How Atlassian uses OKR to Keep 15,000 People Aligned with Amber Morey-Wu

Welcome to Strategy Candy, the podcast that's all about doing better work with a great strategy, achieving audacious goals, using OKRs and building products people love. I'm your host, Tim Newbold. Today is a really special one. It is very rare that you get to open up and explore the inner workings of some of the world's leading tech organizations. Now we're talking to Amber Wu today from Atlassian. And if you haven't heard of Atlassian, you would have heard of one of their products. So such as Jira, Trello Loom. There are so many different examples. If you haven't heard of them, I'd be very surprised. Amber shares how she helped Atlassian embed okrs across the organization as an internal team member and her role in running it today. Another key insight that Amber shares, islassian's rolling for the rhythm they use to actually plan and set their goals and collaborate together to make sure they're focusing on the right things. There is a stroke of genius in this. I can't wait for you to check it out. I hope you get the most out of this episode. It was fantastic for me. And let's get into it at the end. I'm going to share my key takeaways. Let's do it. Amber, I am super excited to have you join us today. There is so much that I've heard and read and seen about how Atlassian build products and work on strategy and develop okrs as well and bring this all together to something that seems really amazing from a work practice perspective. So I'm really excited about this interview. So thanks so much for joining us today. Awesome. It's great to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me. Excellent. Excellent. So I'm just going to start pretty simple to be honest. And we're just having a bit of a chat before we start recording and this is actually the big question on my mind. I'm curious about what do you do? But then actually before that, how did you get into this role? Because you're Australian, right. But you're currently over in the States so I want to unpack that a little bit. Yeah. I moved to the US when I was 20 years old. I have an American stepmother as a short version. Yeah. Nice. That's the simplest version. It does, Yeah. I grew up in Victoria and East Gippsland and South Gippsland, went to Melbourne for college and then accidentally got a one way ticket to Anchorage, Alaska. Yeah, my parents, my Australian father and my American mother were moving there and forgot to move back. I was Actually studying fine art photography at Philip Institute and was loving it but didn't see myself having a career in it. And so I was finding my way. So I've been through many different iterations of what I should do with my life since then, but the most last 20 years have been in tech in general. More specifically, tends to be in program management and yeah. Joined Atlassian five years ago. Been in a few different roles at Atlassian. I started off in the security group, worked in Confluence for a while and then for the last going on towards two years, I was invited to join the Business Rhythms team. Okay, nice. And so you might say, what's Business Rhythms, Amber? That was about to be my next question. What is Business Rhythms? It's the way the company operates from a strategic perspective. And so what our team does is we lead what we call the rolling four, a term that we've coined at Atlassian. It's the rolling four, it's the R4. It's like an agile process of business planning. What we do is every quarter we look back and we review results, then we look forward and we plan the next four quarters, the next quarter or two in detail and the further out quarters at a higher level. But every quarter we do that. So we're rolling that year plan instead of just doing a once a year plan, set it, forget it, wait for a year, check back in. We do a much more agile way of planning. So this is not just product development. The finance team does a rolling four concept. This is across all but lasting that we do a rolling four concept. And within that Business Rhythms team group, you've got the top level of strategy, then below that are goals and then below that is work planning and resource planning. So people and, and so our team oversees all of those pieces. And the piece that I layer in is the OKR process. So I lead the OKR rhythms across the whole company including the planning process, refresh process, the monthly review with the executive team. All those bits and pieces. Wow, that's really cool. And that's a big role as well, right? That's down to again to that business rhythm, right? It's the heart, it's the heartbeat of the organization. I've got so much I want to unpack there because I think where I've seen organizations do this really well, they have someone like you that is there to bring this all together and make sure that cadence happens because otherwise it's another thing for everyone to think about independently. And all of a sudden it starts to. Everyone starts to work in a Slightly different cadence, things start to go a little bit different, and therefore you're not working in an aligned sort of rhythm. So I think having your type of role is really critical. Before we get into that, I think pretty surprised nowadays if I hear people who haven't heard of Atlassian or Jira or these sort of the products that you build. But I'm curious, and for anyone that has lived under a rock and has no idea what is Jira, what is Atlassian, what is Confluence, What. How all these things and how they fit together. Yeah. So Lassie makes team collaboration tools. Some of them you might have heard of Jira, Confluence, Trello and other tools. What we do is we help teams collaborate. Our stock ticker price. Stock ticker is actually team. Okay, nice. It's not Atlassian or Atlas or anything. Team is actually our stock call number or whatever you call it. That is cool. So, you know, whether people are building software, planning projects, or just trying to stay organized and collaborate effectively, our tools can help teams do that. And we range from helping tiny startups. That's a place we started. To huge companies, people like NASA, Airbnb, Uber, LinkedIn, Spotify, companies you might have heard of. They're all working on our tools. So when a rocket goes to the moon, we were like, we help our tools. We have the backbone of helping them make that happen. It's super cool. You're part of that story. It is amazing. Look, and I've got to say, working with product teams and even executive teams, it's pretty rare nowadays to find someone that doesn't work with Jiri. And I know, sorry. As part of the Atlassian toolkit, I think about Jira is a pretty common one with a lot of these teams, which I don't know in simple terms, and maybe you might correct me here, but it's effectively a collaboration tool that's also a bit of a workflow management tool as well for teams. Back in the day, there was also simpler versions. There was Trello, which I know Atlassian acquired. So you've got that full range for something where teams have got a really simple need. They want a basic way of looking at their work, having a simple Kanban all the way to some pretty complex crazy sort of stuff that people can set up if they want to go that far into it. So it's pretty amazing suite. Yeah, no, that's a great description. And Trello is actually. So I work in tech. My other sisters don't necessarily. One sister does, two sisters don't. The other two sisters are Like Trello. Oh my God. My one sister uses trello to organize her knitting. Yep. All of her skeins of. All of her skeins of wool apparently are in Trello. That's amazing. That's the first. I've never heard of. That's the user friendly. That is cool. Yeah, I do it. I use Trello for planning trips. I use a Kanban and like each day and so