Customer Obsession at Atlassian with Natalia Baryshnikova

“As a product manager, I know that product is never the end goal, right? The end goal is value to the customer. And that comes again with a huge people problem or an opportunity, to put it differently. How do I make my people customer-obsessed?” In today’s episode of the SAFe Business Agility Podcast, Adam talks to Natalia Baryshnikova, head of product at Atlassian, about customer obsession, starting with the relevance of an intern’s perspective. The two also discuss topics including parallels between art and digital transformation, the importance of value stream management, and highlights from the Atlassian product roadmap. Natalia also shares her recommendation for listeners around the million-dollar question.

Like what you hear? Connect with Natalia on LinkedIn.

Hosted by: Adam Mattis

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to the SAFe Business Agility Podcast. This is the place to get advice, stories, perspectives, and updates about SAFe and related topics to help you work differently and build the future. Thanks for listening, and be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts.

Adam Mattis:

Today’s guest is Natalia Baryshnikova of Atlassian. Natalia oversees the digital products that we all know and love from Atlassian. She’s responsible for the roadmap, and her obsession with customers is something that is pretty admirable. I hope you enjoy this conversation. I know I did. It was a lot of fun talking to Natalia, so please again, enjoy this one with Natalia Baryshnikova.

Natalia, thank you so much for taking the time to hang out with us. We’re at SAFe Summit here in Prague. Atlassian’s really showing up pretty big at this event, and thank you for that. How was the party last night?

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Well, first of all, thank you for having me, and thank you for having us here. The party last night was fun. It was uneventful in a good way, you know; I feel like everyone really wanted to get together and have good conversations. There were no bar fights as far as I’m concerned.

Adam Mattis:

So those happened later, I’m sure.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Yeah, I’m sure. Yeah. But it was great.

Adam Mattis:

It’s really nice to see organizations in this space kind of creating that space for people. I feel like in industries I’ve worked with in the past, that’s just kind of part of how things happened. And one of the things that I have missed in this space—and Scaled Agile does a good job—we put a party on for every event, but it’s nice to see vendors that step up and invest in the community and create a good space for fun and conversation. I feel like in our world of consultants and change agents, we sometimes forget to have fun. So thank you for doing that.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

That is very true. And I think, especially now, people have really been craving the in-person conversations, and this is a space that will always have a need for having difficult conversations because we as a community keep pushing the boundaries, and no one has a perfect recipe for digital transformation, but that’s why it’s so important for events like this to happen where people can have those conversations and challenge each other.

Adam Mattis:

You know, that’s a great point. And one of the conversations I have often is that when you look at things like the Framework, or you look at tools like anything in the Atlassian suite, the mechanics are easy, right? You look at, Hey, you just install this thing and do what it says, or, you know, here’s the Framework. Just kind of follow the mindset, values, and principles and do this stuff, and you’re all set. It’s not the tools, it’s not the frameworks that are the problem. It’s us. It’s the people.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

It’s the people.

Adam Mattis:

Yeah. And it’s, I feel like in this space, there are a lot of engineers, there are a lot of very analytical people, and I’m one of them. And with those personalities, it’s so hard to put yourself out there and to force the conversations and to build relationships because, I mean, I do this, right? I’ve been selling most of my career. I’ve been working, leading engagements and transformations and stuff like that, working with enterprises for a long time. I do this podcast; truthfully, I’d rather be in my room quiet by myself.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Fair enough. I feel you, <laugh>.

Adam Mattis:

So, again, thank you for creating that space. Thank you for providing the social lubricant that really builds some of those relationships. What about you? Who are you? Tell us a little bit about you and how you got to this awesome role you have at Atlassian. We want to know about you.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Yeah, that sounds great. So my name is Natalia Baryshnikova, and I’m head of enterprise agility at Atlassian. And that’s a business unit that includes Jira Align, the product that is fairly well known in this space. I took this job about a year ago. Previously I was at Atlassian running the core product for Confluence Cloud. So I’m not new to Atlassian, but the space is still something that’s fairly new for me, and I absolutely love it. I keep discovering amazing customers, amazing thinkers. And just at this event, the quality of conversations that I’ve been having with people is just through the roof. I have been in enterprise software for over 10 years at this point. And I love working with customers on transforming their businesses. It’s always very humbling. One thing that I always like to open my conversations with customers with is the fact that we, like you said, often have a lot of engineers in this space. But in reality, some of our customers have more software developers than tech companies do. Like McDonald’s has more software developers than Atlassian, for example. Does that make McDonald’s a software company?

