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[Nikki] Good morning. I'm Nikki...

[Biro] ...and I'm Biro.

[Nikki] And this is Monday coffee with Jexo where we scan through last week's news and updates from across the Atlassian world. The links for the sources of the topics we are going to discuss today are all linked in the description.

[Nikki] And the first topic we have today is the Atlassian community 2020 year review with some interesting numbers from Atlassian data analytic team.

[Nikki] An the beginning of the posts, they mentioned that the Atlassian domain was registered 20 years ago. That means that Atlassian is celebrating this month on 19 of March 20 birthday. So happy birthday Atlassian! 🎉

And also another interesting number is that the Atlassian community was launched four years, four years ago in 2017. And it has over 18 million people, community members who joined it, which is an insane number.

So now we can have a look at the little bit of few other numbers below. So the first, first one which we get is how many visitors the community had. So in total, it had 20 million visitors in 2020, and from that, 19 million were new visitors. When I was checking these numbers for last two years, because they are doing these reviews every year. It seems that every year you get 1 million users who were there the previous year, who are returning visitors.

[Nikki] So that number seems to be the same in the last three years, but there is always, a lot of people joining as new visitors every year. So these numbers remain quite similar. But what's increasing is the average daily visitor. So it seems that a lot of people are coming to the community more often. So that is increasing every year and this year Atlassian announced the Atlassian university program. So in early 2020, I think that trainings were for free. We had some team members of ours doing the training. And the most popular one was Jira basics, which took 67% of all courses that were taken. But the second most popular was Cloud migrations, which makes sense when we think of us and our last year announcing server decommissioning of the server.

[Nikki]  And from other interesting numbers, there were a lot of question views. The post that gets the most views in the community are questions, which was 70 million, which is crazy. But then I think about it when you search on Google for something, it always gives you the Atlassian community questions and answers, which is great, but you know, that's why you also maybe getting such huge numbers. And then from the topics that were created. Most of them were related to Cloud and then to Jira and then it's Server and everything else, which again, makes sense, given the recent events. And then at the bottom, there are some kudos to people who were most active, like Hana Kucerova et cetera. And they get a special badge, a special community 2020 badge for their activity.

[Biro] Those are some pretty impressive numbers, to be honest, but the one that's most shocking to me is the 20 years mark.... 20 years! 20 years ago, I was a teenager at school 😁

[Nikki] Yes. Well, I don't even know what I was doing...

[Biro] So go through the article. I think it's interesting and you know, fun numbers retrospectively to put it like that...

[Biro] All right. Next up we have a piece of the announcement. Basically, the fact that Data Center now supports multiple identity providers with one Data Center instance, if that makes sense. This is not out of the box under the shape of a free app on the Marketplace created by Atlassian. It means that if, for example, you have a scenario where your organization, internal teams use one ISP provider, but you also have external partners that use a different provider. You can now facilitate authentication for both at the same time. It actually comes as a surprise to me that this wasn't part of Data Center out of the box already thinking of the type of customers that use Data Center services. The thing is it from the comments section, I see that it only works with certain versions of the Data Center products.

[Biro] The latest version only works with Jira Data Center version 8.15 and four Confluence probably the same with the latest version. So you have to go through the versions section to really understand exactly what the features are available and for what version of your Data Center product it works. I would say if you want something that would work retrospectively with other older versions of Data Center, as well as have a bit more flexibility in terms of configuration and features, you should still look at some of the Marketplace apps and one that I can recommend (unbiasedly) is resolution single sign-on app. So you have options. That's what I'm saying. You have options if you feel that the current functionality in that's native, not so native is not for you.

[Nikki] So the next up, just to connect to the new releases for the Data Center. Now analytics for Confluence are a part of a Confluence Data Center, starting from again, version 7.11. And to put it quite simply, you can view the analytics reports across your organizations of your conference pages and spaces usage. And this should help you further organize and basically maintain your Confluence spaces. So you know what pages are most visited etc, and you can then take actions from there. This feature is already available on Cloud, and it's good to see these features coming also to Data Center. It looks quite simple, very similar to the Cloud version. So you get the chart of the activity of your Confluence pages, most active users and contributors and the spaces as well.