on. I have a backlog of things that I can do. So on a daily basis, some things I've already planned out what I want to do but then also I can just look at my backlog and yeah. Choose what's next that I want to do. Yeah. So our tools can be used for personal as well as professional. Yeah, it's amazing. It's that whole sort of toolkit. It's a good little gateway drug there, isn't it, where you can start using it in your day to day life and yeah, then it leads to things. I did start using Kanban at work, working on product teams. If you come back to. There's actually a book on the topic called Personal Kanban. So it does actually. It is really handy in your own life and so tools like that are pretty powerful. So I'm curious about with Atlassian. What would you see, as you say, is your unique bit of source? There's it talked a little bit about. You talk about the focus on teams and collaboration and there's a lot of tools out there. What would you say is the really big one out there that is a bit of a game changing piece that's unique to Atlassian. What's that really special edge that it has compared to any other product that's out there or company in this space? Yeah, I think the thing that we're emphasizing these days is really the concept of the system of work. The system of work is having a whole lot of tools that collaborate together. So you're in this seamless flow between one tool and another and you have your workflows between all of those different tools. We've got everything from Confluence to Jira and so we're moving from having specific software to thinking more of an app and that things can get surfaced between the different tools. And so it's really about the way that you work your workflow that we're able to deliver to customers. Yeah, okay. I love it. That's very cool. It's interesting how we're starting to really focus back on that customer experience and servicing those needs in singular apps. That to me sounds like something that's a big opportunity. Know when I've used during a flat in the past many moons ago. I think it's gotten a lot better now. But back in the day it was like quite a big complex thing to take on. I think that's why also they had had Trello as an acquisition. Cause it's a nice easy way to start. But I see over time they've really refined the product down to make it a lot more simpler where you want it simple. But if you need that sort of bit more intense customization, it's behind the scenes. I like that. That's where the current thinking is that cool. So if we think about rewinding a little bit because obviously the work that you do sounds like it's pretty mature. A pretty mature practice at Atlassian. I know there's a lot of publications people can just google Atlassian okrs and they'll see how your products use okrs but also how the team uses okrs. I think you've got some playbooks out there. So tell me if and if this is before your time, that's cool. But I'm wondering what. Where did. Do you know why Atlassian turned to okrs in the first place? Where did it start? Do you have that history? Yeah, I was. You'd given me that question in advance. I was tried. It was before my time. I. Based on my research we started. We've been using for a long time. It looks like 2018, 2019 is where we really started using them comprehensively across the whole company. Gotcha. And from my perspective probably of experimentation then it's popped up from there as okay, this is something we're going to do properly. Yeah, I think so. And we really use it so to make sure that we're all rowing in the same direction. So we have the concept of L1, L2, L3 and L4KR SO levels. And so an L1 is a company that's something that an executive team leader is going to be the sponsor of. And the work that is being done on it usually takes multiple departments to complete. And so that's L1. The company level. L2 would be department level. So that might be like the sales team. And so the sponsor for that would be the head of sales. And that's work that could mostly be done by the sales team. Might still need some support for folks outside of that group. Then L3 would be a subgroup within that sales team. For example a specific sales planning group. And. And the idea is things should ladder but not always perfectly and so we've got a company objective. Win an AI. Probably most companies have that as a suggested objective right now. I don't think you're giving away any secret IP or any secret. No, I don't think so. AI Right. It's pretty. Pretty popular. Exactly. And so if you've got that at the company level, then marketing is going to look at that and go, what's that? There might be already a company thing they're contributing to, but what's something that we're going to be doing that ladders up to that and then that sales planning team below that might. How do we ladder up to that? We also emphasize though, that not everything has to perfectly ladder. Yeah. Because you don't want to have too many OKRs at the company one. Yeah, yeah. You don't want to have too many. If you have too many OKRs to make sure you've covered all the use cases, then you lost focus. Yep. And so you want to keep. We've got four company objectives and four key results under each of those objectives at the company level. And that's not going to cover every tiny bit of work that we're doing in Atlassium. And so teams need to be empowered to also look at the company level, be inspired by that, have some things that ladder. But not everything needs to ladder. There may be other work that's not captured and that's still important. And as long as they have the alignment of their leadership, they should be planning around that. The other thing I want to talk about briefly is we talk about okrs that change the business and following metrics as run the business. Right. So most companies will have things like an MBR and so on a monthly business review. That's when you look at like, how's our sales doing, what's our MAU, et cetera, et cetera. That's all about run the business. So Those are metrics versus OKRs are all about CTB. Change the business. This is what's going to skyrocket us. It's not going to affect our finances today or tomorrow, but this is what's going to help us in the next year or two continue to grow Atlassian as an amazing company. Amazing. You've. I just want to pick up what you're laying down here because you've covered so much good stuff. I want to rewind the conversation back a little bit. So you mentioned that not have having a few set of okrs really focused and not everyone needs to ladder up to that. Can you unpack that a little bit because I know with a lot of traditional goal setting, it's like we've got to have a goal for everyone to fit into so they can all see where they fit into the big picture. And then you've got a list of a hundred, I'm going to say things, whether it's goals or what, like a hundred things at the top. Why wouldn't we do that? And let's unpack that a little bit. Focus. Yep. Simple as that. Yes. If you have too many goals, you're not going to achieve anything. If you have less, fewer goals, then you're going to be more focused. You're going to really know what you're trying to achieve. And it's back to the idea of you should ladder some, but not all. You want to be growing in the same place as a team and so that laddering helps you row in that same direction. And some other things might be inspired by. But not ladder as directly, but it's still some important work that needs to be done. But focus, Focus. Right, that's what I would say. So for some teams it's more of a, here's where we're focusing, here's the problem we're trying to solve and we all need to get behind that because you clearly fit into that. For other teams it might be just more of a light signal that is, hey, we're moving in this direction. Do