What did we talk about?
- Cloud app promo codes are now generally available
- Team Central Walkthrough: Creating and Updating
- Unstoppable Together: The Tempo Hackathon
- New feature: ⏰ Schedule now, publish later in Confluence
- Atlassian made it to 100 Best Companies to Work For by Fortune.com
- Atlassian Team'21 platform is now open!
- Atlassian Announces Preliminary Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2021 Financial Results
- Article of the week: Does transparency at work boost creativity? HubSpot thinks so
Watch the video here 👇
Full Transcript
[Nikki] Good morning. I'm Nikki...
[Biro] ...and I'm Biro. Good morning.
[Nikki] And this is a Monday coffee with Jexo where every scan through last week's news and updates from across the Atlassian's world. I have a special guest with me today, Peanut our Chief Cuteness Officer. And links for the sources of the topics we are going to discuss today are linked in the description.
[Biro] We're starting today on a very exciting note. At least for me, this is exciting news because Atlassian just launched the cloud app promo codes!
And for me, it's a very exciting topic because of the flexibility this brings to your customer acquisition as an application marketplace partner, as well as all the onboarding side of things. Because you can now generate, for example, a code of let's say a hundred percent discount for three months. If let's say a customer needs more time to evaluate.
[Biro] And I think at least on our end, and I think a lot of marketplace partners will know it happens quite often that potential customer does not finalize their evaluation period in 30 days. And usually what I used to happen was we've had absolutely no control over that end and we there's nothing we can do after the 30 days trial to extend customers trial. So that's really, really exciting.
A few other things that I've kind of quickly just scan through the feature in our marketplace. When you create a promo campaign, you can see a nice table where it shows you, if you apply 20% discount, what it actually means for every single user license tier you have, which is pretty neat. You can also set time-based limits. So for example, you can specify when the code expires, but also for how long a customer can use the code.
[Biro] And in each of these promo campaigns, you also have a list of codes and the customer that use the campaign, the user tier that they're on and so on, which is useful information. The post here on the screen and in the link goes into detail more about the use cases for which you would use these discount codes and provides a few other resources that you can go through to understand them better. So exciting news. We're we're going to put this feature to good use and I hope that everyone in the community will take advantage and find this as a very positive release.
[Nikki] It definitely sounds like a lot of great features for the first initial launch of this, of this feature.
[Biro] It does feel like a complete... I don't know, I've never seen the Server discounts and how that works, but it does feel like a pretty mature release and at least for me, I can't think of anything that is missing. Maybe others that have more experience with discount codes would say, well it doesn't have this and that yet...
[Nikki] I was just expecting to get something like a promo code with the expiration and that's it. Nothing else.
[Biro] Yeah, you have like a four step process where the last one is the validation and stuff, but it is quite a nice piece of tool.
[Nikki] So to the next news and for a change from the user community. So in the Atlassian user community, I discovered this useful video walkthrough of Team Central software. For the ones who don't know what the Team Central is, it's a project reporting tool where you can save your project status updates and set and track your goals.
So it was basically built to easily share status reports. In this five minutes walkthrough you will learn how to set up the tool, goals and projects. And of course you will see how the toll itself looks like if you didn't install it already. And if you are looking for a way to easily share project status reports, then you can go to the Atlassians Point A website, we were talking about it last week, and register for Team Central and get started. And I think it's good to mention that the tool is free for everyone while it's still in beta.
[Biro] Yeah. We, we got to play with it for a bit very, very early on. We were part of the, I think it was alpha program or something like that. Very useful. I'm not sure I've not looked at it recently but I want to explore it more when there's a tighter integration with Jira.
[Nikki] It now sits in our Jira instance. I was actually installing it last week when I was trying it for the morning presentation. So you basically still have a goals there. It looks very similar to the initial release, but I think there's that automated reporting project part, which we didn't use in the alpha.
[Biro] Right. I'm very curious to give it another shot and see and see how that works out. [Biro] All right. Next up the Tempo hackathon! I'm so excited about these kinds of things because it just signals the community maturing and moving forward. This is a great initiative from tempo and I really applaud over there for organizing it. We really need more partner-led initiatives like this that are focused on the developer community. So I was really excited when I heard about this hackathon. This hackathon is held on 28th of April 2021. And it does seem sold out.
