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Lenny's PodcastLessons from Atlassian | Megan Cook (Head of Product, Jira)
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
How Atlassian Builds Products, Trust, And Teams That Consistently Win
- Megan Cook, Head of Product for Jira, breaks down how Atlassian scales products, culture, and processes across 15 product lines while staying customer-obsessed and innovative.
- She explains concrete practices for psychological safety and play (peer feedback groups, offsites, ‘Fight Club’), operating as a fully remote org (Team Anywhere, deep work, async updates, Loom-style videos), and getting executive buy‑in.
- Megan shares how she championed unsexy but critical work like CSAT and usability, Atlassian’s gated innovation model for new products like Jira Product Discovery, and how the company continually adapts to market shifts.
- She closes with personal lessons on thinking bigger about features, learning from failure, and intentionally designing more joy into both work and life.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasDeliberately design psychological safety through structured peer feedback and shared vulnerability.
Megan uses small peer feedback groups, twice‑yearly PM onsites, and leaders sharing failure stories to normalize rough work, early feedback, and the idea that big swings and mistakes are acceptable and valuable.
Make conflict a ritual to prevent resentment and misalignment.
Her weekly 30‑minute ‘Fight Club’ with design and engineering leads is a dedicated space for hard conversations, ensuring tensions are addressed early, decisions move faster, and relationships stay strong.
Remote teams need intentional rhythms of connection, deep work, and async communication.
Atlassian mixes 3–4 in‑person gatherings per year with synchronized deep work blocks, strict avoidance of status meetings, rich documentation (Confluence, Atlas), and heavy use of async audio/video to handle time zones.
Treat buy‑in as a journey, not a single high‑stakes meeting.
Successful proposals start with early 1:1 conversations, clearly separated facts vs. hypotheses, openness to alternate solutions, and meetings framed around what you need (decision, feedback, specific risks) backed by tight data.
You can win resources for unsexy work by tying it to revenue and making it easy for others to help.
For CSAT and usability, Megan combined rich qualitative feedback with clear business impact (on acquisition and expansion), then designed low‑cost collaboration (dependency teams provide ‘shepherds’ instead of full dev capacity).
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesThe opposite of play isn’t work; the opposite of play is fear.
— Megan Cook
We’re really firm believers that you don’t need to be in the office to build world‑class products.
— Megan Cook
Most of the time when people come to me for buy‑in, they’re planning one perfect meeting—and that’s the wrong attitude. It’s more of a journey.
— Megan Cook
If the customer isn’t satisfied or the usability isn’t there, they can’t access the value anyway—it doesn’t matter what features you ship.
— Megan Cook
I missed a really big opportunity. We built automation into Jira, but I should have realized it could have been a service for every product.
— Megan Cook
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