what you can to support that where it makes sense. And other teams, they don't fit into that, but they've got something really important to do that is still important for the business, but maybe it's not a top level okr, they can still work on that. It's not longer, you can't do that, but as long as it's not conflicting, it's okay. Does that sound right? Yeah, that sounds right. A good example would be, say, hr. So I just gave the example of pretend, like when an AI, there's probably some AI things that HR can do, but there's probably some other things that they need to be doing. So people team, not hr. People team. There's other things the people team should be doing that are just not going to land into the company okrs, but it's still going to be important to make us a healthy, happy, positive company. And so you've got to give them the space to be able to create those okrs themselves. I like it. So what we're doing there is really setting them up for a bit of empowerment and they're actually able to own those things, which is really good. Yeah. Nice. Okay. And you talked about. This is one that really catches my eye as well, is the change. I think what you call about changing the business and running the business is that all maintain the business. Yep. I think that's a really important one because everyone thinks about if we're going to have our metrics, we're going to have them all under an okr, which often means it's really conflated. And coming back to that lack of focus. Lots of different things. Tell me a bit more about that. You've got that focus around change. The other metrics, are they just about keeping things running and running well, how do you use your other metrics to track the business? Yeah, there's another group of people, so I'm not that. I've referred to that monthly business review. That's not my area. So I can tell you at a high level, but somebody else could tell you much better than I could. Those metrics are the health of the business. So you want to make sure that your MAU is steady or approaching towards gold, et cetera. You want to make sure those metrics. We try and make those metrics separate and we try not to have, for example, an MAU okr. Gotcha. We try and say that's going. Something that's already been monitored in the business reviews. We want to do bigger and different things and so we try not to. And that can also be. There's trailing indicators and leading indicators. Leading and lagging and. Yeah, leading and lagging, exactly. And MAU is more on the lagging side of things. It's harder to. It's going to take a while for those efforts to show up. And so it's good to have things that you can track where you're going to see more instant results. Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, it makes sense. The way I frame it is it's often too. It's tied back to a problem that you're trying to solve. And usually then you can see pretty clearly here's the problem that we're solving. It thinks back in quite nicely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Very nice. So I'm curious. It sounds like we talked a little bit about where OKR started and why they turned to it and the initial stages. When you came in, what did that look like? Because it sounds like you weren't really part of this OKR rhythm or into setting it up. You weren't part of that. You were in the security space and then you moved into it. Tell me about what did that journey look like and why was this role established. Yeah. So the team that I'm on was established. There was another team running it and now we've got a couple of different teams. But our particular group was created to take over a couple of different areas and do it from a program management perspective, from a very process oriented perspective. It was being run by folks who are more strategic oriented, who are also really great, smart, talented folks. But they wanted to have folks who had more of a process perspective. And so I think that's why our team was created to take on some of this type of work. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Okay. Yeah. And so what did that. What was the remit originally given to the team and how did that evolve? Because I think this is such a critical role that so many businesses miss out on when it comes to okrs. How did that work? Yeah, I mean, it was taking over what I described at the start. So we own the OKR process, the strategic folks own the what it is and we own the how. So they own what the goals are. We own how you put that together and how the whole process runs. So it's a collaboration between those two groups, if that makes sense. Yeah. And so I'm going to. Trying to loop back to your question there. I think I've lost my train of thought for a moment. Oh, that's good. That's good. So it was really around. Yeah. How did it evolve as we started out in that role and then how did we start to evolve that? Yeah, we took over established rituals and then continued to evolve them and work on improving them based on feedback cycles and so on over time. So we took over a of rituals of a monthly meeting with the executive team and a page that gets reviewed and comments and feedback, et cetera. We took over that ritual. We introduced more of the refresh concept. And so back to that rolling four idea. Guess what? Every four three months we look at our okrs and we ask everybody at both the L1, so the company level and the L2 at that department level to refresh their okrs. And what I ask people to do with refreshing is look at the external markets. What's happening that might have changed the last three months? Look internally at Atlassian, what might have changed last 3 months? Are all of your okrs still the right thing to do now? The answer might be yes, and that's okay. The answer might be, gosh, there's this thing that's changed. This is less important. We need to focus on this over here. Let's wrap this one down and bring this one in or you know what, our targets on this, we're blowing them out of the water. We want to raise our targets and increase that. We do okrs, krs that are three, six, nine and 12 months. I'm working on getting the company to move to shorter time periods, but we do definitely have 12 months. The AI team are great at doing three and six months. Do they have a choice? No, it's the most logical thing because it's hard to see the future when it comes to AI, honestly. So I think they're doing a great job. But every three months before that refresh process and then once a year when they do annual planning, we do a slightly bigger refresh. And so those are the rituals that the OKR process that might I lead or cover makes sense. It's really interesting and it does depend on the type of business and where you get the best bang for buck, because there is a cost to having those okrs that can shift every quarter. What I've found works is we have an annual for the company and then even for depending on the company, it does change a little bit, but generally a quarterly for the company as well. But they're really focused on what are those core business problems or customer problems that we need to solve framed around that and then teams link into that. And because you think about the old school, like balance scorecards and all these kind of things, where it's like a really heavy process to align OKR is that much more of a lightweight alignment process that you can go through that quite quickly. And as long as it's not where. I think some people get this a bit wrong as well, it's, oh, it's a new quarter or a new year or whatever it is, we've got to totally change our okrs. No, let's come back to what problems are we solving? How much of that problem have we solved, if any at all? And if that's solved, cool, let's go pick up the next thing. But if not, let's keep focusing