[Biro] So you might not have a chance to participate. But I'll just go and inquire. Look at the post, look at the page and maybe inquire with Tempo. If you can still register for it. I think they had over a hundred registrations which is mind blowing to think about it, given that it's, I think, their first public hackathon. It just shows that the need for these type of initiatives is quite high. The topic of the hackathon are around Jira and Tempo automation, integration, but also touches on machine learning. Everyone is invited to join the hackathon. You don't have to have specific traits to put it like that. And the total price pool is $2,500. Really cool initiative again. Well done. I think this kind of motivates us to think of similar events that we can tailor for the developer community moving forward. So yeah, well done Tempo for pioneering these kinds of events for all of us.
[Nikki] It's quite impressive to be sold out just in a week when they announced. I think they announced it last week, so we didn't even manage to mention in time.
[Biro] Well, I can see on the screen, it says 236 people attending. So more than more over 200.
[Nikki] That's pretty cool. Let me move to next one. There is a new exciting feature coming to Confluence and it's publishing functionality. So if this feature, as the name suggest, you will be able to schedule when you would like your Confluence page or blog to be published and you can choose the exact time and the date of the publish. It's really handy for example, when you are using Confluence as blog or documentation, and you have some kind of content calendar that you follow. So I will definitely use this feature as well for myself when updating the documentation, when we have some new releases and features. So I don't need to come back and I always forget to publish, and then Biro needs to chase me 😁. If you can't see the schedule button in your Conference yet, then don't worry, the changes are rolled out gradually and it will be there soon.
[Biro] This is a really interesting feature. And I think is going to open up to a lot of possibilities and a lot of implementations of different kinds. So I'm pretty sure we're going to see stories of this feature in implementations in ways that we wouldn't even think about, to be honest.
[Nikki] Yeah. I can see Carlos already commented under this post. He actually has a blog and he's managing it in Confluence about Jira. And I think he's translating the articles and talking about the Atlassian tools in Italian, I think.
[Biro] That's useful for that as well. You know if you're using it as a blog platform, that's very useful.
[Biro] And topic is about Atlassian and Fortune magazine that went up the polls. So I was reading the other week, another piece of article where Atlassian has announced that it is now a distributed first company. And I don't think that comes as a surprise or news to a lot of people. Atlassian has been vocal about a post pandemic and during the pandemic, allowing their employees to choose whether they want to work from home permanently, part-time or work from the office and such. I think this is an expected move for them to move to preferred option being, working distributed, working remotely. I think this major change in work culture during and post the pandemic seems to have had a very positive impact in the organization. Fortune magazine took note of this and seems like Atlassian has now made it in the top 100 best companies to work for. I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of other reasons, but I think the distributed remote culture was the focus of that. So well done Atlassian if you're looking for a role yeah. I recommend that Atlassian as a workplace.
[Nikki] I think it's quite interesting to highlight the remote work. Now when it seems like everyone's fed up with that and wants to go back to the office. But when you think about it, when we go back to normal. I remember when I was working from home, I actually liked it because it was less stressful for me. And then I could just go out with my friends afterwards. I think that's the big difference to meet people after your work hours as well.
[Biro] It's interesting because, I think, there's a split. And I think that the article that I was looking at was that a very low percentage of Atlassian employees when asked if they were excited to get back to the office. So clearly there is at least in the Atlassian organization, but I'm pretty sure because they're such a big company it's kind of reflective on the general trend in the work place where people are starting to prefer a remote and a flexible way of working more rather than a nine to five in the office? But that's not for everyone. And I kind of agree with you as I'm an office type of person. I like the buzz of the office and being around people.
[Nikki] There is a comment from Linkedin.
[Biro] All right. "The scheduled conference post is a game changer." Yeah, I agree. We don't give it enough credit but It's a big thing.
[Nikki] I think it's going to help a lot.
[Biro] Thank you for the comment. Really appreciate it!
[Nikki] So this one is going to be really quick. Atlassian Team'21, if you don't know is starting in only eight days and because we are getting really close to the start day of the event, the Team platform is now open and you can login and plan your events, see the whole lineup, browse through the sessions and select in which you are interested in. There was really a lot of sessions to choose from. So I think it will be really interesting event and we will learn something new. You can see here, I'm looking at my account. And you can plan your basically your list of the event here.
