“I’m responsible for all the engineering at Atlassian,” Rajeev Rajan said in our on-stage interview at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. His goal — and the goal of the two CEOs at the helm of the company — is to create one of the best technology companies in the world. great. So how do you do that?
Rajan explains that a key part of his approach since his appointment a year and a half ago is to enable “developer joy.” Atlassian created a company-wide OKR (Objective and Key Result) to track the level of happiness across the company – which is just as important as the company’s revenue goals. Developer productivity is enhanced by having great tools, enabling tools, and creating an “amazing engineering culture,” he said.
The company had a ways to move forward on this front. When Rajan joined, the company conducted a survey asking whether developers felt productive. Less than half the company said yes, Rajan says, a number that has since risen to more than 70%.
“Programming is part science and part art. You should feel excited about what you’ve created. And the things that get in the way of that happiness are when you have friction. When you’re writing code, you get stuck, and you need help from someone else in a different time zone. You You don’t know how to connect and then you stop. So we focus on the things that get developers banned, and how to unblock them.
Atlassian just completed a project to completely move all of its tools to the cloud, instead of the on-premises hybrid it used before. Most other companies have had a head start using Atlassian on this front, but Rajan has some experience in this area. At Microsoft, he was part of the team that moved Office 365 to the cloud, for example.
“When I came to Atlassian, we were a bit behind compared to Microsoft, but we were making good progress,” Rajan says.
A big part of the work was refocusing. Atlassian laid off a significant portion of its workforce earlier this year, and the company’s CTO sees that as an opportunity to step back in some places, while focusing more on other areas — like artificial intelligence.
“We announced Atlantic Intelligence at Team 23, which is our annual conference. “We’ve partnered with OpenAI and we’re really focused on how we can make teams more productive through AI,” says Rajan. “The second aspect is using AI in our engineering. Our developers use different types of programming assistants. I think what AI programming assistants do is they take some of that hard work away from you so you can focus on the more creative aspects of writing code, building things, etc. And it’s really interesting to see that play a role. And we’re really excited about the productivity gains that we get from AI, you know, helping with programming.
Values remain the same even as culture changes
At Atlassian, part of the focus is maintaining the values that have been part of the company for 20 years, but recognizing how the culture evolves.
“Culture is the most important thing when you’re trying to scale, when you’re trying to get to the next level,” Rajan explains. “And I realized it’s important not to change the values. We have some really good values at Atlassian. One of the values is an open company, no bullshit. You know, we’re very open about the way we talk about and bring things out. And it’s really important that that dialogue continues.”
Things can move very slowly in large companies because products and decisions have to pass through too many people. By empowering people to make decisions, you can keep things moving, thus ensuring that people stay engaged and excited about their work because they see it pay off and be disseminated.
“Move fast, don’t break too many things,” Rajan jokes.
Far away first, always far away
The pandemic has accelerated Atlassian’s focus on remote work — the company has a distributed, remote team and they have no intention of changing that.
“We are completely remote/distributed. We have offices, and we do something called international teamwork. “Human connection is very important,” Rajan says.
You can watch the full interview here: