Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery)

Been in the product management team at Atlassian for roughly 10 years now. I worked on HipChat and Stride, and more recently I started Jira Product Discovery.

Why is it so hard to start new products, go zero-to-one within large companies?

The company has a tendency to over-invest. Start-ups have the benefit of starving. And so you need to create scarcity. Like, what we try to do is remind everyone things are going to fail, let's not drag the rest of the company into it.

Sounds like one of the biggest lessons is super silo sort of team.

I needed the rest of the company to go away so we could get the autonomy to test the things that we needed that is not going to scale, that is not going to respect our design guidelines.

The biggest challenge I think a lot of companies have is just like, "It's been six months. No one wants this. We're gonna kill it." How do you protect that?

Be very clear about what we're testing, doing that with data, doing that with personal customer stories. Give people a sense of velocity and speed. No one wants to fuck with a high-speed train.

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Tanguy Croussong. This is a really unique and important episode, because we get into something you don't hear much on podcasts like this, the real talk challenges of trying to innovate and build zero-to-one at a large company like Atlassian. Tanguy has been at Atlassian for over 10 years and has worked on a bunch of internal big bets, some that have worked and some that have not. Including products like HipChat, which I was a huge fan of back in the day. Also a product called Statuspage, and most recently, Jira Product Discovery, which is one of the fastest growing products in Atlassian history that Tanguy led from idea to launch. We go through each of these stories and Tanguy shares what went wrong, what went right, and everything that he's learned about creating space for innovation within a larger org, including how they structured their internal incubation program called Point A. There's a ton of gold in this episode, and a bunch of really interesting stories, which is part of the reason that it went this long. It's the longest episode I've done yet. If you're looking to create change in your organization and foster more innovation, this episode will be worth your time. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Tanguy Croussong. Tanguy, thank you so much for being here. And welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much for welcoming me here, uh, Lenny. I'm super, actually super proud to be, uh, on this podcast. I've been a huge fan. Whenever I get the chance, I listen to you when I drive somewhere. So, yeah.