In 2001, a couple of Sydney computer science students – in a bout of adolescent-like lazy/energetic inspiration – wrote a program that made programming easier.
Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar’s software, Jira, became the basis of Atlassian, a technology company which created so much wealth that Cannon-Brookes is now trying to buy a whole power company.
Today, the co-founders are in their early forties, and their newest product is designed for business leaders, like themselves, rather than programmers.
If successful – and that’s a big if – it could give one of Australia’s most prominent, but least understood companies a blow-out growth opportunity. It might even change the way companies manage themselves.
Mostly ignored when it became available two months ago, the product is called Atlas. Originally, as Atlassian grew to 8000 employees, it was built to help Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar keep track of what their staff were doing.
“We couldn’t run the company without this tool,” says Sean Regan, Atlassian’s head of product marketing. “I think it represents one of the biggest bets of the company into the biggest [potential] markets.”
The staff directory
In simple terms, Atlas imbues a staff directory with characteristics of Facebook and Twitter.
The software shows everyone working on a specific job, what their function is and what they’ve achieved. Team members post updates (“I fixed a problem in the database today”), which are limited to 280 characters. Expected completion dates are vague, or fuzzy in Atlassian’s language, reflecting the uncertainty of most work.
Atlas is designed to replace progress meetings, known by some project managers as “RAG” status meetings, for red, amber or green. Senior managers not directly involved in a project can use it to check on its progress.
“A lot of task-tracking tools (like Jira) focus on quantitative metrics instead – the numbers of days until a release can be shipped, the number of open bugs, etc,” says Robin Scanlon, the professional services director at Glintech Australia, which helps companies use Atlassian software.
“These are a more accurate measure of success, but they require context and a knowledge of the details. Senior stakeholders just want a ‘vibe check’ which RAG status was good for.”
Atlas took a couple of years to evolve from an in-house tool to a commercial product. During this time its working title was “Watermelon”, a reference to projects that look good from outside but are red inside.
When he starts work each morning, Cannon-Brookes often checks Atlas to find out what his staff are doing, according to Regan, and will sometimes tell Regan not to take on more responsibilities.
Replacing meetings
Computer programs are changing work. Slack, Office 365 and similar work-chat products are replacing email. By making it easy to share and work on documents from anywhere, Google, Dropbox and their competitors are contributing to a retreat from offices.
The most time-consuming and complained-about office feature of all – the meeting – has been too entrenched for technology to displace. Group meetings may have become more popular during the pandemic. Last year, Zoom users racked up 3.3 trillion minutes of meetings.
Work meetings are popular because of their versatility – you can talk about almost anything at them – and they fulfil our need for social contact.
Replacing these meetings with online updates probably isn’t desirable or realistic. A lot will be unspoken in a two-sentence status report. Body language and tone convey information.
But busy companies have limited management resources, and many younger employers want to share their feelings about the workplace, and are willing to do so through a computer.
Businesses know this, which is why Melbourne-based Culture Amp was worth more than $1 billion last year, before tech stocks began to fall, through selling staff surveys.
This week Culture Amp offered a new program, Develop.
Develop allows staff to tell their employer what skills they want to improve or learn, and what their career goals are, before meeting with a manager or human resources department. With the information written down in a standard format, the employer should know exactly what their staff want when they talk career progress.
If successful, the program could partially supersede the career-goals meeting, or make them more effective.
“In some cases, you might just fill out a static form,” says Dany Holbrook, a senior people scientist at Culture AMP. “We don’t have the prompts in front of us. We don’t have the words. It [Develop] will guide the employee and manager through the process and give prompts.”
Naturally, technology companies have been more ready to use technology to manage staff. Culture Amp’s important clients include Canva and Oracle.
Atlassian’s original customers were computer programmers. Specialising in cheap products used by many people – one, Trello, has 90 million users – Atlassian is going after what it calls “knowledge workers”, which is basically people who regard python as a kind of snake.
Atlas can operate as a bridge between programmers and non-technical staff, according to the company, and help revenue growth, which is $US3 billion ($4.2 billion) on an annual basis and rising at 30 per cent. The company is valued at $US50 billion.
Because Atlas is a simple product, Atlassian gives it away. When more features are added, Atlassian will charge for them. Marketing of Atlas will begin in a few months, Regan says, and “thousands” of people already use it.