Adam Mattis:

It should.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Right? Yeah. And we work with organizations that have hundreds and hundreds of years of successful business history, and those organizations are looking to transform and work in new ways, and it’s incredibly humbling and inspiring to work with those people. My first ever job was a street artist on the streets of Moscow.

Adam Mattis:

Tell me more about that. You can’t just drop that and then not tell me more about that. So what kind of art did you do?

Natalia Baryshnikova:

I mean, I graduated from an art school, so mostly I was selling oil and watercolor.

Adam Mattis:

Oh, that’s so cool.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

And that was my first paying gig.

Adam Mattis:

And if you think about, like, the downtown Moscow area, did you do, I mean, skyscapes and the scenery? Because there are so many beautiful buildings and everything right downtown.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Yeah. I think my most successful series was actually still life, especially fruit. For some reason, people really like fruit in their kitchens. And landscapes, usually mountains or something of that nature, because I guess, you know, it’s very soothing to have something of, you know, like pictures of nature and spaces.

Adam Mattis:

Yeah, I feel like I’ve seen a lot. I won’t say a lot, but I’ve definitely seen people throughout Prague as I’ve been going for runs either very early in the morning or late at night, and I’ve seen people when it’s been basically me and this artist, people out there either doing pen and ink. I’ve seen one gentleman doing watercolor overlooking the river from one of the bridges and the boats and everything. And I think that’s cool. I wanted to go up to them and offer to buy, but they weren’t done yet. So I thought it would be awkward, but that stuff is so cool. I do not have that skill. I truthfully don’t have many skills. I’m good at riding a dirt bike, and apparently, I’m good at talking on a podcast and apparently, yeah, doing tech stuff, but I have no creative skills outside of that.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

I would disagree because I think that, you know, creating good conversation is a very creative effort. It’s a very artistic venture. So if you can create a good conversation, if you can create a story, if you can create a narrative, that’s actually very similar to what artists do, right? Because as an artist, you don’t just want to capture what is; you want to add your own spin on it, right? So, as an artist sitting out in the street and painting something, the two questions that you normally get are, one, what are you doing <laugh>? What are you drawing? What are you painting? And the second one is, can you draw me <laugh>? And I think that that’s very related to our earlier point of conversation. It’s all about people, right? People always look for people, and that’s why events like this are important because people always want to know what everybody else is doing and what can we learn from each other. What can we share with each other? And I think wolf art and ironically, enterprise software have that in common. You never think that that’s the parallel I would draw in a podcast, but here we are.

Adam Mattis:

Here we are <laugh>. I think this is a really special event. I think last year, when we did our first in-person conference back in Denver, I felt that it was very awkward. People were excited to see one another but still very unsure if we could shake hands, or if we could hug, or things like that. Here, that’s all gone. It just feels like people are back. They’re excited to see each other. I mean, the personal space is not a thing. The contact is, it’s just really good to be back around people. And with that said, I’m really excited to go home tomorrow and take the weekend by myself.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Nice. Yeah, definitely. Definitely feel you again. I think that over the pandemic, a lot of us lost social graces. Many of us, you know, like myself, <laugh> didn’t have many, to begin with, but I certainly had to relearn how to communicate and be in a crowded space. But again, I think it’s a good thing, right? Like we keep challenging ourselves, and that’s what I like seeing here. Everyone that I have spoken with, they’re looking to push the boundaries of what they’re doing and why are they here. And I think it’s, again, everything is related.

