“Even before I got there, the company’s earliest mission is characterized as building remarkable products.
That feeds into what we’ve always tried to architect for, which is the durability of the business as a whole.”įor Atlassian, the core ingredient in the flywheel is product-led growth, an ethos that predates Simons. “Conversely, it’s hard to stop a flywheel - you can’t just grab onto it and bring it to a halt. But once you get it going, it’s going to move at a consistent pace, and there’s small things you can add to move it a bit faster,” says Simons. You typically can’t get it to accelerate fast because it takes so much to push it. “We gravitated to that metaphor early on because a flywheel is a big, heavy device that takes lots of energy to spin. In any conversation with Atlassian insiders, you’ll likely hear one word over and over again: flywheel. UNCONVENTIONAL MOVE #1: BUILD ON THE BACKBONE OF PRODUCT-LED GROWTH. There’s plenty of spot-on advice for go-to-market and revenue leaders, but also lessons for any company-builder on architecting a product and culture that’s rooted in first-principles thinking. He also dives into why the company relied on product-led growth before anyone coined the phrase, his theory on why HipChat lost to Slack, and the flywheels that fuel and reinforce the company’s up-and-to-the-right growth. In this exclusive interview, he gets incredibly tactical about each leg of Atlassian’s three-pronged stool: the self-service funnel, a global network of channel partners, and enterprise upselling.
Here on the Review, we’re big fans of folks who can think outside the box and sidestep conventional wisdom, and Simons is game to get deep in the weeds to unpack each of these atypical moves. It’s way easier to just rip the page out of the playbook and follow the script. We always began culturally with the question around, ‘Why is it done that way?’ I want to understand it first and maybe there’s room for not just incremental innovation, but real invention that can make a big difference for us,” says Simons.Ĭonstant willingness to reinvent the wheel takes a shit ton of courage and energy. “It was really rare for us to just do something that works somewhere else. Whether it’s the company’s genesis in Australia - far outside of Silicon Valley’s center of gravity - or the unusual dual-CEO leadership structure, or a second product launch in just their second year - it’s a growth story that doesn’t get nearly enough of the spotlight it deserves. If you turn over any stone on their path to scale, you’ll likely uncover something that bucks a trend. But in our conversation with Simons, we found that this wasn’t the only outlier in the company’s story. Most have heard about Atlassian’s storied lack of a traditional sales force.
Unconventional trello software#
Now, as a partner at Bond Capital and board member at Hubspot and Zapier, he’s got plenty of stories to tell about the unconventional moves that positioned Atlassian to become a global leader, with a suite of software collaboration tools like Jira, Confluence and Trello. He joined Atlassian back in 2008, and under his long tenure as president, the company grew from $20 million in AAR to about $2 billion today. The company has been humming along for 18 years, quietly shifting the ground underneath traditional tech companies.įor a large chunk of that journey, Jay Simons was in the center of the action. There are plenty of young, flashy startups that seem to be overnight successes, bursting onto the scene, grabbing headlines and growing at a break-neck pace - Atlassian isn’t one of those stories.
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