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I Watched All of Atlassian Team 25 So You Don't Have to (Part 2)

May 13, 2025

Following up on Part 1 (which covered the three keynotes), here are my stream-of-consciousness bullet points for the Super Sessions. Like before, very little has been done to clean them up or format them.

The Science of Driving Impact, Together

  • Talia Baily Plax and Molly Sands
  • Quick Polls:
    • “Have you ever had so many meetings you couldn’t actually start work until 4 or 5 pm?”
    • “Joined a project without knowing exactly what you were supposed to do?”
    • “Spent a ton of time tracking that one email that you’re pretty sure contains a link to the deck that probably has the data that you need.”
    • Basically implied that these are things that happen to all of us.
  • Atlassian Teamwork Lab
    • They’re a group at Atlassian of “PhDs that study teams across the globe every year to design and validate better ways of working.”
  • They’re “designing better ways of work all backed by data.”
  • “All teams need to adopt a System of Work.”
  • The most successful teams align their work to goals.
  • Pushing bringing “AI teammates” into workflows.
  • Four strategies to create a better System of Work for you and your team.

Align Work to Goals

  • Get crystal clear on what your goals are.
  • 78% of workers say they’re expected to attend so many meetings they don’t have time to get work done.
  • Design your workday around your priorities.
    • Be more intentional about how you spend your time.
    • Focus on a clear goal for the day.
    • Every day, review your team’s goals and choose “one thing” you can do that day to move those goals forward.
    • Keep 50% of your day blocked off for focus time.
  • Showed a demo of Atlassian Goals.
  • When you add Focus Time blocks, actually mention what you’re working on.
    • Coworkers are more likely to respect them than.

Plan and Track Work

  • 56% of workers say it’s hard to collaborate because teams plan and track work in different ways.
  • The best teams establish “project rituals that create clarity.” Essentially:
    • Document all of your processes, guidelines, etc., in Confluence.
    • Standardize your project briefs and other documentation.
    • Map out roles and responsibilities.
    • Start projects with a pre-mortem.
    • In Jira, make sure everything has a clear definition of done, owner, and milestones.

Unleash Knowledge

  • 50% of workers feel the only way to get the information they need is to ask someone or schedule a meeting.
  • “Meetings that could have been an email.”
  • Too much information lives only in live conversation and never gets documented.
    • Say it louder for the people in the back.
  • Use the meeting to do the work, not just talk about the work.
    • Make key decisions and move the work forward.
    • Invite AI so that it can generate action items.
  • Page-Led Meetings Experiment:
    • Created a clear, concise page for each meeting ahead of time.
    • Attendees took 10 minutes to read the page at the start of the meeting, commenting and flagging parts of the page.
    • Feedback showed these sessions were more productive and less frustrating, and more reliably achieved meeting goals.
  • Create a new meeting culture:
    • Look for meetings that can be replaced with documentss or Loom recordings.
    • Adopt Page‑Led Meetings broadly.
  • Use Rovo Chat afterwards to ask questions about the contents of meetings.

Make AI Part of the Team

  • People who collaborate with AI “save nearly a full workday every week.”
  • Use AI agents to “provide a bench of always available digital teammates.”
    • Made sure to point out that these are not replacing humans, just assisting them.
  • Showed an example of asking Rovo to “quickly do some research about the most successful marketing campaigns” when trying to plan the next one.
  • Showed a demo of walking through and building a custom agent.
    • Describe in natural language what you want the agent to do.

Additional Resources Linked:

Under the Hood: Atlassian’s Cloud Platform, the High-Performance Engine Powering Your System of Work

