How Atlassian connects its teams through one System of Work – achieving impact that would be impossible alone

Turning teamwork obstacles into opportunities

At Atlassian, we’re passionate about teamwork. We support 300,000+ customers across sectors – including over 80% of Fortune 500 companies - with industry-leading tools that fuel business success.

No matter the sector or size, our customers share common challenges in this modern world of work. Surveying 5,000 knowledge workers and 100 Fortune 500 executives for Atlassian’s State of Teams 2024 report, we found that “teams are busier than ever, but accomplishing less.” As the number of tools, data, and distributed teams are increasing, companies are noticing decreasing productivity, engagement, alignment, and time for focused work.

Seeing how common these challenges are, we decided to formalize the philosophy that has been guiding our approach to effective teamwork: the Atlassian System of Work.

A System of Work that brings technology and business teams together

Developed from supporting teams and over 20 years of teamwork research, the System of Work is a philosophy for how technology-driven organizations should work, connecting technology and business teams to accelerate progress and maximize team impact.

This System of Work has a few key principles. Successful teams work together to:

🎯 Align work to goals: Calibrating expectations and progress against a common understanding of outcomes and progress.

🗂️ Plan and track work: Ensuring that everyone, from leaders to individual contributors, understand where key projects are today and what’s next.

💡 Unleash knowledge: Keeping critical information flowing across and between key teams, so everyone can share context and find information more easily.

Forrester Consulting research shows organizations that collaborate effectively in this way see better results inside and out, “including more satisfied customers and employees, a greater ability to respond and innovate around customer needs, and more impressive revenue and growth results.”

However, despite agreeing collaboration is critical, the same Forrester Consulting research shows that barely 2% of the business and tech leaders surveyed feel their organization is effective at all three of these principles.

It’s time to evolve. The old ways of working don’t support the modern path to success. Atlassian is here to help with this shift and unleash the power of all teams.

One System of Work helps Atlassian's 12,000+ distributed employees move faster and deliver more value

Atlassian has built a enterprise-ready, scalable cloud platform and portfolio of teamwork products to help our customers implement the System of Work, allowing teams across industries to align their work to the right goals, plan work seamlessly and break down knowledge silos to drive collective impact.

From automotive, to consumer goods, to software, Atlassian customers across all kinds of technology-driven organizations are adopting the System of Work and reporting faster time to value, increased team success, and higher ROI.

And our internal teams live and breathe it too.

Here are just a few of the ways Atlassian puts its own products and practices to work, connecting 12,000+ employees across our worldwide organization to achieve impact that would be impossible alone.

🎯 Aligning work to goals

OUR PRACTICES

Growth starts with goals. At Atlassian, we set Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) at an organizational level, outlining both what we will accomplish and how we will reach our desired outcome. These OKRs then cascade down to all teams, who set team and individual goals that ladder back up to the top-level OKRs.

Atlassian leaders track progress throughout each month, then re-evaluate and refresh OKRs quarterly to ensure we’re solving the right problems in the right ways. Teams also align on what to deliver and milestones to meet in the upcoming quarter to accomplish each goal.

OUR PRODUCTS

Atlassian’s leadership tracks and documents top-level OKRs in the Atlassian goals app.

🗓️ SEE IT IN ACTION: SETTING AND TRACKING ANNUAL GOALS

At the beginning of fiscal year 2025 – as we do every year – our leadership team set organizational OKRs and documented them on Confluence pages, which include context about why decisions were made and how the goals cascade through the organization.

Then, teams linked their goals (more than 5,000 total!) and underlying projects to higher-level OKRs using the Atlassian goals app, ensuring individual work aligns with team work, and team work aligns with organizational work.

Throughout the year, teams share weekly or monthly updates on their projects in the goals app, which stakeholders “follow” to receive updates. This process facilitates easy cross-functional communication, helping everyone move in sync while reducing meetings for status updates and project tracking.

Everyone can see each other’s goals across all tools and on Atlassian Home. This dashboard pulls in work across Atlassian’s ecosystem of products and provides each employee with a personalized view of their own goals and progress, as well as how their individual goals ladder up to business goals.

🗂️ Planning and tracking work

OUR PRACTICES

Planning and tracking work at scale requires intentional, organized practices.

Annual plans and OKRs are shared across the company to ensure everyone is aware and aligned. Teams then set up projects to plan and track all project and product work.

Each department also has a service management process so that teams can request service or support from each other, such as submitting a bug or feature request to engineering, a question to HR, or a support ticket to IT.

Every step of the way, teams collaborate with each other to manage dependencies, share knowledge, move work forward, and iterate based on results and feedback.

