We just completed our 7th annual user conference and it was bigger than ever! If you’re not familiar with Atlassian Summit, it’s a must-attend event whether you’re an admin, developer, product manager, or passionate user. A day before Summit, the Technical Account Management team hosted TAM Day. This is an exclusive event for customers in the TAM Program, where a full day is dedicated to discussions with product leadership around scaling and standardizing across different business teams. The day also provides a collaborative environment to meet and chat with other TAM customers from around the world.
So, what exactly is a TAM?
As Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO of Atlassian, discussed during Summit’s opening keynote, a TAM is one of Atlassian’s technical solutions offerings. TAMs are a single point of access across all of Atlassian, focused on providing our largest enterprise customers with prescriptive insights to optimize the way they use our products. A TAM helps customers maximize their gains in team productivity from their Atlassian investment by providing best practices on deployment of Atlassian solutions, optimizing processes and feature usage on the toolset, risk mitigation through operational reviews, and strategies for scale and availability.
Attendance for TAM Day nearly quadrupled from last year as more and more enterprises are finding value in the benefits of a TAM. The day provided a chance for customers to provide direct feedback to Atlassian’s product leaders on our strategic product direction, and speak with customers from other enterprise-level organizations about how they’ve successfully deployed Atlassian products at scale.
“TAM Day provided me with extremely useful and pertinent information. The access to Atlassian staff is invaluable. And talking with other TAM customers is great for hearing common issues and possible fixes.” –TAM Customer
3 Big takeaways from TAM Day at Summit:
1. Accelerating team efficiency through standardizing tools
Enterprise organizations often struggle with the issue of team silos, teams across the organization using different software vendors. This creates a blocker of transferrable information and data from team to team. The 65+ customers that attended TAM Day use Atlassian products – including Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo, and Hipchat – to keep their teams and management informed of progress at all stages throughout the development lifecycle. From engineering to marketing to operations, teams are standardizing on Atlassian to create a shared view of work product and delivery responsibilities across the organization.
2. Building an “innovation culture” through greater autonomy and visibility
Providing autonomy for teams and visibility across your enterprise organization is crucial when looking to create an innovation culture. Are your teams able to forecast realistic release dates so that they know when they can deliver? Are your teams able to make fast prioritization and tradeoff decisions? Our Principal Product Manager of Jira Portfolio, Martin Suntinger, asked these same questions during TAM Day. Using a tool like Jira Portfolio can help you build an innovation culture by providing visibility at enterprise scale.
3. Using ChatOps as the gateway to effective decisions between development and operations
Further automate the way your enterprise organization communicates by never having to leave Hipchat to be informed of updates. Hipchat is a rock solid communications tool, with enterprise grade features, and deep integrations. You can now completely embed other apps, like the software performance monitoring service New Relic, right into a chat channel in Hipchat. Adopting ChatOps and Hipchat will allow your developers to focus on what’s important….. development!
What’s the best thing to do after a day filled with discussions around building an innovation culture, standardizing across teams, and ChatOps? Enjoy some hors d’oeuvres, beer, wine and mingle with Chris Clarke, Enterprise Group Product Manager and Graham Carrick, Development Manager for Jira Enterprise that’s what!