on that and keep burning away at that until it's done. Yeah, absolutely. And I found objectives can quite often be evergreen for a year to year. They'll often change, but sometimes they are evergreen for at least a couple of years. If you're really focusing on this particular thing, the key results underneath, you want to achieve them and keep getting the next thing. Exactly. So the key results should be updated, but the objective might be evergreen for a longer time period. Exactly. Yeah. I think it's a really good mindset and a good way of Approaching it. Tell me a little bit about how the executive team gets involved in the okrs. Are they looking at team level okrs or do they focus on business okrs? What does that monthly look like? Yeah, we keep the focus on the company level. The page that I prepare is all about the company level and their role is to basically probe and check and make sure things are running properly. So we do a, the traditional kind of half, 20 minute pre read of the page, et cetera. We do the cameras off, pre read the page, come back. We usually have curated what we call a lightning round of people. I've already looked through all the okrs and gone, okay, they're going to ask about this and this. So let's have three people queued up to speak to this and be ready on point to answer questions. So we go through the lightning round. That usually produces some good comments. They also being confluence, they highlight and ask questions on the page. We're also starting to do a table with a few conversation starters as well, which our business team, business rhythms team is looking through those updates ourselves and asking curious, probing questions that the execs might, if they had a lot longer, might pick up on and want to ask. But we have a lot more time to read those tickets than they do and so put some conversation starters on the page as well. So the goal is very much interactivity with the exec team. It's not just a report here it is, okay, give us a rubber stamp. We want engagement, we want feedback, we want suggestions. And so we do everything we can. And we've been iterating on that meeting format over time and those suggested question ideas, that's a new one. We've just iterated on the last couple of months. But keep iterating to make sure we really get that engagement because otherwise it could just be a video. Exactly. It could just be a video that they could watch. And what's the point of having that conversation if it's just looking at even then you go, okay, it could even just be a bloody report, read it and done so exactly. That creative tension that comes with an okr. Right? And that challenging and that, okay, here's where we're struggling, here's where we need support. So I really like that. I think something here that is missing for a lot of businesses that you've really nailed. There is again, this comes back to your role. I think this is one thing I haven't actually asked you is there. And role title is always a bit of a question thing. But what is your Role title. If I had looked you up, what would it say? It says Principal Program Manager, Business Rhythms. Yeah, cool. And that suits it. So like that to me is there's something missing. For a lot of companies with a role like that, we call it the OKR lead. There's like different names for it, or Strategy coach, there's a few different things that we call it. But what I see very rarely in businesses that don't have a role like this is they don't have that pre thought and that structure around those OKR check ins. And so it means that those clever questions aren't being asked or we're not having someone really prompt those conversations. So sometimes the CEO is really all over it and they're the one driving that conversation. That's fantastic. But they're busy too and they get distracted and sometimes they come into these meetings after weeks and weeks of M and A and board meetings and all these kind of things. So they're not in the headspace to be picking up this kind of stuff. And then it's like a awkward. Okay, yeah, this is all going okay. Good. Next versus when you've got someone that's curated some good questions, prepared the group, had some challenging things, got some guests to come along that can talk to different topics that are important to the business, that must just make it so much of a better flow and structure. Absolutely. Yeah. That's definitely the goal. And it's funny, this is actually the third company I've worked at where I've ended up being involved in the OKR process. Nice. So I guess I have a history in this. They didn't when they asked me to join the Business Rhythms team, they weren't aware of that background. But when they like this ended up being a great match. Two companies that I worked at, Wikia, which is now Fandom, and I actually was asked to introduce okay out there. So this was 10 years ago where it was a bit of a younger thing. So I sat down and watched that one really long, hour long Google video which was about all there was out there at the time, which is every mistake in the book. Now we look at it and they've since gone. We don't do that anymore. Don't do that. But it's a great starter. Exactly, exactly. And so I trained myself and then trained product development and so we started using OKAY as a product and then I was asked to roll it out across the company and so it was like a 300 person company. So not a massive scale but decent. And then my next company was an even smaller company, Imgur, which was about 70 people. And the CEO was the one running the OKR process. And so he and I collaborated together. Awesome. And we would have great fun asking questions and pushing on things. And so it can be done at different scales. At last seen 15,000 people, so a whole different scale again. That's why suddenly we have levels and et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, it's interesting. It really is a different beast at that level of scale. Now we've worked with Domino's on a similar journey, so they're a similar size prob. Little bit smaller because that does include, I think there might be a little bit larger. But they've got obviously delivery drivers and cooks and all these kind of things. Some of the stores do OKRs, funnily enough. But yeah, it was really, for me it was that getting the whole business behind that and a rhythm that made sense for all of them and similar things to what you talked about. Having that right focus at the leadership level, not having that laundry list of goals or okrs, all those same kind of things. Absolutely. I'd love to double click and get into the product side of things because this is where a lot of people from product backgrounds listen to this podcast and this got a lot of questions on how this works and I've even every now and again I'll come across a team that goes, oh no, we do, we're a product team. We work in an agile way. OKR doesn't really fit in here. And it always blows my mind because agile is such a loaded and what does that actually mean term. But I would say that OKRs and product like it's a match made in heaven. This is exactly what we should be doing. But I'm curious based on your experience, maybe at the last thing now, but even just historically, how do you see product teams working with OKRs and how do they use it? How does it help them? I think it's a great way to drive slightly more bigger picture focus across a product team. Ideally, as you and I both know, the chaos shouldn't be delivered this product. Yep. It should be release the feature. Yeah, it should be shift the feature and have X number of active users buy this something more like some proof of point it should be. And so I think it gives people a bigger picture goal to work towards when you use them well in the product versus just ship this. Ship