OUR PRODUCTS

Atlassian’s roots are in project management for teams. While our products have expanded beyond project management, we still use a combination of tools called Teamwork Foundations, which are specifically built to strengthen collaboration and power all types of work.

All of our teams use:

• Confluence, our most widely used tool at Atlassian, which almost every employee (as well as contractors, partners, and vendors) uses daily for planning, documenting, and sharing knowledge

• Jira for project and product management

• Loom to share readouts of plans and goals with other teams and stakeholders, and for visibility into work without scheduling lots of meetings

• Rovo to scale the impact of projects and work with autonomous, specialized agents

Specialized teams also use:

• Jira Service Management for high-velocity service management

• Jira Product Discovery, Bitbucket, and Compass for world-class software development

🧱 SEE IT IN ACTION: DEVELOPING AND LAUNCHING THE NEW JIRA

At our flagship Team ‘24 event in front of thousands of people, Atlassian unveiled the next evolution of Jira: a shared place for every team to plan and track work.

Behind the scenes of that announcement was a herculean, cross-organizational sprint to merge two products. This initiative involved 150+ people across 20 teams and six time zones, who came together to plan, build, and launch the new Jira in just three months.Where did it take place? Naturally, on Jira.

• Seeing goals in Jira kept all teams – including executives – aligned, which helped bridge silos, ensure everyone clearly understood status, and reduce meetings.

• Teams used Jira Product Discovery to brainstorm and prioritize ideas, which were automatically pulled into Jira backlogs and sprints.

• With so much flexibility in Jira, people could work the way they wanted to. Software teams used agile practices and sprints, while marketing teams used a business plan and calendar, which all product, engineering, and sales teams could see.

• Confluence also came in handy for strategy development, launch plans, messaging, and documentation.

🤝 SEE IT IN ACTION: IT AND HR SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Atlassian’s business and tech teams collaborated across nearly 1.4M tickets and 1,100+ projects in Jira and Jira Service Management in fiscal year 2024. HR and IT are a perfect example. Using Jira Service Management augmented with AI-powered virtual service agents, these two departments collaborate to support our distributed workforce across the employee lifecycle, speed up response times, and free up time.

For example, employees can ask questions about company policies in Slack and get immediate responses from a virtual service agent, which also directs them to a relevant knowledge base article. For more detailed inquiries, they can request a private conversation. All interactions are tracked as requests in Jira Service Management, providing employees with visibility into anticipated response times while enabling HR to triage, track progress, and escalate issues as needed.

Atlassian’s main service desk for all things related to employment, which we call G’Day, receives an average of 3,500 queries per month across HR, facilities, finance, and legal departments. Virtual service agents are resolving 22% of requests and returning around 57 hours (~1.5 FTE) of capacity each week. Capabilities like these are enabling People Ops to handle an increasing volume of queries without adding headcount.

🛒 SEE IT IN ACTION: PROCUREMENT SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Whenever Atlassians need help on something - from building a presentation to buying toilet paper - we turn to one of 100+ business service desks for support. Our Procurement service desk, called “Shoplassian,” is a prime example.

Procurement partnered with Atlassian Corporate Engineering to create a service desk that combines several Atlassian tools:

• Jira Service Management for contract lifecycle management, third-party risk management, asset management, and automation

• Jira Product Discovery for capturing, prioritizing, and tracking cost optimization opportunities

• Atlassian Analytics as a dashboard to track cycle time, activities by supplier, and team activity

• Rovo agents are being developed to automate and accelerate tasks, including drafting contracts, spotting contract issues, and assessing risk

This solution has helped ten internal teams across the company collaborate to fulfill around 2,800 requests in the first year alone (and growing). Its agility, flexibility, and scalability supports Procurement as they manage increasing volume, complexity, and risk.

💡 Unleashing knowledge

OUR PRACTICES

Atlassian has always believed in open work. In fact, one of our core values is “Open company, no bullshit.”

We document everything, from daily notes to formal strategies, in a single source of truth so we all know where to go to find what we need. This helps us be more efficient and more effective.

Having knowledge is only so useful. To maximize the value of that knowledge, we must move from having that information, to sharing it, to taking action, to scaling its impact . We unleash our collective knowledge and bring ideas to life together by sharing written notes, videos, presentations, day-to-day conversations, meetings, training, playbooks, and more. Having easy access to this information reduces duplicative work and gives every employee a head start on their tasks, increasing productivity on an individual and global scale.

OUR PRODUCTS

Atlassians document, share, and grow our knowledge using Confluence, Rovo, and Loom, which are all part of our Teamwork Foundations collection of tools.