[Biro] I think they're putting a bit more effort. I looks like it is a completely different platform from what they used last year for the Summit. And I think they put a bit more thought into it because last year there was heaps of problems from technical crashes, but also with how the sessions were conducted.
[Nikki] Well but they did it in like month or two..the whole thing!
[Biro] They have to adapt in such. I'm not putting the blame on Atlassian.
[Biro] So we'll move on to the next topic. We have some news from the post from Business wire.
[Biro] So Atlassian released the third quarter preliminary financial results. Now to be clear, the quarterly report is not out yet. It's scheduled to go out on 29th of this month. This is just a preliminary overview we will for sure cover the, the financial report in our future, Monday coffee with Jexo. And we'll probably have a special guest on the stream to dissect that report a bit better.
But this article from Business wire talks about the revenue projected for the quarter. What impacted the growth. Like for example, the spike in Server sales pre-stoppage of all new server licensing and a few other headlines. The post also shares details on when and where the report will be published, including the live investor relations webcast.
[Nikki] I'm really curious the actual report. So you said in 10 days, right?
[Nikki] So the last one on our list is an article of the week. And this time it's an article from Atlassian blog with a title "Does transparency at work boost creativity? HubSpot this so..." So this one definitely caught my eye because recently I wrote an article about creative thinking on our own block and Jexo.
So as the title suggests, HubSpot is betting on transparency and sharing the business priorities, but also with his business not focusing on and why with everyone in the company. But I guess we are all curious how they are doing this with so many employees on board, because that must be crazy. But the solution is actually quite simple. They use blogs in Confluence, (maybe they will make use of the new schedule functionality) where the executive team posts updates quite often and were employees share their feedback in comments under these posts.
So they get this real time engagement and feedback on all the news around the company. And this way everyone can engage early on and share their opinions. There is also an example where HubSpot goes really, really brave. They were continuing to share the financials and monthly sales with everyone in the company, even when they were preparing to go public and after. But they said it was good because it gave everyone context in their day-to-day job.
The final thoughts on the approach, in general HubSpot team says the transparency and look smarter, more strategic innovation and helps their employees take ownership of their own decisions and who wouldn't like that 🤓
[Biro] Well we do that as well. So we are internally fully transparent. There's no piece of information that's a secret to our employees from a financial point of view and such. You know, we're not doing it like this. We have more of a verbal discussions once a month, but I do feel that's the way forward. I think it motivates, inspires everyone in the team to know how healthy the company is and how things are going in general.
[Nikki] Yeah. So HubsPot gets a 95% of people logging into the Confluence. So now 95% of their employees look in and read this blogs in case someone is skeptical that no one would read that. But also in a small companies, it's really easy to share. There is a space to share. And when you have like 10, 20, 50 employees, it's quite easy to sit down with everyone and get them on board with everything what's going on in the company.
But this was really, really interesting approach of a really huge company. And that they're doing it as a startups basically.
[Biro] To be honest there's a threshold when the team is at a certain size where these like monthly company updates might not be as effective. And I've seen it in the past where reaching a certain number of employees, you see people in these monthly updates kind of like drifting or not taking on the information, that much that well, because your messaging also starts tailoring to wider audience and such.
So I guess there's a threshold on where you can start using something like this. Like a Confluence page where you can actually write down your updates. You can try it very early on as well if you prefer more written type of communication.
[Nikki] It might be good with really remote teams. When you can't get everyone on the call, then you just write the blogs and message under them. I think that might be good also for the people with the different schedules or who can't go on the call in the exact time.
[Biro] Very, very true.
[Biro] All right. So that's kind of it for this week. There was actually quite a lot still beneath this, but we only have time for what we have time.
I hope you enjoyed the Monday coffee with Jexo, whether you're watching it live or the recording afterwards. Just a reminder, the links of everything that we've talked about are in the description either below or wherever you are on the platform. If you have any suggestions on what we should talk about next week, let us know in the comments. We'll see all of you who are watching next Monday at 9.30 am.
[Nikki] See you next week. Bye bye👋