By Dick Stark and Alan Reynolds

Atlassian held its Team 21 annual customer conference (formerly Atlassian Summit) April 28 and 29 virtually. This was a big deal with an estimated 25,000 online attendees. What a difference a year has made. Thanks in part to the Pandemic, Atlassian’s collaboration tools are on a roll. And there was no shortage of the A list customers showcased: Zoom, Slack, Peloton, and Twitter, headlined a few of this year’s sessions. At any rate, I attended the keynotes each day and Alan was able to attend some of the other sessions. Here is a short summary.

Keynote Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes opened from the Atlassian studio with a story about how two Atlassian customers “unleased the power of teams” by managing COVID vaccine development efforts using Atlassian software and Agile processes. Although Mike didn’t specify which two companies, there were no projects more important in the world in the past 14 months than those related to controlling the COVID virus. Mike summarized other progress Atlassian made including: adding a Machine Learning engine to the platform, faster and more secure cloud experience, Cloud Enterprise Edition, built in automation, and better collaboration across more product lines.  Mike also announced Point A, five co-joined products: Halp, Jira Work Management, Jira Product Discovery, Compass, and Team Central. He explained, “this is a collaborative program so we can learn alongside and with you.” Team A includes:

Jira Work Management (in beta release) – this is a rebrand of Jira Core Cloud, with improvements to provide a calendar view and a spreadsheet view (list view) of work for business teams like legal, finance and marketing.

 Halp (in general release) – this tool provides conversational ticketing capabilities from Slack or Teams.

Compass (in alpha release) – this tool gives software teams a single place to understand engineering output, support teams, use insights, and best practices for improvement.

 Jira Product Discovery (in alpha release) – this tool helps product managers create products by rallying teams around priorities, from discovery through delivery.

 Team Central (in beta release) – this tool provides status reports to replace status spreadsheets that give everyone access to real-time progress, potential problems, and priorities, in a digestible feed.

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, Atlassian speakers emphasized that success is dependent more on alignment between teams than the success of any individual team. Furthermore, if working from home, Atlassian is the hub of work for any team, no matter the location. Most importantly–everything works together better in the cloud.