Adam Mattis:

Yeah, it is. You’re absolutely right. So, going back to kind of what you’re doing now, I have to say, if you came into this space, you inherited a pretty cool product. I have sold a lot of Agile Craft licenses in my day.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Oh wow, thank you, thank you!

Adam Mattis:

They’d be looking at solutions, and I would say, Hey, have you seen this really beautiful and elegant solution that did all the things well? And a lot of the time, I would see people stack solutions, and that never works, right? It’s always clunky. I actually had one client tell me that they couldn’t buy it because it was too nice. And they were afraid that if they introduced their people to Agile Craft, then a lot of the other software solutions they were using, they would completely complain about. So they didn’t do it. But I thought it was really cool when Atlassian bought Agile Craft and, you know, Jira Align became a thing. And that was a lot of what I saw in enterprise; organizations would use Jira as their configuration management tool, as their code repository, code integration tool.

I mean, obviously, it was something the teams were using, and there was a lot of that stacking going on where team people would say, our teams are using this, but for art management, for portfolio management, for strategy alignment, let’s use Agile craft. So they would create these weird integrations. And I thought that was really forward thinking by Atlassian, where they could see that that was happening. And they said, well, there’s something to this. Let’s make it elegant. Let’s make it one. So I thought that was a really cool acquisition. I was a little envious. I wasn’t part of the team that was acquired. I’m sure it was a nice day for them. But, you know, in your role and with your background in storytelling and creating elegant things, I think it’s a really cool space to be because obviously there’s something in your organization where people recognize the importance of experience, the importance of that elegance. So have you kind of found a way to be creative and bring that part of your personality into the work that you do? And have you been getting satisfaction from it?

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Yeah, it’s a great question. I think Jira Align and enterprise agility are about connecting strategy to execution. And when we are thinking about connecting strategy to execution, one of the most common questions that we ask ourselves is actually from the world of art. And that is, what’s the big picture? If you think about it, the big picture is a very visual term. And as an artist, when you draw something, you always try to understand what is the overall situation you’re trying to capture in your work. Likewise, when we’re thinking about strategy and work, the big picture is always about seeing the whole thing while you are maybe focused on a small chunk. And in that way, I do find my job incredibly satisfying. I absolutely love what I’m doing. It is about elegance, but it’s not only about elegance in software, which is very, very important, of course, because especially if you’re trying to scale the use of Jira Align or any other product, you obviously want to make it easy and want things to be grokable.

You want people to have an easy time adopting something. So that is very, very important. But it’s also about going back to our storytelling part. It is about telling a story that people can easily comprehend and relate to. And that is about surfacing strategy to them in very simple terms. And showing the connection between what they’re doing and strategy in a very easy and satisfying way. One of my favorite customers from a large, international bank, he always says that he likes to take on the perspective of a software intern. So when they were rolling out Jira Align for their organization, his main lens was, I’m a software intern. I’m on my day one, I got my first project. I’m working on committing code to something. How do I know that my code contributes to this large international bank’s many many years of existence and business strategy?

How do I see that connection? Because that’s what makes me feel motivated. That’s what makes me feel ultimately connected to the organization. And I think it’s a very good lens, but it is about, just like with art, seeing the big picture. And so, in my role, what I find incredibly satisfying is, one, working on the elegance of software. Two, working on the elegance of that connection. How do we help folks connect strategy to execution? And three, helping businesses that are solving that problem to make it elegant. And I would say that I learn a lot from artists in this space because they may not be artists by trade, but what they do is pure art, no pun intended.

Adam Mattis:

Hey, we like puns around here.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Art and art, yeah. We do like art in this space, for sure.

Adam Mattis:

So I think what you’ve basically said is it all comes back again to communication and people. And it reminds me of one of the very earliest experiences in my career where I was working with a very large logistics company, and we were, I don’t remember what tool we were rolling out, but we started working with SAFe, and we started talking about understanding how value flows. And we started talking about customers. And it broke my heart because these people that had been in the organization for 20, 30 years honestly believed that their customers were APIs. They did not have the visibility to see how they impacted the customer, what people’s lives they touched. They just honestly believed their customer was, I think, a data processor and an API. And that was it. And it hit me hard because what a boring career, right?

