>> Hi there. My name is Bree,
and I'm a product manager here at Atlassian.
Before we get into the topic of alignment at scale,
I'd love to start with a story.
So once upon a time,
there was a hapless product manager.
She led a bunch of super sharp, deeply engaged teams.
Everyone had the absolute best of intentions and they
wanted to deliver meaningful
customer value through their work.
They move really fast to do it,
but at times teams were
moving fast in the wrong direction.
Our product manager felt like she was running
around saying the same things over and over.
She felt like she wasn't getting through.
She was getting pretty frustrated.
So what was going wrong?
Hi, I'm the product manager. It's me.
The problem was that these priorities were documented
in places that aren't
really top of mind on a day to day basis.
There were presentations that I
agonized over and I did in town halls.
There was super detailed, full of analysis,
confluence pages that I'd written up and
I'd shared and I'd made looms,
and I'd shared them in Slack.
And it wasn't wrong,
but it just wasn't enough.
Because people are going to people.
They forget, they've got busy lives,
they've got their own work to do.
I needed a way to make sure that
this super important context was also easy to find,
and well, just in everyone's face all the time.
So long story short,
goals are the secret source to
alignment up and down and across a company.
And this is probably not news to many of you.
But goals need to not only live on
a confluence page in a slide deck or in Loom recordings,
they need to be everywhere that people work.
Today I'll explain some of the tips and tricks to support
alignment at scale by
unlocking goals in your work stack,
and how you can use Atlas,
Jira Product Discovery and Jira Software
to make sure that your teams are all
on the same page about what's most
important for your customers and for your business.
You'll learn how to make goals
visible, including progress,
how to prioritize by goal,
and why your team should be
deeply involved in this process.
And lastly, how to make sure that
your team's precious efforts are being
spent on your highest priority work.
But before you can unlock goals in your work stack,
you've got to get some goals in place,
or at least pull them out of that slide deck
that you last updated a few quarters ago.
And before we talk about the how,
I want to share some of the common missteps
that we see when people are crafting goals.
The first is that goals are set in a vacuum.
They're done entirely by leadership.
And look, I'm a pragmatist,
this is often how it rolls.
But people are curious,
and when goals are set and handed down
with a little explanation or just a one off,
then there's not much for teams to work with,
to internalize and be inspired by.
It's such a huge missed opportunity.
Second, goals are focused on the output.
We need to try lots of things,
find out what works, and invest
more in the areas that show some promise.
Delivering a thing is not when the work ends,
it's actually when the work
starts and goals are not prioritized.
Tradeoffs are everywhere, and it's impossible
to make them when everything
appears as important as everything else.
So how do we do it differently?
First, make goals visible and accessible for everyone.
If we consider people to be the heart of an organization,
then goals are your heart beat
and what keeps them moving.
Keep that blood pumping and share your goals widely.
Goals should measure outcomes.
People are creative problem solvers.
Show them where you want to go,
instead of describing the path
one little stepping stone at a time.
lastly, when goals are prioritized,
teams can make their own trade off
decisions you don't even need to get involved.
They can move faster because there's
full context of what's
most important to be achieved, why?
In Atlas all of this is possible, capture and
codify your goals including relevant context owners,
and also the target date that you're shooting for.
We've got our goals they're
documented and they're living and breathing.
They're ready for us to now bring
into our decision making.
But what are we actually going to do?
We're going to capture ideas: the good
mediocre and downright terrible.
Do all through the lens of our goals.
Those who are working with
customers who are closest to the code base
or whatever the coal face means to
you have got some pretty wicked ideas.
Are your teams involved in this process,
leverage their knowledge also the context that you've
shared about why you've chosen the goals that you have?
When teams are inspired by the goal when they
understand it when they've been brought into the process,
you've just unlocked that next level of alignment.
In Jira Product Discovery ideas can be linked to a goal.
The linking while pretty simple,
is a really positive forcing function.
It encourages people to think through an idea.
How could it help the goal?
Is it just something cool that I've wanted to do
for a while or will it actually help?
How confident am I really?
Do I have any other data to already support my idea?
Every function should be welcome to
participate in this process if they want.
We've got our goals, we've
prioritized opportunities against the goals,
and teams are now really starting to
work together to bring these ideas to life.
Often, this is when things can really start to wobble.
Let's see how the final piece of
the puzzle, Jira Software,
can help to maintain alignment across
multiple teams even as
things start to get a little bit tricky.
It's at this point in time when work can really
start to disintegrate into team silos.
But when teams are working toward a shared goal,
or even contributing to the same piece of work,
then it's critical that progress, tradeoffs,
risks are all viewed through
the lens of the overall work to be done.
There's no time for,
but we've finished our part.
We want to turn this into teams thinking about how we
can help to get it all done together.
Using issue hierarchy to talk about
high level work items, initiatives,
Epics, features, whatever you want to call them,
it keeps teams on the same page.
Using plans in Jira Software Premium,
you can bring together the work of
many teams into a single view.
There's flexible levels of hierarchy,
the status of work can be visually elevated across teams.
As soon as you have a delivery plan though,
you can pretty much guarantee that it's
probably going to be out of date.
We know that dependency management
is cryptonite for most organizations.
Through the lens of your most important pieces of work,
a scope changes and the teams learn new things,
you can understand the knock on
effect of trade off decisions.
Then manage those dependencies before they become
an active risk to the outcome
that you're trying to drive.
We've covered how you can use goals, the secret source,
to drive alignment across
teams on what's most important for
your product strategy what you'll
prioritize, how you'll execute.
In reality though,
we know this is not a linear process, it's messy.
It actually looks a little bit more like this.
Even this is oversimplifying.
To close the loop,
there are a few more steps which are essential.
As your teams start to make
progress towards their goals,
executing towards them, there will be
things that go well and there
will be things that go less well.
Share these learnings liberally.
How's progress going towards your goal?
Share the wins you can do all of this in Atlas.
Most importantly though,
adapt your plan with these learnings in mind,
and then keep going.
I'd love for you to remember three thing,
goals are the secret source to unite
teams but you've got to share what they are,
the why behind them.
Empower teams closest to your customer to know
how to achieve the goal and prioritize work together.
As the work comes to life bus team silos
by visualizing and
tracking progress and risks
using hierarchy. Thank you very much.