[Biro] That is pretty cool. I think it would be be actually very interesting to get something like this in Jira as well. Like this type of analytics. I feel that it would be useful to, I don't know, at least for me, maybe people don't find that useful. Maybe that's why they haven't introduced it yet. But it would be useful to see what, where teams spend most of their time while working with Jira, especially when you have teams that work with multiple projects, multiple types of tasks and things like that. [00:10:28]

[Nikki] So you can see who is spying on you 🕵️‍♂️

[Biro] Yeah, exactly. So I can spy on everyone 🤓

[Nikki] And everyone can know that you are doing it 😂

[Biro] Okay, let me just share my screen. All right so the next bit is actually a podcast that I found that was published last week on March 24th in the Harvard business review. It's a really interesting interview with Scott. And just to give you just a gist of a few of the topics of discussion in this podcast. Scott talks about the differences between him and Mike in culture and how they grew up starting Atlassian right after uni and not having to get a job and wear a suit like they put it. Also how starting a company earlier in life is better than later because you have less obligations. You can basically just eat sandwiches all day and not have to worry about it. You can bootstrap a lot better if you're younger than if you're in a later stage in your life.

[Biro] About how, how the first project with Jira and such and how they started that. About servicing larger customers and fake until you make it. Having multiple email addresses that go to the same person I think we can all relate to that. Another point selling their first piece of software and feeling guilty for charging for it. Like "why would anyone pay for this". Also fixing stuff quickly and being responsive early on, first investment decision and many more.

[Biro] And what I've just mentioned, it's in the first 10 minutes of the interview. The whole interview is 45 minutes so there's a lot of interesting stuff to listen to when you have that one hour available while you're doing stuff in the background.

[Biro] I think for me, it's always great to hear from Scott and Mike talk about their journey, crafting software into a business. You can't help to relate to their story. A lot of the stuff that I've listened to in, just the stuff that I've mentioned the first 10 minutes is it just feels like if some of the journeys that we've been through at Jexo and we are constantly going through as well. So yeah, very interesting podcasts - do listen, when you have a bit of time.

[Nikki] It's funny, you mentioned that they felt guilty to charge for the first piece of software. And why would someone pay for this? I think that if you don't have this type of feeling, then you launched too late, right? It's not the MVP anymore.

[Biro] We're the same, we launched Swanly when we got the first payment, I don't even remember, I think the first payment was like $30 or something like that. There was a $30 per month subscription, and I felt shocked that anyone would pay for our work and basically have that trust of, you know, subscribing to software that we created. So yeah, I can definitely relate to that.

[Nikki] It was a really good feeling. Yes...

[Nikki] Okay. Next up, we have an update on the Next-gen or the team managed project, if you want and customer feedback. So in this post, Eion, who is a product manager who takes care of the Next-gen projects, is trying to find a new way to close the loop with the customers who are giving feedback in a scalable way. So they came up with these quarterly updates on the main topics that were raised by the customers. When you think about it, and they really can't just go and update every customer in person via email. So they need to find some more scalable and better way how to do it. And these quarterly post posts might be the way to go. So in this post, again, we have a reminder that Classic and Next-gen projects are going to be soon changing the naming convention to team-managed and company-managed projects. And then we have their actual changes to the products which are grouped by the most received feedback, which is performance & efficiency, limited features and cross-team visibility.

[Nikki] So to the point of speed and efficiency, Atlassian significantly improved a lot of times of team managed projects, and they also introduced quick actions on the cards in Backlog and in the Kanban, which means that now you can, for example, change the status or assign the task to someone without even going to the ticket detail, which is pretty much the same, like a spreadsheet. And it's really nice and quick. I'm using that feature all the time... To all feedback about limited features Eoin was pointing out the changes to the workflows and the time estimations that were announced last week. Which is the Original time estimate field if you remember... But there are also some great features planned for the next period. And we should see the ability to reopen or delete the sprints, configure backlogs and Kanban cards to show fields. I think this is really interesting for us Biro because that's especially useful for Foxly where we are showing the priority score on, on Kanban cards and on the backlog. So that's going to be coming through to Next-gen in the next quarters.

[Biro] Yeah. I mean, god knows how many times we had to tell people "No, no Next-gen doesn't do that". If you really want to use that stick to the Classic. So we don't need to direct them to Classic anymore.

[Nikki] And then there's the last feedback category, a which is the cross-team visibility. And here Atlassian is planning to introduce the ability to schedule multiple sprints for one backlog board for one project, which is quite interesting. Then also the ability to see multiple projects on one boards. It's a similar feature that's on Classic and viewing issues from one project that his team-managed from another projects of any type. So that should be really good. For example, for linking. Using epics from a different project and linking them to your issues in our team-managed projects, etc. So this post is really nice roundup of what was delivered to the team-managed projects, and what's coming next in a few quarters and it looks like there are quite a few nice features planned.