this. Yeah, yeah. So it's actually connecting them to some sort of purpose, something they're trying to achieve. It fits in with strategy, I've seen a little bit that where it shifts, the thinking can be around historically. And I think a lot of teams, they're still trying to move away from this. But I think again, most businesses still struggle with this. They've shipped something and functionally it works like it does the things we hoped it would do, but then it isn't performing in the right way. And that could be a customer's using it. But also, like, I've seen plenty of examples where it is not performant from an interaction perspective. You click something and it's loading, loading, loading, and it's okay, we're done with that. Next thing it's, hang on. No, like, I think OKR stops that kind of thing from happening first. It gives you a line in the sand. So over this time period, here's the outcome we're trying to achieve. And then you got to keep at that until that's achieved. And if you release something and it doesn't work, it's okay, we haven't solved the problem. Let's not go and add something else new into the mix. Let's actually solve that. No, I think that's perfect. It's outputs. Sorry, outcomes over outputs. Yeah. A good chaos should be about an outcome. What if we didn't just ship it, but what did we achieve? Why does the customer care? How is it better for them? What. What is it doing versus output is just. We shipped a thing. Yeah. So that's what you always want to be focusing on. Yeah. Okay. I'm curious how this plays out at Lassian, because I know, again, if I read through all the playbooks that you have, it very much is intended to be outcome thinking, problem focus, solving, outcomes for problems. But you're not bringing up your engineers from graduate school all the way up. You've got a lot of people who've come in from different companies, a lot of different cultures and mindsets. And I'd say the default for most businesses is ship the thing. And that's it, that's success. How does that fit in with Atlassian? And what sort of journey do you think you've had to go on to get people thinking about the outcome? Has that been a difficult conversation? Is it like, oh, people just get it. What's that look like? Yeah, I think we've definitely. The culture over the last few years has been focusing much more on impact. Like that. That. That is a big word at Atlassian right now. Impact. What's the impact? Why do I care? And so from leadership to a individual engineer Individual contributor. Everybody is thinking about it's not just doing this thing, but why did. What did I change by doing that? And so I think we've been pretty successful in driving a culture that cares about impact. And I think that matches really well with the OKR mindset. Yeah, really nice. Okay, I've got two questions now. One which is around what do you feel like is your personal secret source that has helped you be successful and make this work quite well? So maybe it's the secret sauce of your method as well. But then I'm also curious about what are you finding is most challenging right now? Maybe not even personally, just around the business as we're working on this and moving down this way, maybe starting. What do you think is your secret sauce? What's something that you do differently to others that get the best results? Yeah, I always try and give the why as well as the what. I do a lot of asking people to do stuff, a lot of me, here's a date, give me this thing versus here's a date and here's why we're doing this. Here's what we're working towards. This is what we need by this. I always try and give some context on what we're doing. People engage better. It's like you don't just go up to an engineer and give them a deadline. You say, I need this done. What do you think? And work them towards. You always want to give context, give people some level of control, et cetera, and understanding. So I always try and give more context. I also. So Loom is another of the acquisitions that Atlassian made, which is a recording technology which can record video, your screen, et cetera. We use Loom, unsurprisingly, a lot. And so if I. It. Yeah, it gives a human, literally a human face to things. And so sometimes when I'm asking for something, I'll do a quick loom as well. I'll just go on camera. I don't do the multiple takes. I'll just say, hey, folks, here's where we're going. Here's what. Here's why we're doing it, et cetera. Let me know if you have questions. And so that gives a much more human versus just a text message. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So as much as possible, I just try and bring the human element into what I do, which, as I said, is often giving people deadlines and asking why things aren't done. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And this is a scary reflection on this day and age, but I say it's always been A thing. But it's like the ease of watching a video and all the body language you get with it and all that kind of stuff too, is so much easier than reading a text or reading a long message. And I'm. I always, I'm a big one. Same thing. I'm like, you've got to have the context, really make it clear. What do people want to think, do and feel off the back of all these messages? And when I write in a message, it's, oh my gosh, it's like a laundry list versus a video. Like a video. It's like a 10, 30, 60 second thing. And you get all the same information off so much quicker. Yeah, it's just. It's more personal. Yeah, absolutely. I'd say one more thing. Not that this is super related to everything we're talking about here, but I don't know, maybe someone will take something away from this. I think the power of Loom as a product is absolutely incredible. And this is what. I'm going way off script here. Back in the day when I was working on product teams, what we'd do is we'd. When a engineer had finished building a story, it's like before we'd be working on a feature, we'd go through it together and we'd go, okay, here's the plan, here's the outcome we're trying to achieve. Here's like what we think it'll look like. Look at the wires and all those sort of things. We'd work on it and then at the other side of it, we'd go, great, how did that work? So the engineer would be like, hey, great, I'm done. It might be like dev completely or they've at least got it functionally working, so they're happy to run it, everyone buy it and they bring in the product and design and we'd all get together and have a chat about it. And it was great. And it was like never a mandatory thing, but it'd be like a quick little mini ceremony we'd have and if people weren't around, too bad, so sad, we'd keep going. But it meant that it's quite disruptive to your work. And again, that cost, which is definitely outweighed by just being better in terms of we're all aligned on what was built and if there was any tweaks and changes, we could do that nice and early. But it was still hard versus now, again, since I've been working in product teams as many moons ago, so Loom wasn't really a thing back then. But now what I see teams do is they will do a quick loom video of the product, of the experience they've built, and they'll drop it onto Slack or any other sort of product. I know Jira's got your own version of chat as well, but whatever they're using, they'll drop it on there and the team can go in their own time and have a bit of a look. And that creates that really short feedback cycle. So I think using these tools is pretty powerful. Yeah. And I love the ability to comment and do emojis on loom. Like it. It does make it a truly interactive feeling. It does. Particularly when you watch a loom that a lot of people watch and you like instead of thumbs up, jumping up while you're watching it. That's fun, too. It is. It's a