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Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery)16 June 2024

Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian

8Frameworks
15Insights

Episode overview

Tanguy Crusson draws on a decade at Atlassian and work on HipChat, Stride, Statuspage, and Jira Product Discovery to explain why new products struggle inside successful companies. He contrasts failed bets and difficult acquisitions with Jira Product Discovery's path through Atlassian's Point A incubator, where explicit stages, protected autonomy, and Lighthouse users enabled sustained learning. The discussion emphasizes validating assumptions early, resisting competitive myopia, communicating visible momentum, and adapting mature-company processes to the uncertainty of zero-to-one work.

Key ideas

  • Successful companies must validate whether an established distribution playbook actually transfers to a new user segment.
  • Rewriting a successful product while simultaneously creating shared platform infrastructure can destroy speed and focus.
  • Acquisitions are people-and-culture integrations as much as product or technology integrations, and usually slow down before accelerating.
  • A zero-to-one business case needs a compelling “why now,” not merely a large opportunity.
  • Point A protected early bets through four shared stages—Wonder, Explore, Make, and Impact—with evidence-based gates between them.
  • Framing failure as the likely outcome helped Jira Product Discovery preserve scarcity, autonomy, and permission to run disposable experiments.
  • Lighthouse users created a staged 10-to-100-to-1,000 learning funnel and put engineers in direct contact with customer problems.
  • Frequent internal updates combining data, product demos, and short customer clips built trust and made the team's momentum visible.

Transcript available · source text is retained privately and is not published

Frameworks in this episode

Leadership3 steps

Failure-as-Default Framing to Create Startup Scarcity

Openly declaring a new bet will most likely fail buys the autonomy and speed a big company otherwise smothers

Read →
Innovation3 steps

Incubate-Iterate-Integrate for Innovating Inside a Mature Product

Build the new experience beside your core product, perfect it, then fold it back in — so you don't break existing customers

Read →
Communication3 steps

Keep the Flame Alive: The High-Speed-Train Comms Cadence

Weekly bite-sized, honest updates and 3-minute customer snippets build momentum no one wants to step in front of

Read →
Strategy3 steps

Rewrite vs. Restart: The Plane Decision

Never rewrite a live product with a big customer base; do shut down a small-traction acquisition and rebuild it

Read →
Influence3 steps

Spending Chips: Breaking Rules Without Breaking Trust

Treat accumulated social capital as chips you deliberately spend to break the specific rules that block a new bet

Read →
Strategy3 steps

The Lighthouse Users Program (10 → 100 → 1,000)

Deliberately serve a tiny, named set of customers through defined stages instead of chasing MAU too early

Read →
Communication3 steps

The 'Why Now' Perishability Test for Internal Pitches

A good business case that lacks a strong 'why now' trigger gets parked; make the opportunity feel perishable

Read →
Innovation4 steps

The Wonder-Explore-Make-Impact Incubation Gate

A four-stage vocabulary with 6-pager gates that lets a big company incubate new bets without prematurely scaling them

Read →

People & resources mentioned

Attributed to the moment in the episode. Timestamps are approximate.

People · 3

  • Lenny RachitskyMentionstoday we've got another very special compilation episode something I've been pulling on more and more with the podcast and the newsletter

    “Thank you very much for welcoming me here Lenny”

    ▶ Watch at ~2:00approx.
  • Mahika KapoorMentionsone of her superpowers and wellink to her episode is that she is designer engineer PM

    “this reminds me of my chat with Mahika who does similar work at Figma”

    ▶ Watch at ~51:30approx.
  • Noah WeissCoinedNoah is Chief product officer at slack where he spent the last seven years

    “I came across an article from Ben way no sorry Noah way”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:18:00approx.

Resources · 31

  • Jira Product DiscoveryMentionssoftware · Atlassian

    “Jira Product Discovery which is one of the fastest growing products in Atlassian history”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:00approx.
  • AtlassianMentionscompany

    “trying to innovate and build zero to one at a large company like Atlassian”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:00approx.
  • Point AMentionsother · Atlassian

    “their internal incubation program called Point A”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:30approx.
  • ZanzibarCoinedsoftware · Google

    “a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar which was originally designed for Google”

    ▶ Watch at ~6:00approx.
  • GoogleCoinedcompany · Google

    “Zanzibar which was originally designed for Google”

    ▶ Watch at ~6:00approx.
  • Google DocsMentionssoftware · Google

    “to power Google Docs and YouTube”

    ▶ Watch at ~6:00approx.
  • YouTubeMentionswebsite · Google

    “to power Google Docs and YouTube”

    ▶ Watch at ~6:00approx.
  • HipChatRecommendssoftware · Atlassian

    “I loved HipChat I was a huge user of HipChat at my startup back in the day”

    ▶ Watch at ~13:00approx.
  • SlackMentionssoftware · Slack Technologies

    “Slack came out of nowhere”

    ▶ Watch at ~15:00approx.
  • The New York TimesMentionscompany · The New York Times Company

    “Slack put an ad in the I think it was the New York Times”

    ▶ Watch at ~17:00approx.
  • Microsoft TeamsMentionssoftware · Microsoft

    “Microsoft launched Teams”

    ▶ Watch at ~17:00approx.
  • MicrosoftMentionscompany · Bill Gates and Paul Allen

    “it was like Microsoft distribution advantage”

    ▶ Watch at ~17:00approx.
  • JiraUsessoftware · Atlassian

    “people use Jira to plan and track work when it's committed”

    ▶ Watch at ~26:30approx.
  • TwitterMentionswebsite · Twitter

    “everyone on Twitter was always loving them”