[Biro] It's interesting because I was going through the comments of this it's a really good thing to have to exercise and habit to get into communicating this stuff [updates to feedback]. But looking through some of the comments, people are grateful for getting these updates. It still feels that Next-gen aka team-managed is still a sensitive topic given its limitations. And it does feel like people want a bit of acceleration on delivering some of the features that are missing from there. Well, and all this still shows significant progress. And I think that's also one thing that will be conveyed because at times we feel like there's not much progress, but most of the time, because it's not communicated in an aggregated manner over a certain period of time. So, you know, when you read this, you think, at least I think to myself, "Man, that's really moving, it's moving in the right direction". So I think it's a really good initiative.

[Nikki] And also if you have a lot of people who are extremely excited about something and a lot of people jumped into Next-gen projects, when they sold the roadmaps, etc, they were really excited about this. That's why you get all of this feedback and people knocking on your door and waiting for new features to come. But in the post, they also mentioned that the performance of Next-gen project and loading speeds, they improved them and there are 50% faster. When you think about that, that's crazy like doing such good performance fixes. It must taken them a lot of resources and time.

[Biro] Yeah, that's a very fair point.

[Biro] Next up, just a very quick mention the Atlassian stock last week dipped under 200 and not really 100% sure why this happened. I'm not an expert in the matter, but I just wanted to notify everyone. It did dip a lot more than in the weeks before and the weeks before it was higher, the month before was higher and such. But it's been a bit dropping in the last period. So it's currently the end of Q3, right? So we just finished Q3. You know, the Australian financial year has a different type of setup. But on Australian financial year just finished Q3, the awaited quarterly earnings and shareholders letter will probably help bump the stock back on an upward trajectory from my perspective. That's where it usually happens because it shows revenue growth, it shows the strategy for the future. So that tends to significantly impact the stock, the share numbers. I'm actually not sure when that's supposed to come out in the last quarter, it was on the 28th of January. So that's supposed to be January, February, March - so next month! At the end of next month, we should check out the shareholder letter and the earnings and all...

[Nikki] That's going to be some interesting news. I can't wait for that...

[Biro] Yeah, definitely. I've usually find jewels there in the wording and the strategy and such. So it should be an interesting read when it comes out.

[Nikki] Connecting the puzzles... [Biro] Connecting the puzzles, yes... So you always look at Atlassian's words and try to turn them around and on various sides and try to figure out what they actually mean by some of those taglines.

[Nikki] All right. And the last topic of today's morning coffee is the article of the week. And this time it's a Quiz: Have you mastered the fine art of speaking for yourself at work? So the content of this article is obviously a quiz you can take. It's a very short one, five questions. And as a result, you will see how well or not well you're doing in terms of communication and expressing yourself. And then there is a further read in the article below with some nice steps on how you can improve. [Nikki] So as you can see, I have done the quiz myself, scored 12, and there are still some things I should probably improve. And it gives me some tips over here on what I should be focusing on. So that's really nice.

[Biro] I think you're better than me. I scored 11, but I got the same tagline. "You're saying words, but you're not making connections." So it does seem like I need to work a bit on the understanding people part.

[Nikki] Yeah. There are always things to improve. I can see that also on myself. A lot of things...

[Biro] For me these quizzes are on a deeper level. They are very useful, engaging, but very useful because they kind of grounds you and helps you assess your approach. It makes you think.

[Biro] It makes you think, it makes you assess your approach into how you engage with others, how you collaborate, communicate, work. Because sometimes especially for some of us you get drowned in your own reality. And you don't really see the outside perspective, right? Not even the other person's perspective, but just the outside perspective. So it's really nice to be able to just even if it's a short silly quiz to put things into perspective for some of us.

[Biro] That's kind of it for this week. Thank you everyone who joined live, if not, hopefully, some of our connections, some of the folks that that were close to and following can watch this back. Hopefully, it's useful. I also want to mention, if you have any suggestions on how to improve these weekly streams do message me or Nikki. Also, if you have ever have topics that you want us to talk about, anything that's in the news or updates messages us well with that. We're more than happy to talk about it. Join us for a coffee every Monday morning at 9 am. So until next time, we wish you a lovely week and happy Monday!

[Nikki] Happy Monday!