great product. I love it. Okay, cool. So, yes. All right. So I like it. So the context and the why and that again, that's something I'm really big on. I think it's just so important. The other reason there is that if I've always found that when you say, have you heard about the. The cursed monkey paw? The Simpsons did an episode on it once. No. Vaguely refresh my memory. So what it is, basically, I think in this, I'll go with the Simpsons episode because it's great. It's one of the Treehouse of Horrors episodes, but Homer buys a monkey's paw. It's a cursed monkey's paw. And what it does is it gives you a wish, but it's a unintended consequence wish. It's been too many moons since I've actually said the episode. So I can't remember what he wishes for. But an example might be, I want to get him, you know, a million dollars, or I don't want to earn a million dollars, or, okay, great. The monkeys pour, one of the fingers closes over. Your wish is granted. A family member is dies in a car accident and you get a payout from insurance or something like that. So it's like not the thing that you wanted. Okay, yeah, that's. I wanted the money, but not in that way. So I find when you say to someone, I want this thing, often they will come with their idea of what the problem is, and so they'll solve it in their own way. So if you're. And in terms of what you're doing here, if you're asking for a piece of information or something like that, they're going to solve it based on what they think you want. If they don't have the why, you get that sort of monkey paw effect where you're probably going to get something. Maybe it looks a bit like what you're after, but really it's not what you're after. So if you give that context of here's what I'm after and why, it not only does it engage people, it actually gets you to the right outcome, which to me is actually what OKR is also all about. And that's what we're talking about. Here's what we're focusing on and why. And here's how I'm measuring success. Gives you the same effect. That's amazing. No, that totally makes sense. I have a quick question for you, if I may. Yeah, let's do it. You seem to use OKRs as a singular. I use this as a plural. Yeah. So I'm curious to hear why you use singular. It's good. So I bias towards having fewer okrs. By default. I talk about an okr, like trying to have an okr. Now does that suit a 15,000 person business? In most cases not. You can get it down quite focused. And for you, maybe four is the right number. Maybe two or three or whatever it might be one. For me it's that sort of going for one okr. So when I talk about an okr, I talk about one. When I talk about the framework, it's the OKR framework. But yeah, when I talk about teams with their okrs, I. They've obviously lots of teams have lots of okrs. But yeah, I think it's a bit more of my personal bias towards striving for one okr, which is. Yeah, what a triangle. That's awesome. Go for. That's awesome. Mixan. Thank you. Cool. Okay. This has been really amazing. I think I've picked up so much around this. Coming back to that, your secret sauce there, is that why in the context. And I think that is again such a good thing. That helps. I think if anyone, if you want to have a superpower, I feel like that's the superpower is coming into a meeting, be able to set context because it just helps in every given scenario. The one thing I'd be wondering is, okay, what is Atlassian working on at the moment from an OKR perspective that you talked about? You've now got the questions coming into those monthlies. What would you say again, you're talking about on impact? What's something that's not quite working right now, Something that you guys are really working on to try and take it to the next level. Whether it's OKR as a product or something like that. What's something that's a bit of a theme. Yeah. I think we're at the quarterly refresh that I mentioned earlier. We're still developing that muscle. People still generally defaulting to a 12 month old oblong KR at the start of the fiscal year. Gotcha. As I said with the exception of the AI team. And so I think we're really focusing on trying to strengthen that. It doesn't have to be that long. It can be shorter, it can be more agile. One team came up with a KR that had two metrics. One that would last six months and the one that would last the next six months. I'm like that's just two KRs. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Just break it into two bits and have a six month and a month. So really trying to bring more agility into the time period that people are using. And I know we absolutely had the support of MCBM CEO. Shorter is good. That is a thing. And so continuing to educate along those lines I think is the next thing that I can do to really make a difference to the agility of the process. Yeah. Amazing. I think. And that all of a sudden means it unlocks the organization's ability. Not that it's not already doing this. I do see all the incredible work that Atlassian does and it is moving quite fast. But within the business having that focus on the strategy and also being very clear on what problem are we solving right now for the team and moving that much quicker, you do. That's where you get that extra really big impact in outcomes. Yeah, I like it. I think it's a worthwhile thing to give a bit of a go. If I think about some of my close out questions I normally ask. You've actually covered quite a few of them I've been talking about. What are you experimenting with lately? Obviously that's the questions. I think just to round off a couple of quick questions then maybe I want to hear more about your thinking and what you're learning at the moment personally. Because again I think it's incredible when we have wonderful guests like yourself that obviously a leader in your space and we can all learn from it. If I can borrow and steal some of the books that you're reading or you found interesting lately. I always like to do that. Maybe just to round out how you're using okrs as an organization. Do you go down to the individual level? Do people have individual goals or OKRs. How does that book? Yeah, that's a great question. We've recently, probably about two years ago, we didn't used to have any sort of goal setting at the end. No formalized goal setting, you talk with your manager, et cetera. But there wasn't a company wide tracked, et cetera process. We have introduced that. I think it was two or three years ago. Don't quote me on that. But it is just old fashioned goals. Right. It's not okrs. Yep. That being said, people absolutely do think about the OKRs when they make their personal goals, but we don't force it at that level. I personally think okrs at an individual level are a bit too heavyweight. My perspective, it might be good learning for people to really understand them. Yeah. But I think it's probably more process than you need for an individual. Yeah, yeah, makes sense. That's just me and. Yeah, yeah. And so let's unpack that because I think it's a really good point. So why do you think that is? Is it just the adding like extra layers and extra. The complexity to it? Is there anything else that makes you think that's not the right sort of fit? OKRs can be really powerful if you understand how they work and if you get them wrong, they're not very useful. Exactly. Yeah. People have the basic understanding of what is a goal. Everybody's heard of a goal. Everybody's heard of a smart goal or if they haven't heard a smart goal. It's really quick and simple to explain. OKRs aren't super complicated, but there is a bit more overhead to understanding them. And getting 15,000 people to all do that correctly, that's a task. I don't know if that's a challenge I want to take on. Yeah, yeah. I think it's a really good, really good point. As