together: Introduced at "Work Life" in San Francisco, this new offering bundles Atlassian's Work Management products into a single cloud subscription at an "irresistible price," aiming to simplify adoption for teams across the organisation.
• Confluence Whiteboards: A significant new addition, Confluence Whiteboards provide a digital canvas for flexible collaboration, ideation, and visualising work. Features include standard whiteboard tools, the ability to turn stickies into Jira tasks with a single click, importing structured work from Jira and other tools, smart connectors for creating relationships between items, and smart sections with automation capabilities. This feature is available for free to all Confluence users, with an early access program for the full functionality.

The Power of the Atlassian Platform

Following Farquhar's presentation, Atlassian's President, Anu Bharadwaj, took to the stage to delve deeper into the underlying Atlassian platform that powers these solutions. She highlighted the platform's multi-layered foundation, ensuring enterprise-grade scale, reliability, extensibility, and performance, all while enabling deep cross-product experiences.

Bharadwaj detailed key improvements to the platform's base layer:

• Scale: Increased user capacity for Confluence and Jira Software, and a doubling of agent capacity for JSM.
• Speed: Enhanced performance across core user scenarios in Jira Software and Confluence.
• Compliance: Expanded data residency support to the US, Australia, and the EU (including Germany), with more regions and data residency for Connect apps on the horizon. Progress on FedRAMP timelines for US federal customers was also noted.
• Security: The introduction of Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) encryption for enhanced data protection and the announcement of Beacon, a brand-new threat detection and alerting solution integrated across the Atlassian platform. Beacon monitors for malicious activity, suspicious searches, and third-party app installations, providing alerts and investigation capabilities integrated with JSM for faster incident resolution.

Bharadwaj also emphasised the platform's extensibility through Forge and Connect frameworks, and the growing Atlassian Marketplace with over 5,000 apps. A new privacy and security tab on Marketplace app listings aims to provide greater transparency regarding data access policies.

Shared Experiences: Administration, Collaboration, Automation, and Analytics

The second layer of the platform focuses on shared experiences:

• Administration: The Atlassian Admin Hub continues to evolve as a central control centre for managing users, products, and subscriptions, with Trello now integrated and Bitbucket following soon. New features include improved visibility, interconnected apps, reduced shadow IT, and enhanced audit logs. Atlassian Access now offers more capabilities for enforcing security and data access policies, including customisable data security policies and secure access for consultants and contractors.
• Collaboration: The platform enables the formation of teams based on shared goals and common work, transcending traditional org charts. These teams can be referenced across all Atlassian products. Smart Links further enhance collaboration by allowing users to embed live views of data from external applications directly within Atlassian products, reducing context switching.
• Automation: Building on the success of automation in Jira Software, this powerful capability has been extended to Jira Service Management and Confluence. A library of one-click rule templates covering multiple products, including third-party integrations, simplifies the automation of repeatable processes.
• Analytics: Atlassian Analytics, launched last year, consolidates data across Atlassian products into a data lake, allowing users to merge this with external data and generate actionable insights. The Team Effectiveness Scorecard provides valuable insights into team performance, workload, and potential bottlenecks. Atlassian Analytics is now included with Cloud Enterprise editions for Jira Software, JSM, and Confluence.

The power of the Atlassian platform was further illustrated by a testimonial from Dish Wireless, highlighting how it has enabled their teams to collaborate effectively across a vast network of vendors and achieve significant improvements in issue resolution times.

Introducing Atlassian Intelligence: Your New Virtual Teammate

The final segment of the keynote saw the return of co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes, who addressed the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Acknowledging the recent advancements in large language models, he announced Atlassian Intelligence, a new core part of the Atlassian platform.

Atlassian Intelligence combines existing machine learning models with new large language models, infused with an organisation's unique knowledge and data. Cannon-Brookes presented five everyday scenarios showcasing its capabilities:

1. Jira Service Management Virtual Agents (Charlie): Powered by Atlassian Intelligence, virtual agents can understand natural language requests, ask clarifying questions, and take action within IT processes, providing immediate help for common requests.
2. Service Agent Ticket Summarisation: For more complex issues, Atlassian Intelligence can quickly generate concise summaries of lengthy ticket conversations, enabling service agents to get up to speed rapidly.
3. Tone Adjustment in Responses: When drafting replies, Atlassian Intelligence can help users adjust the tone of their communication to ensure empathy and clarity.
4. Content Generation: While not explicitly demoed in detail during these scenarios, the underlying implication is that Atlassian Intelligence will assist in generating various forms of content across Atlassian products in the future.
5. Contextual Personalisation (previously mentioned): Existing machine learning models already tailor user experiences based on their work and collaborations, providing more relevant search results and teammate suggestions.

Cannon-Brookes emphasised that while Atlassian Intelligence aims to be a powerful assistant, users will always remain in control, able to review and edit AI-generated content before it's shared.

Conclusion: A Future Powered by Teamwork and Intelligence

The Atlassian Team '23 Founder's Keynote painted a compelling picture of a future where teams are empowered by an increasingly intelligent and interconnected platform. The announcements of Jira Product Discovery, Confluence Whiteboards, Beacon, Atlassian Together, and, most notably, Atlassian Intelligence, signal a significant step forward in Atlassian's commitment to "unlift your team's potential." By focusing on flexibility, collaboration, automation, and now, the power of AI, Atlassian is equipping teams with the tools they need to navigate complexity and achieve their most ambitious goals. The emphasis on a robust and scalable platform underpins all these innovations, promising a more seamless and powerful experience for Atlassian users worldwide.