If you think that your only purpose in life is to make this API happy. So we went down that path of trying to visualize all work. And the goal was exactly what you said. I worked with their executive team because I was rather young at this point, and I didn’t have much social grace either. It’s fine. So I brought this directly to their leadership team, and I said, Hey, this is a problem. And thankfully, they agreed with me, and they didn’t throw me out. What we did, what our goal was, is we wanted on a day, one employee intern, very junior person to be able to come in and to see on a value stream map that this is what you do, you work in this sub-process, and then you can zoom out as much as you possibly can. And then the macro view was the entire enterprise.

So you could see as much detail as you wanted to what you touched. You could scope out the sea. Well, where’s the first time we touch people, and how does that fit in the bigger picture? And in that organization, that changed the entire culture because it was dehumanized before, right? And I think that’s when you’re building something for anyone, if you don’t recognize where the humans are, you can’t serve them. And then your solution looks like that. And I think we can all look at software solutions or processes or, I mean, if you go get your oil changed in your car, you can tell which dealerships are focused on customers and which are focused on just getting oil in the car and getting it out. And we can recognize those solutions. And if, I mean, again, going back to yours, you can tell that Jira Align was built for people.

I mean, the way that things interact and the way that things look and feel, and they’re easy to navigate, and you could pretty much sit down and kind of figure out what to do in that tool versus ones that were built solely on an engineering perspective that doesn’t make a lot of sense, right? They’re not pretty, they’re not intuitive. They were built to solve a problem, and that was it. So the importance of giving people the opportunity to understand how they fit, how they impact, and where the humans are, boy, that’s such an important thing.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

It is. And thank you for saying that. I think it’s an evergreen problem, right? So, when Agile Craft got acquired by Atlassian, one of the things that the team started thinking about, and we’re still thinking about, and we will keep thinking about it, is how do we develop Jira Align in sync with other Atlassian products? And the way it represents in visuals, the way it represents in user experience is, Jira Align needs to be not only beautiful but also work in contextual connection with other Atlassian tools, right? So, for example, if you’re switching from to Jira to Jira Align, the navigation needs to be consistent. And conceptually, you don’t need to go for the page and study every single element on the page to quickly understand where are you at. And for example, one of the big rollouts that we’re doing right now is the new navigation that takes the Jira Align navigation and makes it closer to the conceptual navigation of other Atlassian tools. Because, of course, like you said, our Atlassian customers are using Suite as a solution.

Adam Mattis:

They want to feel related.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Of course. Yeah. Yeah. And so, keeping an eye on that and just keeping the evolution of the products for that purpose is very, very important. It’s just constant finesse.

Adam Mattis:

So you mentioned a little bit about the stack. So if I’m an enterprise and I want to go all in with Atlassian, what does that look like? What are the products involved that kind of help us navigate from code commit through team planning, ART, portfolio, large solution, and enterprise strategy? Like what would that all-in solution look like? What products are involved in that?

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Yeah, that’s a great question. Jira was the first product at Atlassian, as you know.

Adam Mattis:

We all know Jira.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

We all know Jira, but Jira is actually a great example of reinventing oneself because today there are five Jiras. Oh, wow. So the Jira family keeps growing. OK. So today, there is Jira software, there is Jira work management, there is Jira Service Management, there’s Jira Product Discovery, and there’s Jira Align.

Adam Mattis:

And now, correct me if I’m wrong, but as a small one- or two-person shop, you can still get Jira at no charge. Oh, yeah, absolutely. That startup license.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

And Confluence, too.