well as coming back to what you're saying, which is you could do it. And just because we could do it doesn't mean we should do it. But you could do it. But would it actually drive the return, especially for the effort? The thing that I come back to is, yeah, look, you can use it as a learning method and if you want to write personal goals, it's okay. I was like, cool, go for it. But don't try and confront plates into the structure. What I find is like, let's go with something really simple. A sales team. Right. We've got a sales team and we've got a. One of our key results is to reduce the time it takes to close deals. Something really simple. Let's go with that. Okay, so maybe for some of the sales leads in that group, it's some really obvious stuff they can do to fix that. Right. They can fix their process, tweak things, maybe change their conversations, having with customers, but they might have a sales assistant or a sales associate that's helping behind the scenes. But how do they fit into that? If I wanted to set a personal goal, really clearly plug that in, it's a pretty. It can be pretty hard and can take quite a bit of overhead to try and work that out. And where I plug that in personally, was it actually just me or was it everyone else? And if everyone else is successful and I do nothing, I'm still successful, it starts to make less sense. Right? But if it is down to here's what's important to me, here's what I want to improve, here's what I want to learn, maybe there are some instances there where there it makes sense to have an individual target for some reason, but ultimately that's the conversation should be had. Where do I want to get to by the end of the quarter while supporting my team's okrs? I think the good one for me that I've seen a few companies use that works quite well is that advocacy. As an individual, are you advocating for your team's okr? If you are, then gold star is great. If you're totally ambivalent towards it and not helping the team, and if anything holding them back, that's a problem. And that's enough. To me, as a manager, as a leader or a manager in a team, you can see, okay, which of the team members are really driving for this, which of those are not. Typically most team members are, but again, there's always the old exception. So that to me is tick. Tick. That's cool. That's working. No, that totally makes sense. And people's personal goals, they should be looking that their departments, okay. And so on. But they also should be looking at what's my personal development. So how am I also getting. How am I helping the company? But if I get better at my job, I'm helping the company too. And so there might be personal development goals that don't connect directly to an okr, but the company will benefit as I increase my coding skills or as I get better with using AI or whatever it is that you're working on personally, or get better at my management, et cetera. So again, goals are just a simpler, like lower overhead way to phrase those. Those things. Exactly, exactly. I was about to Use an example, but I don't think it's a very good one. It's going to be like an mba. How do you see the return of an MBA in the near term? I think some people would argue maybe you don't see return of an MPA at all. So maybe not the best example. But there are certain things where it's like, you got to work on that a long time before it's going to pay any dividends on a personal level. And that's okay. That's all part of it. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I really like that. Look, I'm super conscious. I could keep going for hours about this, but I've only got 10 more minutes of your time and I don't want to. Don't want to use it up too much, really. Just thinking about now, what I'm really keen for audience to get some ideas to take away in action, which I can guarantee you all the way through here. There's so many golden nuggets here. I'm wondering, on a personal level, what are some books that you've been reading and learning about? What's the. Yeah, what's some stuff that's got your fascination at the moment? So the things I read are not always direct. They're in the general area. But I don't read Goals books every day, I confess. I'm actually listening to. I'm actually listening to Jacinda Ardern's autobiography right now, the Ex New Zealand Prime Minister, which is amazing. Yeah. And so I'm listening to it because she narrates it herself. Okay, that's good. So hearing it in her own voice, I've just gotten to Covid. Things are getting interesting. Yeah, that was. That was particularly work, being from Australia. It's where I'm from. And I know, obviously your background as well. We're across the ditch from New Zealand, and so we get to see a lot of what's happening there. And that was an interesting time, wasn't it? Yeah. I know it's going to get contentious soon, so I listen. So I actually love autobiographies. I love hearing about people's stories and how they've achieved and how they've become who they are. I do a lot. I do a lot more listening than reading because I combine it with going for a walk or doing things around the house, et cetera. I listen to the Pivot podcast, which is Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. So it's all things tech, and then a lot of politics and other things end up merging into that Cara Swish is a well known journalist who is quite the sassy, opinionated person. And Scott Galloway is a good compliment to her besides some of his jokes. But beyond that, I definitely recommend They're a little blue, shall we say? Yeah. The profit. Prof. G. And so actually realized there was that podcast. I'm going to put them in my browser right now. Yeah. Because I think they, they pop up as guests or maybe it's recast from that podcast. But. Yeah, right. You're gonna check that Pivot podcast. I like it. No, strongly recommend the Pivot. And then a couple of the things I'm listening to Reclaiming, which is a podcast by Monica Lewinsky. Oh, really? And so she interviews all kinds of different people and her theme is what are you reclaiming in your life? Like hearing about the person, who they are, some of their adventures in life and so on. Is there something that you've lost in the world and you want to reclaim? And so she's done all sorts of really interesting interviews. So she's a great one. Amazing. And then for some fun and it's a bit more fluff, you'll see a theme of females here. Goodhang, which is Emmy Polar, the actor and comedian. Okay. Who's the leading Parks and Rec lead if that was it. I know who she is. Yeah, I've never watched that show, but I know who she is. Yeah, yeah. No, so she basically interviews her friends, but it's called a good hang. So it's all. She just has fun with them. Nice. And so if you want something lighter but still to learn bits and pieces, she's got some pretty good famous friends, I gotta say. That's great. Yeah. So that's a lighter, more fun thing to listen to. Gotta have balance. So look, normally what we do is we just capture this and for everyone listening in, this is in the show notes. You can check all these out, but actually writing these down because I'm going to get download some of these. I'm flying to Sydney tonight. So I'm like, you know what, this is going to be some good stuff while I'm on the plane. Amazing. Where are you right now? In Melbourne. Yeah, but you mentioned earlier that you grew up in Gippsland, so that's why I used to go camping and traveling out that way. So like Dargo, Bonambra, Omeo, that sort of various areas. