We want to understand teams better than anyone, because we believe that teams are the cornerstone of getting great work done, not individuals. And so if you want to understand teams, you need to understand them outside of how they're using your product, because that's real, crucial, qualitative research.
Alastair Simpson
Head of Design, Atlassian
Designers at Atlassian explore broadly and have a true user’s perspective, thanks to some help from their research team. The customer journey—from purchasing to using a product—bridges multiple internal teams. By having design centralized across the whole organization and not split into product units, they’re able to create a more coherent experience.
If you don’t break the silos, users will feel the pain. By designing across the seams, in any organizational structure, we’re able to patch it up in a better way for our users.
Jürgen Spangl
Global Head of Design, Atlassian
We spoke to Global Head of Design Jürgen Spangl, Head of Design Alastair Simpson, Design Manager Ashleigh Sterzenbach, and Head of Research and Insights Leisa Reichelt to gain more insights into what helps the Atlassian team make great products by designing across the seams of the organization.
Innovation through The Product Braintrust
One practice that helps Atlassian design across the seams is an internal forum for strategic discussions. Inspired by the Pixar Braintrust, a mechanism for candid communication related to new creative productions, the Atlassian team gathers founders, senior product leadership, and Jürgen to talk through ideas.
These topics of discussion come from actual teams inside the company. Each week, high profile projects or previously scheduled presentations are showcased in the forum, with the idea of helping the presenting team make the best decisions possible before building and shipping to the world.
From this session, we work together. The main purpose is to equip teams as much as possible to make the best decisions. So, the forum is not meant to be a gate, it's about how can we help make better decisions.
Jürgen Spangl
Global Head of Design, Atlassian
For Atlassian, a big part of the Product Braintrust’s value is the fact that managers and team leads aren’t the ones presenting—team members are. Because of this, designing across the seams starts internally, where learning and asking questions to enhance a project are given the spotlight instead of a red light.
To keep the conversation focused on improvements, the Product Braintrust uses something called P Rules. These are a set of rules for giving critiques that turn the focus and attention to the presenting team rather than critical feedback. Head of Design Alastair Simpson says one of the most important P Rules is not to pile on feedback, especially if the point has been made once before. These seven rules also help guard forum participants from focusing on small things, like typos, during presentations.
The point is to let presenters present, because that's what people want. They’ve come in and they've prepped a five- or 10-minute presentation, so let them get through it.
Alastair Simpson
Head of Design, Atlassian
Start with the customer
Aside from the P Rules, there’s only one true stipulation for presentations: Start with the customer. Whether it’s a demo, deck, or something else, framing the work with the customer in mind is top priority.
It’s been lovely to include in terms of empathizing. With this rule, we can stay closer to customers by asking, ‘Why are we doing this? What's the customer goal? What's the customer intent? What's the customer outcome here?’
Alastair Simpson
Head of Design, Atlassian
Then, with exposure to the thought process of senior leaders and a continuous focus on the customer, designers have a better idea of what to prioritize—and how to bridge gaps between stakeholder preferences and user needs.
Being capable of sketching something quickly, mocking something up, building a prototype, and then playing it back to the team—playing it back to users to get feedback—is so undervalued in the industry.
Alastair Simpson
Head of Design, Atlassian
Research also plays a big part in product design prioritization. Atlassian’s Research team has three areas of focus: customer happiness tracking, strategic research, and design research. Though product managers and designers also conduct research, the formal team focuses on research that otherwise wouldn’t be seen by the product team, according to Head of Research and Insights Leisa Reichelt.
The idea is to have always-evolving practices for internal education without our research being shipping-oriented. The Research Education Group is a big part of that—rolling out training like usability how-to’s and facilitating operations for product managers to observe field research.
Leisa Reichelt
Head of Research and Insights, Atlassian
Building community around design
Beyond the Product Braintrust, Town Halls are a staple of the design organization. There’s a centralized design town hall in addition to to the global town hall, which is a weekly meeting for the entire company. There are also product- and design-specific town halls on a monthly basis to drive conversations across the larger team. In all of these meetings, Atlassian is investing in transparency and shared context across the entire company.
Though there are plenty of opportunities to get in sync and exchange ideas, Atlassian takes building internal community seriously by flying all geographically dispersed designers, researchers, and writers to Sydney to meet each year during design week.
Atlassian Design Week 2018
Sparring to success
Coming together isn’t the only way Atlassian builds community; sometimes intentional division builds stronger bonds and better solutions. Sparring, a discussion strategy developed from formal art critiques (“crits”), gives the design team a way to develop a strong rationale for design decisions through structured feedback sessions. Sparring helps make sure the product vision and customer needs are sewn into what gets shipped.