  • Maggie Roney
    • Explained how she used the “System of Work” to prepare for this keynote and presentation.
      • Started from a Confluence page.
        • Started from a whiteboard.
        • Transposed whiteboard into a written page.
      • Set up Jira tickets to map back to the Goal.
      • Used Loom to record demos.
    • 47% of workers struggle to find the data they need.
    • 50% of knowledge workers report teams unknowingly duplicating efforts.
    • 71% of teams admit they aren’t fully utilizing AI.
  • Tiffany To and Brandon Devito
    • Brandon is the Director of Atlassian for Ford.
    • Showed a demo of the Teamwork Graph.
    • Talked about the Teamwork Graph being 2.5x faster than before and now has 100 connectors.
    • Soon you can extend the Teamwork Graph through Forge.
      • The example they used is pulling in CAD drawings via a custom connector.
    • Ford has something called “Ford Speak,” an internal language, sounds like standardized rules around labels, acronyms, etc.
    • Ford is planning on making a custom connector to bring new objects into the Teamwork Graph and associate them with this terminology.
    • They are also building two custom AI agents to scale and improve the onboarding experience.
    • Talked about how Ford uses the Goals App extensively:
      • “Seemingly unrelated goals are interconnected.”
      • The Goals App is how they moved from “silo’d spreadsheets” into “daily routines that are stable for their teams.”
      • Employees can see their impact.
      • Leaders have visibility into all of the work being done.
    • Ford uses the Analytics App and Data Lakes.
      • Analytics allows them to make sense of the data in their Data Lake.
    • Custom Dashboards in the Home App are now in open beta.
    • Ford had over 16m automation rule executions in a single quarter.
      • One rule saved 3 hours a day by automating project creation.
    • Showed a demo of building a new automation rule using Studio and involving Rovo agents.
  • Maggie Roney
    • Highlighted the 49 new Cloud features shipped this year.
    • Highlighted three improvements.
      • Added a “Runs on Atlassian” badge to the marketplace.
        • This ensures that the app has been built on the Atlassian Platform, meaning it has the same “security, compliance and privacy” standards as the Atlassian Tools themselves.
      • Tripled the number of users that a single Jira and Confluence site can support.
        • Official Atlassian CLI, currently in open beta.
          • Showed a demo of someone archiving issues over 180 days old through a CLI command.
      • Customer-managed keys, also in open beta.
        • Builds on the existing “BYOK” service, but now you can take Atlassian out of the path.
    • Covered new deployment options: Gov Cloud (FedRAMP Moderate, EAP) and Isolated Cloud (dedicated AWS environment).

Additional Resources Linked:

Building the Foundations for Modern Teamwork in the AI Era

  • Matt De Vincentis and Alison Huselid
    • Leaning into the Jira “isn’t just for developers anymore.”
      • Recognized by Gartner as both a DevOps and Marketing Work Leader.
      • Spoke about how work “gets lost” a lot and how that adds up over time.
        • Lack of context, etc.
      • Showed a demo of using AI to create work items seamlessly from Slack
        • This is also possible in Gmail, your IDE, etc.
      • Mentioned the new public Jira intake forms and the new Custom Project Templates.
    • New Confluence features.
      • “AI-infused collaborative workspace, not just a wiki.”
      • Improved navigation and organization.
      • New, modernized editor.
      • Streamlined sharing and commenting.
      • Mentioned whiteboards, databases, and live docs.
    • Loom
      • “Breaks the cycle of back-to-back meetings.”
      • “Removed the need for more than 200 million meetings using Loom.”
      • Integrated Loom video recordings basically anywhere in any of the apps.
      • Loom can “join” meetings and take notes which are instantly available in Confluence.
        • AI-generated action items which can be automatically turned into Jira work items.
    • Project Kickoffs
      • With Teamwork Collection you can “streamline” this process, saving time and reducing miscommunication problems.
      • From Home users can see everything that they’re working on, across both Atlassian and third-party apps, frequently visited, recently worked on, etc.
      • Showed creating a “team,” comprised of people from all across the org to kickoff a new project (product launch).
      • Automated creating Jira Projects, Confluence Spaces, etc. for this launch.
      • All designed to help everyone get “aligned from the get-go.”
      • You can use AI to “improve your work items.” like suggesting a Confluence page to link to the work item.
      • Use Jira Plans to get a high level overview:
        • See blockers and dependencies.
        • See workload and identify anyone who might be overbooked.
        • View information from Atlassian Goals.
      • Easier to import data into Confluence from other tools like Notion, Tableau, Google Sheets, and Figma into the Teamwork Graph.
      • Confluence Whiteboard for brainstorming.
        • Uses a Rovo agent to pull in information as cards.
        • Users can vote on items then turn them into Jira work items directly.
        • Jira work items can be viewed directly in the whiteboard.
      • Showed using Loom to walk through a bug, which can be turned into a Jira task as well.

