Feedback from Atlassian’s Team 22 Event – ‘Work Differently, Together!’

Team ’22 was Atlassian’s annual event to bring together leaders, product owners and partners from the Atlassian ecosystem. Taking place in Vegas, it was also held both virtually and at in-person viewing parties around the world, including London! It provided a great opportunity for us to find out what was new across the Atlassian portfolio, as well as finally meet our Atlassian partner manager in person for the first time 😊 Here are our key takeaways from the Team 22 keynote…

The initial keynote was largely dedicated to two new product announcements for the Atlassian portfolio:

• Atlas – ‘Make status update meetings a thing of the past’.
  Imagine a workplace where the frequent progress meetings were redundant. Just consider how much time of your calendar could be freed up! Atlassian aim to significantly reduce the number of recurring status update calls with their new product called Atlas – a teamwork directory tool that lets you know what people are working on, who they’re working with and why they’re working on it (via alignment to organisational goals). This product features several neat features such as an organisational directory showing who’s who and how they can help, through to the management of status updates, purposefully limited in size (think Tweet size), to make sure that updates are concise and, above all, useful. No more will key stakeholders have to ask ‘What’s happening with Project XYZ?’, the updates they need will be immediately available in a centralised, single source of the truth.
• Compass. ‘Mission control for your distributed software architecture’.
  Modern code is rarely built from scratch, more frequently it is assembled using a plethora of tools and micro services. In this environment it can be very hard to understand who owns the service, library, website, app or API that you need to use. Hence Compass was born, to help distributed software engineers quickly understand where they can find which services are available for use, what their dependencies are, where to go for help, and much more.

Of course there were also mentions of enhancements to the existing portfolio of tools. For example, in Confluence (Atlassian’s clever team workspace and collaboration tool) we now have the simplistic ability to automatically generate charts from embedded tables of data (rather than relying on other spreadsheet tools to do this for you). This makes the information much easier for your audience to consume. More significantly, Atlassian have now created a ‘presenter mode’ to provide a much cleaner way of, you guessed it, presenting your Confluence pages on team calls, removing all the distractions inherent in web browsers (tabs, menus, side panels etc). It also allows your team members to quickly navigate to the page you’re presenting (via a QR code) so that they can leave feedback and other comments in real-time on the corresponding confluence page . This is an excellent feature, simplifying the presentation of information and allowing everyone in your audience to have a voice and for their feedback to be heard – not just those that shout loudest whilst in the call!

In summary, enhancements to existing products are always welcomed, continuing to show Atlassian’s investment in their portfolio. Whereas the additional new products revealed Atlassian’s strong belief that you need to continue to allow people in your organisation to ‘Work Differently, Together’, recognising that (tool and process) specialism is often key to maintaining your differentiation, but by increasing visibility and enabling better collaboration, we can all get much more done!

The full key note can be seen here, alternatively if you’d like to find out more about Atlassian products and our complementary service offerings, don’t hesitate to get in touch.