It can happen at any part of your design process—it can be as low fidelity as a sketch or as high fidelity as a polished screen. The goal is to gain feedback from the team, to poke holes and to collaborate on whether what's being presented meets customer needs and aligns with the product vision. How it typically works is designers will stick their work up on a wall, or use tools like Mural or Freehand if they're running the sparring remotely, and then present their work back to the team. Designers often start with the problem and go through any relevant research they've used to help inform their decisions. While they do this, the team writes down their feedback and sticks it on the wall. After the presentation, the designer will go through each piece of feedback with the team and then have a discussion of how to move the work forward.
Ashleigh Sterzenbach
Design Manager, Atlassian
The process changes from time to time (and whether or not the team is working remotely), but the goals are the same no matter exactly how it unfolds: to reveal gaps in thinking and design, to practice voicing problems, and to grow as designers.
Sparring principles
- Design driven. Designers run the session and focus on customer experience.
- Structured. Sparring sessions are organized, with an agenda set beforehand.
- Inclusive. Other teams, or disciplines within design, are welcome.
- Regular. Sessions are repeated often enough to benefit every design.
Process
1. Research it - Projects are often triggered by a mix of quantitative and qualitative data to help the team focus on critical areas for improvement. Designers have the freedom to talk to customers as often as possible, without a lot of formal methods or training involved.
What are we hearing from customers? We try to triangulate that data to make sure we're not just focusing on a bunch of customer interviews...with quantitative data, and with longer term qualitative studies.
Alastair Simpson
Head of Design, Atlassian
2. Envision it - In this phase the problem is isolated, as more customers are spoken with and competitor reviews happen. Further discovery work is done to understand customer journeys and frame customer insights. Prototypes are made and tested using InVision. Throughout this process, practices like sparring assure that the dev team and stakeholders have a chance to weigh in.
During the envision phase we want to discover as much as we can about the customer problem or need, who we're actually targeting as well as what they will find truly valuable. We do things like conducting competitor reviews, deep diving into research, unpacking customer journeys as well as defining a north star.
Ashleigh Sterzenbach
Design Manager, Atlassian
3. Ship it - New features are often rolled out on an incremental basis, with feedback gathered along the way.
Right now, there’s an internal blog post that comes out every week from the Jira software team that says what we’ve learned this week from customers from rolling something out progressively. It helps us get a constant feedback loop from listening to customers.
Alastair Simpson
Head of Design, Atlassian
We monitor our in-product feedback very closely, frequently running customer interviews with those who have submitted feedback. Our goal is to understand what they think about the new experiences and how we can continue to improve.’
Ashleigh Sterzenbach
Design Manager, Atlassian
4. Improve it - Atlassian teams are constantly working on improving products and features, so it’s critical to measure the user experience, which is done through mechanisms like in-product surveys.
Continuous improvement is a very important part of the design process. This is why we test and observe how customers actually use the products, and listen to real customer feedback from the in-product surveys.
Ashleigh Sterzenbach
Design Manager, Atlassian
Org design
A hybrid approach, which is common in large enterprises, blends multiple organizational models and runs different models in parallel. In hybrid structures, an organization might position designers in a temporary cross-functional team to work on a focused project with a clear deadline. When they’re done, they return to the centralized design team.
- Design at the top: Global Head of Design Jürgen Spangl
- Research the journey: Researchers aren’t always embedded in product teams, but some remain centralized to better focus on the entire customer journey.
Another common hybrid model strategy is to distribute designers in cross-functional teams, but pull them back together for design reviews, stand-ups, and fireside chats, which helps designers maintain peer connection even when isolated teams dominated by engineers.
Many large companies position the design system team as the hub of design culture to which embedded designers return for discussion about creating a unified customer experience across platforms and products.
Pros: Provides flexibility to tailor org structure to meet the immediate needs of the teams and the organization.
Cons: Hybrid org structures can get complex. It can be hard to operationalize process when teams are organized in diverse ways.
Atlassian has three teams, which are fully embedded along their product lines, and then another three teams which are more centralized. These include content design and research teams. Design Strategy and DesignOps are also centralized in terms of leadership.
When I say centralized, the researchers and the content designers are still working with the product teams, but we have centralized leaders. And by blending those two models we hope to get the best of both cases, of being localized to the different product areas, but then also seeing patterns across the whole company.
Alastair Simpson
Head of Design, Atlassian
Tool stack
How Intuit uses InVision
- Rapid prototyping
- Socializing design concepts internally
- Customer feedback
- Real-time collaboration
InVision is a huge part of our toolkit here for prototyping...and designers use Inspect as part of their process.
Ashleigh Sterzenbach
Design Manager, Atlassian