Adam Mattis:

And I think that’s huge, right? I mean, if it’s so important from day one at a startup to be able to be organized because that tone that you set on day one when you write your first line of code if your organization is successful, as you scale, that pattern repeats. And I mean, I think we’ve all seen startups or acquired companies where it’s just ugly, right? Because the architecture’s a mess. They just kind of built and went and went and moved fast, and there was no organization. So I think just offering that solution is very forward-thinking, and it’s a great way to kind of give back to the community.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

It is. I don’t think I can dunk on debt and technical debt because I think that I’ve been in product management for long enough. Yeah. <laugh>

Adam Mattis:

Nobody wants to pay down the credit card. Natalia, we just want to keep going.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

We just want to keep going. Exactly. And I think that that’s my favorite thing about, you know, staying with an organization for a long time. Because at some point, it really humbles you because then you see the results of your own decisions made five years ago, and it humbles you. But, that being said, the flywheel model of Atlassian is most certainly a very helpful thing, not only for our business but also for our customers, because many of them start small and then eventually grow their business, and they grow with us, which is an incredible privilege to see companies rising and growing their business at the same time. Atlassian has a lot of customers in enterprise. And so the solutions that Jira Align offers, even though they’re applicable for smaller businesses, but most prominently, you see large organizations that have portfolios that are trying to connect strategy to execution, use those types of solutions because the problems are just so much more imminent for them. The need is much stronger and more pronounced.

Adam Mattis:

And that’s really the big win provided by Jira Align, right? Is it’s kind of art through portfolio alignment.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

That’s right. Yeah. And back to your question about the stack. So the cool thing about the Jira family is, under the hood, it’s the Jira data model, right? And so, Jira Align not only can be connected to Jira software, which we all know about, but also Jira work management or Jira service management. And the cool thing about using Atlassian as a suite is actually the fact that everything is connected as a data model under the hood. And if you’re an enterprise, you really want to have connected data. You really want to understand the full coverage of all the work that’s happening in your organization to derive insights from it. And so, uh, getting that connected data, uh, as a value proposition is a huge, uh, thing for Atlassian and for us in enterprise agility as well. Um, but, uh, that being said, um, Atlassian believes that we need to keep building tools, and that’s why Austin keeps shipping new tools for certain subsets of problems, uh, within organizations. And, uh, my goal, uh, as the owner of the solution that kind of wraps around. So what really allows you to take all of that work connected to your strategies and organization is to be very, very aware of what else is going on in other parts of Atlassian so that we can leverage Jira line to connect with, um, those, those parts of, um, other Atlassian products and solutions.

So with the Jira data model, are, are you able to access that and use it in other places as well? Is it like a read thing? Is it a read-write thing? So if I have other reporting models or just other needs for data throughout the enterprise, is that accessible?

It is. Uh, so, um, just this past month, um, uh, we had our user conference team 23 in Vegas. And, um, actually, many, many folks that I see here were there as well, which is super exciting. But one of the big launches that we, uh, did at this event was Atlassian Analytics, which is the data visual visualization tool, uh, that sits on top of our data lake and allows you to connect all the data and build cool reports. So, for example, if we talk about value stream management, um, what my team launched at this event was, um, the integration between Enterprise Insights, which is Jira Align’s data lake, and Atlassian Analytics, because you can take the data from Jira Align on the organization level, you can take the data from Jira software on the team level, and then you can build value stream management reports. So we actually have a couple of customers already live on that solution. So, you know, being here at the SAFe Summit, I hear a lot of conversations around value stream management, and when I first reviewed SAFe 6.0, one of my favorite things was actually how far and how advanced the thinking is from SAFe around value stream management. So we believe in value stream management as well. And a lot of our strategy recently has been around that.

Adam Mattis:

I’m totally aligned with you on that. It’s, you know, I thought that when we started exploring value streams in SAFe three. that it was a good place to start a conversation about what a value stream is. And I think we started building the mental models around value through SAFe four and five. And I really appreciate how now we’re fully talking to the discipline because it’s not new, right? We didn’t invent it. Value stream management has been in business for a long, long time. I think that the biggest of organizations have been the best at it at a top level, right? Because they use it to figure out how do we execute strategy across the enterprise. And if we want to do this thing right, like, what all does it touch? So business architects have done a good job of mapping those macro-level value streams, doing capability landscape modeling, and I feel like we’ve encouraged people to do a lot of the most granular value stream mapping.

