Megan Cook

Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira)

Source 2102024-02-0414,863 words

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Opening

Megan Cook (00:00:00): What we put into place is something we call Fight Club. I'll probably get in trouble for talking about Fight Club. The first rule is you don't talk about Fight Club. But it's 30 minutes every week, and it's just for myself, my engineering, and my design leader; and we get together, and we know that we're going there to have a conflict. Megan Cook (00:00:18): I think often when there's difficult conversations, or those conflicts come up, you can put them off until they become much bigger....

The opener names the listener's problem first, then makes the guest useful to that problem.

Accept praise cleanly

Really good idea and something anyone can do. Megan Cook (00:10:24): Yeah, thank you. Lenny (00:10:26): Great. Okay, you have a second idea? Megan Cook (00:10:29): Yeah. One of the other...

Accepts praise without shrinking from it or turning it into a performance.

Name the work

value, add value to the product, but if the customer aren't satisfied with what you built, or in our case we found that one of the core reasons was the usability, it wasn't where it needed to be. Then we...

Names a concrete strength, artifact, or contribution instead of offering generic praise.

Low-ego framing

almost on different skill sets, helping people level up in say craft or I don't know, communication or writing or something like that. And then who teaches these things? Is it like individual team...

Uses we/us, uncertainty, or learner framing instead of performing authority.

Accept praise cleanly

Lenny (01:20:37): Awesome. Megan, thank you so much for being here. Megan Cook (01:20:40): Thank you, Lenny. It's been fun. Lenny (01:20:42): Same. Bye...

Accepts praise without shrinking from it or turning it into a performance.

Ending

Megan Cook (01:19:55): The best place to find me is on LinkedIn. I'm Megan Cook on LinkedIn. You can also find me if you're a customer in the Atlassian community, if you want to have a chat. And I'm also on social media, so on X, you can find me there as well. And be useful to me. Look, any feedback, absolutely any feedback on Jira software, always hungry for that....

The ending stays curious after the formal conversation is almost done.