Additional Resources Linked:

The Future of Enterprise Strategy and Planning

  • Bree Davies
    • Talked about how much time people waste digging through information to find what they need.
      • “Executives spend 27% of their week just looking for information.”
    • Enterprise Strategy and Planning guide:
      • Focus areas.
        • Organized into hierarchies.
        • Examples:
          • Goals
          • Work
          • Teams
          • Funds
    • Announced Strategy Collection:
      • Focus – Strategic Planning (available today)
      • Talent – Knowledge Workforce Planning (coming soon)
      • Align – Enterprise Work Planning (available today)
      • One price for all three apps.
        • No additional cost for existing Align customers.
      • Includes Rovo agents as well.
    • Focus is a highly customized view of everything that the user needs to know.
      • Using an example CIO, she uses it to see where she needs to “help her team.”
      • Asks a Rovo agent to tell her what “needs her attention now.”
        • Identifies two off-track focus areas, suggests starting on the one without a mitigation plan.
      • Showed it auto-generating an OKR results doc.
      • Most enterprises follow a defined planning cadence but plans still regularly go off track due to outside influences and unforeseen events (macro conditions, competitive threat, etc.).
      • Announce Strategic Events in Focus (Coming Soon).
        • Essentially a view of all of the proposed changes to any existing plans? Somewhat unclear what this actually is.
    • Atlassian Talent
      • Leaders use it to get a “complete view” of their people and investments across the organization, including by focus area.
      • Showed a user creating a proposal for a team change made in Talent, which the CIO can then view in Focus.
    • Completely new Roadmap experience (coming soon) with advanced filters and configurations.
  • Matt Schvimmer and Victoria Leslie-Kent
    • Victoria is the Transformation Director of Lloyds Banking Group.
    • Talked about how they “moved from a bank to a technology company that does banking.”
    • Sounds like they partnered directly with Atlassian, using Jira Align and Focus, helping Atlassian improve the tools.
    • “What would be the advice you would give to leaders in the room that are just in the beginning of a transformation?”
      • Four things:
        1. Dedicate full capability, not a “side-desk” effort.
        2. Make sure you have a clear vision and that everyone shares it.
        3. Define clear data and metrics.
        4. Address behavioral and cultural shifts.

Additional Resources Linked:

End Bad Service Management Now

  • Shamik Sharma and Bruce Randall
    • Talking about how AI can improve the Service Management experience:
      • Uses a “single AI platform.”
      • Predict issues.
      • Suggest actions.
      • Automate resolutions.
    • 78% of ITSM users reported adopting AI.
    • FanDuel has been able to cut the amount of support tickets that require human intervention by 85% using AI.
    • On average 55 minutes saved per incident, per a Forrester Research survey of Atlassian customer base.
    • AI-powered employee support.
    • Showed a demo of a “virtual service agent” troubleshooting a VPN issue with a user.
      • Can be deployed in Slack, MS Teams, email, or as a widget on an external website.
    • Showed a demo of aa “Triage Agent” that can:
      • Reword ticket titles.
      • Change priority.
      • Change request type.
      • Figure out who to assign it to based on expertise.
  • Avani Prabhakar
    • People priorities:
      • Distributed work.
      • Employee experience.
      • Operational efficiency.
    • They are using JSM for HR (HRSM):
      • Managing the “employee lifecycle.”
        • Offer → Onboarding → Performance → Exit
      • Self-service desk for internal mobility (moving offices).
      • All of this was set up by the HR team, they didn’t need someone from IT to do it for them.
      • Handles about 3,800 requests per month, 30% of which are handled by a virtual service agent.
      • Saved ~2 FTEs and achieves 95% customer satisfaction score.
  • Shamik Sharma and Bruce Randall
    • HRSM:
      • Customizable portal that can bring in dynamic content.
      • Almost 30 out-of-the-box HR templates.
      • Journey Builder:
        • Build “journeys across the employee lifecycle.”
      • Integration with Workday.
        • Okta and DocuSign coming soon.
    • IT Operations reimagined:
      • Alert grouping:
        • Use AI to group alerts that are all actually from the same incident.
        • Helps find the root cause and related information.
      • Automated playbooks and retro documentation creation.
    • Use Compass and JSM to see a better overview of all of your services.
    • Data Manager:
      • Open beta for higher tiers.
      • Not much information on what it is.
    • Doubling down on asset and configuration management:
      • Embed assets with Smart links across any of the System of Work apps.
      • Now can support 10 million assets, up from 3 million.
    • New Customer Service App:
      • In beta, not much information about it in the presentation.
      • atlassian.com/csm

Additional Resources Linked:

Turbocharging Productivity with AI-Driven Software Development

  • Andrew Boyagi
    • The goal: Delivering high-quality software fast.
    • Traditional definition of productivity is output over time:
      • You don’t want to deliver more code over time; that’s an antipattern.
      • Leaders want value delivered faster and want to deliver a product that customers actually want.
    • Jira Product Discovery:
      • Helps your team build the right thing at the right time, using data and insights to bring product ideas to life.
      • Aggregate roadmaps from different products.
      • Use hierarchies to show how products and ideas are related.
      • Global fields for better scaling.
      • Mentioned project copy.
      • Now has templates for prioritization frameworks (e.g. RICE).
  • Suzie Prince
    • Based on a survey of 2,000 developers, developers waste, on average, eight hours a week on inefficiencies:
      • Tech debt.
      • Insufficient documentation.
      • Build processes.
      • Lack of time for deep work.
    • Compass:
      • Helps engineering teams track every service and standardize on best practices.
      • Provides teams with a unified catalog of services, libraries, resources, and the teams working on them.
      • Has preconfigured templates with best practices built in.
      • Can call APIs and kick off third-party services.
      • Use scorecards to get a complete view of the health of your services.
      • Can connect to Goals.
  • Josh Devenny
    • Only 38% of devs are experiencing productivity gains from AI.
    • Devs spend most of their time doing things other than coding:
      • 16% of their time writing code, 84% doing ‘other things.’
    • Rovo Dev Agents (beta):
      • AI to help get work ready for developers:
        • Writing issues to prepare for a Sprint.
        • Pulls from the Teamwork Graph of similar issues and related documents.
      • AI to help developers:
        • Can generate a ‘code plan,’ files that need to be changed and what those changes are.
        • Can then generate actual code from the code plan.
      • You can create your own Rovo agents.
        • An Atlassian team wrote 200 pull requests in 60 minutes using Rovo Agents.
      • Rovo code reviewer can do a basic PR against your engineering standards.
      • You can run Rovo agents as part of Automation rules.
      • Bitbucket-only(?) features include auto-generating deployment summaries as a starter for release notes.
      • A Rovo/GitHub Copilot extension is included in any Jira Premium or higher plan.
      • They’re building an Atlassian MCP server.
      • atlassian.com/rovo-dev

Additional Resources Linked:

Make AI Your Trusted Teammate

  • Melissa Miller
    • Rovo sits at the center of the “System of Work.”
    • Atlassian has built over 50 app connectors.
    • Prebuilt agents that can find and update work across Atlassian.
    • Atlassian-hosted LLMs coming soon.
  • Jamil Valliani
    • 71% of teams admit they aren’t fully maximizing AI.
    • Workers spend 25% of their time searching for answers.
    • Curated Search, different users get different results based on the Teamwork Graph.
    • Connector for Confluence Data Center is available today; Jira Data Center coming soon.
      • Ability to create your own connectors coming soon.
    • Rovo Chat:
      • “Secure AI teammate.”
      • Has a Deep Research function (Google Gemini?)
      • Browser extension and mobile app support with voice recognition.
    • Many out-of-the-box agents require no setup; partner-built agents are in the Marketplace.
  • Melissa Miller and Ronny Katzenberger
    • Ronny is Director of Engineering Enablement at Procore.
    • They’re investing in Atlassian as a platform, not just a single tool.
    • They’ve been an Atlassian customer for a while, so they have an “immense amount of data” that Rovo can tap into.
    • Rovo adoption spans all teams, not just engineering.
  • Jamil Valliani
    • Studio:
      • Develop Agents, Automations, Assets, Hubs, or start with Forge.
      • Use natural language or advanced code to support technical and non-technical users.
      • One Atlassian team saved “100 workdays per year” with a custom agent.
      • Showed a demo of creating an Automation with custom Agents that runs daily to analyze support tickets and create articles based on gaps in their KB.

Additional Resources Linked:

My Thoughts

  • The Page-Led Meetings experiment sounds really interesting, I’ll definitely suggest implementing that the next opportunity I get to do so.
  • Having worked at companies where no one was on the same page, each team doing things differently, changing how they plan work every 6 months when a new director or executive comes in, documentation and SOPs treated as second thoughts, I’m excited that some of these announcements (from standardized project briefs to Page-Led Meetings and Rovo AI agents) could give concrete tools to enforce consistent processes and make documentation something that people don’t just ignore.
  • As someone who’s always been equal parts excited by the potential that AI can bring but also highly cynical of everyone just trying to shove it into everything to keep up with the hype, I’m pretty impressed by how far Rovo has come along and how it’s a product that actually seems to make sense, not just a gimmick.

Part 3 Coming Soon