And I think the secret to success in the future is being able to bring all of that together for a holistic view of the organization so we can really understand where the bottlenecks are in our operations, what are the implications of the decisions that we’re making? And if we want to do this new cool thing, really, what’s the cost? What are we touching, what are the impacts? I guess as a bit of an engineering nerd, it just seems, I mean, like, why wouldn’t you do that? How are we having this conversation? Why haven’t you done that already? But as organizations grow and move fast, and there’s been a lot of growth through acquisition, without integration, we’ve got to start paying that debt. And we have to start managing the flow of value through the organization because if we don’t, we’re not going to be able to move fast enough to stay competitive.

So I don’t want to say a lot of words because I have a lot of words I can say that are secrets for the future, but <laugh> I’m really excited to see how this conversation evolves. And I think that having the conversation is part one, I think visualizing the results of those conversations and being able to use what’s created in a way, which is what you’re doing, right? I feel like that’s where making that information and that data usable and consumable and dynamic is really going to give people and organizations the power to do cool things in the future.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

I agree. Yeah. And Atlassian is in a good position to assist customers with that, right? Because the value flows on all levels of the organizational hierarchy. Again, if we go back to that software intern perspective as a part of a team, we have a micro value stream that you’re working on, but then as you go across portfolios, as you go across different parts of work, you can discover those larger, just like streams and the sea, right? Like you have the gulf stream, and then you have a micro stream. And so the same is through value stream management. Therefore, looking at all those different flows of value on different levels of the organization and making sense of how they connect and seeing, again, that bigger picture is something that I feel really, really passionate about. We also, when we were actually building that solution that we launched at Team 23, collaborated with customers because the solution comes with a set of opinionated dashboards of how we think you want to start tracking your value stream management efforts across the organization.

And my product management team collaborated with customers, and we asked very smart people, how do you do this? What do you want to see? How do you think about flow metrics? How do we present them in a way that’s meaningful, not only to, you know, big bosses, but also to the software entrants? And that’s a very interesting problem to solve. And definitely not something that I would consider sold in, you know, the near future. But that’s what makes me so excited about it. Like you said, it’s about connecting that engineering thinking with broad organizational thinking. Because what we’re seeing here, and what we’re seeing in our space, I would say, is business software used to be different parts of the conversation, but now they’re blending, right? And I think even the dichotomy of software versus business is something that’s driving unnecessary friction, sometimes.

Adam Mattis:

You are speaking my language. One of my strategic Adam goals is to just eliminate the word business from that context.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Yeah, we’re our business. We are business, we’re the business.

Adam Mattis:

We’re all businesses. Yes, we’re all in it together. It’s not us. And I used to think it was just an IT problem. So I mean, IT always said, well, the business. Then I started working with HR and marketing in other areas, and they all say it too. And then I realized we have bad language in reference to our customers. When people say “the business,” it’s not this evil empire, right? It’s your customer. You need to treat them that way. And we’re all in this together. Oh, that one bugs me.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Yeah. And that’s why I’m hopeful about value stream management, actually, because I see a number of organizations really going deep into value stream management because they want to practice customer obsession for their organization. And, I think we’ve been speaking a lot about project to product and kind of changing that thinking. But as I think about what’s the next frontier, I think it is customer obsession. As a product manager, I know that product is never the end goal, right? The end goal is value to the customer. And that comes again with a huge people problem or an opportunity, to put it differently. How do I make my people customer-obsessed? Because you can use all the frameworks in the world, and you can bring all the smart consultants, and you can have the best intent from the organization, yet you’ll still be talking about the business.