Confluence

All team members use Confluence as our connected workspace for collaboration and knowledge sharing. Employees created 800,000+ pages in fiscal year 2024 alone. Confluence spaces are open by design, with advanced permissions to keep information private when needed.

Rovo

Employees across Atlassian use out-of-the-box Rovo agents or build their own to serve as virtual teammates and help tackle specialized tasks. For example, teams have created agents to create meeting agendas, bulk update meta descriptions on hundreds of pages to improve SEO, craft PR and communications content in the Atlassian voice, and even assist with peer performance reviews.

Loom

As a distributed, global company with employees in 14 countries, we also need ways to communicate, collaborate, and find information asynchronously. For that, we turn to Loom video messaging. Atlassians create thousands of Loom videos every month to share updates and information with anywhere from one to thousands of people, participate in training, get support, document conversations for future reference, and more. We also use Loom AI to share out meeting recordings, notes, and action items from live meetings so everyone’s in the loop, even if they couldn’t attend.

🔄 SEE IT IN ACTION: PLANNING AND EXECUTING ATLASSIAN EVENTS

Pulling off a live event is the ultimate example of successful cross-team collaboration. From our flagship Team conference, to weekly roundtables and webinars, cross-functional teams work for months (and even years) to make every Atlassian event a seamless success for a multitude of stakeholders: attendees, staff, speakers, internal and external planning teams, media, and more.

Atlassian’s product, sales, and marketing teams, plus external agency partners, work together on more than 3,000 critical deliverables for hundreds of events every year. Even one dropped ball or misaligned goal can impact the entire experience. That’s why our Events teams use Atlassian tools to connect stakeholders and bring each event to life.

• Confluence is the always up-to-date source of knowledge and connected workspace for these teams. Stakeholders reference the Global Events Confluence space – easily searchable with AI – for everything from high-level strategies and playbooks, to detailed messaging guides, logistics, and instructions for on-the-ground staff.

• Loom videos provide essential event knowledge for internal event staff before the event. For example, “Know Before You Go” videos share event background information and details on staff expectations during the event. Additionally, Executive Forum attendees receive Loom videos in their event invitations to provide an overview of what to expect.

• The goals app helps planning teams stay focused on the purpose of each event and track weekly progress toward completion.

• Jira is the operating model to plan and track work, adhere to timelines, and help internal teams and multiple external agency partners stay in lockstep. (Marketers and business teams love Jira too!)

• Jira Service Management provides a one-stop-shop where attendees can go to get answers to their questions and responses to their requests, ensuring each person has a five-star experience.

• Rovo agents deliver answers to frequently asked questions from internal teams.

▶️ SEE IT IN ACTION: ASYNC COMMUNICATION WITH LOOM

Employees across Atlassian use Loom to reduce and improve meetings without sacrificing connection. In fact, we saved over 1 million meetings in the first two years of using Loom!

Atlassian President Anu Bharadwaj is a Loom power user who shares regular video updates with her teams and the whole company. Employees have watched and reacted to her videos thousands of times.

Loom not only helps with communicating from the top down, but also across teams. For example, one of our Jira teams has a Loom space to show quick demos of new features. A Slack integration pushes these new videos to Slack for stakeholders to see.

✨ SEE IT IN ACTION: SAVING TIME AND MAKING BETTER DECISIONS WITH ROVO

Rovo is transforming the way our teams search for information, make decisions, and do their work. For example, our users are already saving 1-2 hours each week with Rovo, which provides personalized answers and expert advice. That adds up to 50+ hours of time per person, per year, which goes toward more meaningful, value-added work.

Team members have also created more than 1,000 Rovo agents. Take the Customer360 Agent, which helps our teams and executives prepare for meetings with customers. Rather than spending hours (or even days) tracking down information across our internal databases, CRM, and Slack, Customer360 draws on multiple data sources to instantly answer questions like, “How have we interacted with this customer over the last 6 months?" and “What are the key projects and priorities this customer has been focused on?” and then turn that information into a briefing page in Confluence.

Centralization and connection enable teams inside and out

Atlassian is bringing our teams together with one System of Work as a solution to the enterprise collaboration and data sprawl challenges we’ve seen for more than 20 years. With this teamwork philosophy and the products to match, we’re not just surviving amid these common problems, but thriving.

“No organization can be effective when work is scattered across tools and information is stuck in siloes. By centralizing our teams with one System of Work using Atlassian’s AI-powered platform, our global, distributed workforce of 12,000+ employees are more aligned, successful, and efficient,” says Atlassian’s Head of Corporate Engineering, Tal Saraf. “The System of Work philosophy of business and technology teams collaborating on one platform, is an essential ingredient to achieving our mission of unleashing the potential of all teams.”