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Here's another quick question for you. Where did you grow up? What city or town? So I grew up in a couple. I grew up in Woodley, which no Longer. We used to own the general store in the post office. Oh, wow, that's cool. And my mother drove a library van around the small schools and the area. Oh, wow. So the town literally was. Yeah. I went to a school of seven kids. I was the only one in my grade. And then a few years in, they amalgamated a whole bunch of small schools into a larger school. And so then I went to a school with 200 kids. I'd never seen 200 kids in one place at one time. It was terrifying. It's been amazing. Where was that school? What school was it? So what was it called? God, it's been too long. I'm going to blank on the name of that school. I was on there for a couple of years. Yeah, that's all right. Then we moved to just outside of Sail. So he skipped land after that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Longford is where we lived. Yeah. Beautiful part of the world out there. It's very cool. Yeah. So I have super small town country upbringing. Yeah. Goodness knows how I got to Anchorage, Alaska. I'm now in San Francisco. Still blows my mind working in big tech. At least for still for an Australian company. So that's really cool. Technically Australian. I know it's on the new stock exchange, isn't. Is. But if you look at our corporate values, two of our corporate values have swear words in them. Yeah, good. Yeah, very Australian. And when I read that, I'm like, gosh. Oh, you Aussies. Okay, all right. That's what we're doing, is it? That's amazing. I love it. I love it. No, so we, we definitely do have the Australian DNA and the company, without a question. Yeah, very cool. And yeah, and I'm, I'm, I'm bilingual for my co workers. I can translate the slang across both countries. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, that's one thing. We work with a few customers in the States and they do enjoy my accent and the slang and I have to bust out the Australian slang because I. Yeah, they seem to love it. So. Works pretty well, right? Yeah, amazing. Hey, look, as a final point, I would love to just go think about for the audience. Is there any sort of key piece of advice or tip? If I'm just starting out with OKR or we're using okrs, but it's just not quite working right now and we probably don't have someone in your role. What's your tip for anyone who's listening right now? Yeah. I would say practice makes perfect. So I've just talked about how right now our company defaults more towards 12 month versus 3 months. If you're starting out, only do 3 month chaos. The more you do it, the more repetition be. I hate to use the word agile, but be agile in your thinking. The more the repetition, the more practice you get, the better you're going to get it over time. And then after time you want to have set longer time periods. That's great, go for it. But I would say keep it short, do it, do it frequently. There's a lot of great books out there, so reading is great. What else? I would say goals can be life changing. I'm somebody who does a lot of personal goal setting, so I've done. And once you set a goal and you set an action plan and you work towards it, aim big. Like okrs are all about aiming for something bigger and bolder than you think you can do. The whole scoring system, the 0.7 is did a pretty damn good job. The point one is I almost flew to the moon. If you're scoring your okrs correctly. And so use this as an opportunity to be really ambitious about what you do. Use it as a way to get your teams excited and inspire them and say this is going to be really hard and let's aim for it. Let's try and use a phrase, think out of the box. What can we do differently? How do we jump further ahead than we thought of? So use them as a potential point of inspiration to get people back to my phrase. I keep using rowing in the same direction, believing in what you're doing. And so those objectives should always have some level of inspiration to them to get the teams excited. I love it. I think that's such a good one that you talk about having those inspiring objectives and things that really get the team excited. And for me, what I see too many teams do is they try and stretch and have just. They try and make it a challenge by having lots of things on the go which is 100% the way to do it. It's about no focusing on the what really counts and work towards that. Do it in short cycles as you said, like rinse and repeat because every. The more, the harder it is, the more you do it, the easier it gets. Keep going through those short cycles. You can improve and make it work and yeah, stretch for something that's challenging and amazing that you know is not about diverting your focus and trying to do lots of things. Let's do one thing or a couple of things really well. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing. Awesome. Amber, I want to thank you so much for your time today. It has been absolutely incredible chatting with you. I'm sure people will take lots away from this. Obviously all the stuff that you've talked about, they'll be in the show. Notes that people can check out. But again, thank you so much for your time and yeah, really appreciate you joining us. This has been a lot of fun. I appreciate you inviting me on here. Great, thanks so much, Emma. You have an amazing rest of your day. We'll talk soon. How good was that? So rare that you get to have these kind of insights into the inner workings of the big tech firms. Here are my key takeaways. I think there's a few key ingredients that really make this successful. First and foremost, the Rolling four method that Atlassian uses. There to have a really clear planning cadence that allows everyone to get organised, focus on the right outcomes and to collaborate at the right time. It gives you that bouncing ball that you can just follow. Too many organizations try and make it up each time or they don't put the proper preparation in so that everything tends to go sideways. So being organized and having that cadence ready is so critical. Having everyone focused on impact and making the biggest outcome they need to make right now, I think there is something around being aligned on those big priorities. What's the key thing that we need to focus on as an organization right now? My second takeaway was keeping focused on impact. So identifying what is the key priority for us right now that matters above all else doesn't mean that everyone's working on that thing. But being very clear that this is it and that is how Atlassian has been successful time and time again. By aligning such a big part of their workforce and not having to list every little thing that's on their OKRs, that's another big mistake. I see too many conflicting priorities. It doesn't make sense. Lastly, I think this is a game changer that I uncovered very early on in my OKR journey. Most organizations don't have a central owner for making OKR work in the business and then they don't understand why is it not working. If someone's not responsible for making it successful, eventually it's going to break away, whittle away, and you'll have teams doing it in isolation. I've seen this plenty of times. Once an organization starts, they keep going, but it just varies how aligned it is and that comes down to the executive team being clear on what that priority is and having someone owning the process. And if you can have those two pieces together, all of a sudden everything works nicely and you have a good system framework for focus and execution in the business. If you want to learn more about OKRs or product leadership, I'm going to encourage you to go check out okrquickstart.com podcast. We've got all the resources over there that you might need. We've also got links in the she Notes to everything that Amber talked about, the books and all the different topics. So go and check those out. Otherwise, stay awesome and focus on impact. I can't wait for you to join me in the next episode.