Adam Mattis:

No, you’re absolutely right. And I think it comes back to what you said a few times now, right? And that’s, you’ve got to be focused on the people. But to be obsessed with the people, you have to know where the people are. And I really appreciate how you’ve mentioned a few times where you always drive the conversation of we need to be focused on this intern on day one. And I think the importance of that is that intern on day one could be your future CEO, right? And if you don’t make a good impression on that day, and you don’t provide the visibility and the transparency, and quite honestly the excitement, well, that amazing gifted person can go somewhere else. So being obsessed with that person, it’s not about only satisfying and delighting the executives and the people writing the big checks. You’ve got to get the people who are there every day doing the work at the most junior levels to be excited, too, and to understand how they fit and feel engaged. And that’s the key to your future.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Absolutely. Yeah. If you want to build a ship, then don’t teach people how to, you know, cut wood and put it together, make them yearn for the sea.

Adam Mattis:

Yeah. That kind of reminds me of a lot of startups I’ve personally started, and it’s a hundred percent about passion for the things that I love and wanting to get closer to them, and not about necessarily solving the problem, but wanting to do more of the cool things that I enjoy.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Yeah, it’s about the why, right? Like, why do we want to solve this problem? Why does it matter? Why does it matter to me? And I think that that’s what sometimes gets overlooked when people are thinking about implementing frameworks, and they’re thinking about, OK, how do we connect strategy to execution? It’s the why, like, why do we need this? And I think there’s something about the future of an organization, sustainable growth, which to your point, cannot happen unless you bring everyone else on that goal and the mission and make them believe.

Adam Mattis:

People behave based on their incentive models, right? And I think it can also go back to how we incentivize people, right? When people are obsessed with the outputs, it’s because we incentivize them to be, right? They’re focused on, you know, in project world, you know, we have to be within this variance, or I’m not a happy person, or, you know, we’re focused on all of these ancillary things because that’s what the system tells us we should be focused on in order to receive the rewards that we want. And I think a lot of the points that you’re making, it’s very important because if we want to change how we interact with our customers, we have to change the incentive model. If you want people to be customer focused, you need to incentivize them to be customer focused. If you want them focused on elegance, and you want them focused on, you know, low debt, clean code, clean solutions, well, then you’ve got to focus on that.

I think a lot of it can be tied back to the early 1900s, the incentive models that we created around manufacturing and how those things evolved through GE during the Jack Welch years, which were better, but still, you know, largely not great, and the world’s changing fast. But for whatever reason, our organizational behaviors and our management tactics haven’t changed. So if we want to be great with customers and we want to deliver elegant value fast, what are we changing in our system to make that a priority? I think a lot of organizations say those words, but their structures and models don’t allow you to chase those things. Or they’ll say these new things and these new perspectives are important to us, but then they don’t change their own behavior. So the organization doesn’t change, and then the people end up blaming the tools or the frameworks or whatever else because we want to do this thing. But these things are in the way, but the reality is it’s behavior. We haven’t changed our behavior, which takes us back to people.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

To the people. Yeah. I think that one of the most successful patterns that I have observed in organizations trying to transform and embarking on that journey is their passion and ability to experiment because the challenge and be,

Adam Mattis:

Be wrong, right? Part of the experimentation is we’re going to fail, and that has to be OK.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Yeah, exactly. And we’re going to learn from our mistakes, but ultimately, that is the single thing that if it’s not present in our organization, I think they’re going to have a hard time. Because transforming business is always about trying, failing, trying again, and finding what works. And those journeys often take years. Most of the time, they take years, and they take constant reinvention. So unless you’re willing to actually make that effort and try and experiment, it’s going to be a big challenge to make that happen. But that also means when people frame their initial scope of how will we attempt to transform, I think it’s important to start with a meaningful scope that’s not too small, not too large, that gives you good answers to the key hypothesis that you’re trying to test with that effort. So, something that I would like to see more of in our space is more conversations about how you frame that experiment successfully.

If you’re just embarking upon that journey, what is the thing that you can do to learn? And then, from that learning, you can figure out how you want to go big. Because sometimes people try and they don’t improve, what is my proof of value for this whole thing? How will I know that I’m successful? How will I know that I’m not successful? What am I looking to learn from this? And without asking those questions upfront, people just try to adopt a framework or adopt a tool, and then they’re like, eh, it’s not working for me, like you said. Right. And so I think one of the recommendations that I have for listeners of this podcast is if you are in that transformation journey, think about how might you experiment and what will success look like? Because that is a million-dollar question, quite literally.

