Building the future of modern work | Chris Davidson

Okay, building the future of modern work. Thanks for having me today. I am hopefully going to share you some stories and some insights on how we are trying to build the future of modern work. I think we heard from Kelsey about collaboration and about how we don't know, the future is now, the future is the actions that we take now. And if we talk about practices, and we talk about ways of working, and yeah, okay, there's some software and some platforms in there that help, I'm going to share you some stories about how we're doing that that I hope you can take away and learn something from. So, we're going to go on a journey. Build the future. What's the future? Let's see about what is the now. So, there was a State of Teams report. We do it annually, 4,000 respondents, three key areas came out that said the now, the problems of the now, productivity. Everyone here is, I'm sure, like, no productivity. What about productivity without burnout? Alignment to goals, this second one, this tracking of progress to goals is really one of the ones that rings very important to me personally, because if you don't know why you're doing something or what you're doing, less than half of people really know what or why they're doing. And stakeholder management, so many teams, so many people, how do we just deal, like the burnout factor of dealing with that. So, that's current work, in some respects, and you may have different experiences, or some of this may resonate. So, what's modern work? If we were to try and describe what would feel good, we know why we're doing it, we know purpose, the teams that we work with, we work well with, like Kelsey's point, what's wrong with the collaboration now? And of course, productivity, right? More with less, but more without burnout, right? Productivity without burnout. I think there's a really key thing that I want to level set on, both personally and from an Atlassian perspective, is that going from and to modern work is an evolution. It's the actions that we take. It is not the silver bullet. Go and buy all the Atlassian platform, and you'll be there. It's an evolution, and it's your journey. But we have to touch that elephant in the room. Atlassian. I stand here saying this is an Atlassian viewpoint. We see a future of human and artificial team members. Why is that? Because they both bring something to the party. Do not underestimate human intuition. Intuition is not a guess. Intuition is, you know something, you sense something based on your experience and your knowledge, and very quickly, you can form a viewpoint, which may be an LLM, which can look at billions of parameters, can validate and can soak up a fair amount of energy doing it. But there is a complimentary thing there. Nothing like a human has intuition that can work as effectively as it can. What happens if we don't know? What happens if we don't have a dataset? If we don't have a dataset, humans are actually quite strong. LLMs less so. There is a role for us both. We see a future of human and computer teams. This whole concept of bringing this transformative technology, I want to just pause for a moment, and Kelsey took us back to Ruby on Rails and Hadoop. There's a story I've told a number of times, and I've told it in every other location but London. And this story, it resonates with me because it's a great story about a team, but it's a great story because it happened, well, the actual work happened just a few streets away, just by Old Street, a place called the Tavistock Institute. And let's just set the context. Technology influence on ways of working. British coal mines, 1940s and 50s, we need a productivity increase. It's the post-war era, we need to be more productive. And there was a whole approach, which I'll tell you about, that took place to raise that productivity. But a team came back to our Jira Mac App, the true story, right? There was more than one team involved, particularly because it was, we ended up, it was discontinued. So, you've got users that are affected. You've got to communicate. We've got marketing, we've got a whole pile of teams that were involved. How did they stay aligned across teams to achieve this? Well, they got a spreadsheet. And every day, on a Thursday, they'd update the spreadsheet. It's a joke. It's a joke. I don't tell jokes as good as Kelsey. Hey, we've all lived those spreadsheets, right? I know some of the audience here has. We've all lived those spreadsheets, and we've all lived those pings. Can you give me an update on what's happening with the Jira Mac App, right? We've lived it. So, how are we doing it, right? First thing is common language. Got to have a common language, very simple language, and maybe to take again, we all stand on the shoulders of giants, but with Kelsey talking about reinventing the wheel, maybe we are reinventing the wheel a bit here. It is intentional. So, we say common language. What is the common language? What are you doing? Why are you doing it? What will success look like? Who's leading it? And who are all these stakeholders that want to follow it and have visibility to it? No matter who you are, no matter what sort of a snowflake you are in Atlassian, those four things, what, why, who, how, you've got to be able to communicate it, and it's got to be visible. But then, even more so, I want to dig in, and I want to understand what's happening. We simply have an update process where on a Friday, by Friday afternoon, you've got to put in 280 characters, and yes, you can put a smart link off to some data, et cetera, 280 characters into an update. You can see when the updates are flowing. On a Monday morning, those updates go out in a sequence.