Adam Mattis:

Absolutely. Those are great insights. So Natalia, to kind of wrap this up and bring it home, what are some cool things on your roadmap right now that you can talk about that people will get excited about for the future?

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Yeah, absolutely. So I mentioned a couple of things. The most immediate rollout is the new navigation for Jira Align that is aligned with Atlassian navigation patterns. And quite a few of our customers are using it already, which is very, very exciting because I think it’s true with many powerful tools that you can have so many different views, you can slice and dice your data in so many different ways, that it’s really important to make that in as few clicks as possible, right? And so that’s something that we always keep thinking about, user experience, ease of use. I mentioned the Atlassian Analytics and enterprise insights integration, which is currently on the public roadmap on the Atlassian website. So that will start rolling out to customers in a couple of quarters. And as a broader theme here is figuring out how we help customers that are adopting value stream management practices, right?

Because Align and Agile Craft have been known for enterprise agile planning. But if we think about different aspects of enterprise agility, value stream management is a huge deal. And if we think about the enterprise agility market and other parts of it, strategic portfolio management is another area where you will see us doing a lot of things. So thinking about financials, thinking about how you, again, create that picture where it’s not business against IT or IT against business, where it’s a single view of how strategy connects to your execution in capturing all the different layers of what that entails, connecting work, people, and money. Huge, yeah. In views that are meaningful. And again, having that software intern lens is hugely important for me. So how do we make it all simple and shareable?

So those are some of the big things for us, I would say. In terms of I think the market itself, one thing that keeps me up at night is thinking about how we help more businesses because, as I mentioned, Jira Align is hugely appealing to large enterprises today. That being said, more and more I hear from smaller organizations because, in our world of complexity and tools, because an average number of enterprise software tools, when a company, according to I think Okta Research is a few hundred, right? And so how do you connect all of this together and to connect the data model that you as a company can leverage to understand what’s going on and where to go and how to make tradeoffs, and how does that impact your strategy is huge.

So, just thinking about that, how might we create value for small organizations? And I think another thing on the roadmap to pull out is actually improvements to the roadmap views because what we’ve all seen happening over the last few quarters is a CFO comes to the CTO and says, Hey, I give you the money. What happens? Yeah. Like, where’s the money? How did we, like, what did we get out of it? And because of that, I know quite a few organizations that have unfortunately had to restructure and even, you know, reduce their resources in certain areas. But that means people need more shared visibility views across work that is happening. So things like roadmaps, therefore, are hugely important right now to our customers because that is how you understand what is going on. And one of my favorite European customers actually said that when they showed the line to the CEO for the first time, the CEO said, Oh, I can finally see all the work that’s happening and why. And so I can see where we’re not doing the right things, and I can see where we’re doing the right things. So that question I think a lot of businesses are getting from other executives right now, to helping our customers there is another good thing for us in the coming quarters.

Adam Mattis:

That’s exciting stuff. Well, Natalia, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. I’ll let you get back to the conference and have some more fun. If people want to connect with you, how can they do that?

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Well, first, they have to spell my last name, which is Baryshnikova, which is not an easy fit. But that’s something that you can do.

Adam Mattis:

We’ll link it in the show notes.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Yeah. <laugh>, absolutely. Yeah. You can find me on LinkedIn as well, or you can contact SAFe institute.

Adam Mattis:

We’ll hook you up. Yeah,

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Exactly.

Adam Mattis:

All right, Natalia, thank you. Have a great rest of the conference.

Natalia Baryshnikova:

Thanks, you too.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to our show today. Be sure to check out the show notes and revisit past episodes at scaledagile.com/slash podcast. Relentless improvement is in our DNA, and we welcome your suggestions for the show. If you have something to share, send us an email at podcast@scaledagile.com.