    ▶ Watch at ~28:30approx.
  • ConfluenceMentionssoftware · Atlassian

    “it's a Confluence editor with everything that you can do there”

    ▶ Watch at ~32:00approx.
  • Transparent UptimeCoinedwebsite · Lenny Rachitsky

    “I started a blog called Transparent Uptime”

    ▶ Watch at ~37:30approx.
  • FranceMentionsplace

    “I'm based in France”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:12:30approx.
  • SydneyMentionsplace

    “they were operating from the mothership in Sydney”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:15:00approx.
  • ReforgeCoinedcompany · Brian Balfour

    “something I read from a slide from Reforge that talk about the safety funnel”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:21:00approx.
  • Safety FunnelCoinedother · Reforge

    “someone in Reforge put the name on safety funnel”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:22:00approx.
  • IPCC reportsMentionspaper · Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

    “every time we read an IPCC report”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:27:00approx.
  • ZoomUsessoftware · Zoom Video Communications

    “we met meet on Zoom we chat we work with the same ones over months”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:28:00approx.
  • AtlasUsessoftware · Atlassian

    “we've got this product internally called Atlas which have a project on Atlas”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:31:30approx.
  • EuropeMentionsplace

    “it's story of a Syrian refugee moving out of Syria trying to move into Europe”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:42:30approx.
  • Mediterranean SeaMentionsplace

    “people trying to cross the Med Sea”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:42:30approx.
  • Who: The A Method for HiringRecommendsbook

    “A Method for Hiring is basically a book about how to do the thing that I for a while was really bad at”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:42:30approx.
  • Hakim's OdysseyRecommendsbook

    “I highly recommend reading Hakim's Odyssey”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:42:30approx.
  • SyriaMentionsplace

    “it's story of a Syrian refugee moving out of Syria trying to move into Europe”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:42:30approx.
  • Statue of LibertyMentionsplace

    “I'm trying to imagine what that is like compared to like a Statue of Liberty”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:50:00approx.
  • Boeing 737Mentionsproduct · Boeing

    “close to the length of a Boeing 737”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:51:30approx.
  • LinkedInUseswebsite · LinkedIn

    “you can find me on LinkedIn”

    ▶ Watch at ~1:52:30approx.

Spot an error or want something removed? Request a correction or removal.

Insights & moments

The myth-busts, hot takes, explainers, and tools worth keeping.

Hot Take· 4

Hot Take16:30

Never do a rewrite, and how that differs from shutting down to rebuild

Asked whether to rewrite a successful product, Tanguy's answer is a flat 'never.' Rewriting HipChat produced Stride, but by the time it shipped, Slack was miles ahead. He draws a sharp line between rewriting a live product for existing customers (rebuilding a plane mid-flight) and shutting down a small acquisition to rebuild it on your platform (just delaying takeoff).

  • Rewriting a product with hundreds of thousands of users while it runs is the trap
  • The HipChat rewrite became Stride, but launched too late to matter against Slack and Teams
  • Rebuilding a low-traction acquisition is fine, because you can shut it down first
  • The difference is whether customers already have expectations of the running product

“should you do rewrite should you not do rewrite uh you ask me now I tell you never”

Tanguy Crusson · 16:30

“it's not the same as trying to rebuild the plane midf flight it's delaying takeoff”

Tanguy Crusson · 47:30
#rewrites#engineering#product-decisions
Hot Take28:30

Ignore your competitors: you're only seeing the tip of their iceberg

Tanguy warns against 'competitive myopia,' the reflex to chase every feature a rival ships. Reacting to Slack feature-by-feature is what lost HipChat its edge. A competitor's shipped features are just the visible tip of an iceberg built on research and customer understanding from a year ago, so he now largely disconnects the creative and research process from what competitors do.

  • Reacting to each competitor move ('just one more feature') destroyed what made HipChat good
  • What a rival ships today reflects thinking from roughly a year ago
  • He now checks competitors only every few months for anything genuinely worrying
  • When a competitor announcement stirs the team, he re-anchors on recent user interviews

“competitive myopia don't fall for it”

Tanguy Crusson · 28:30

“we ended up reacting to whatever the competitor was doing which I think is really really bad”

Tanguy Crusson · 29:00
#competition#focus#strategy
Hot Take1:00:00

Tell everyone your new bet will probably fail

Tanguy's most strongly held principle for zero-to-one inside a big company is to frame failure as the most likely outcome. Positioning a bet as likely to die keeps the wider organization from swallowing it with process, so the team can hack together things that don't scale and test with customers. It's also honest stewardship: he doesn't want to pull 50 people into an unvalidated bet.

  • Framing a bet as likely to fail keeps other teams from imposing scaling processes early
  • It buys the autonomy to build throwaway components and test them with customers next week
  • It is partly a trick to keep the org away and partly respect for the company's money
  • The goal is to prove the bet is worth a 50-person investment before committing one

“failure is the most likely outcome and I will die on that hill”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:00:00

“whatever you're working on is not going to exist in six months we are trying to launch a new product enter a new market”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:00:30
#incubation#failure#autonomy
Hot Take1:40:30

Don't be the only sane person in the room, environments change you

Balancing his 'push hard' advice, Tanguy warns you can only do this work in an environment ready to welcome it. Having consulted for close to 50 companies, Atlassian was the first where he felt at home from day one. His caution: you are not immune to your surroundings, and it's okay to leave rather than become cynical; what's needed is autonomous leaders, not top-down leadership.

  • You can push for change only in an environment that is safe for it
  • Regulated, cynical environments can make you doubt your own ability and turn you cynical
  • You are permeable; the environment will change you as a person
  • The need is for autonomous leaders regardless of title, not top-down leadership

“you cannot be the only samee person in a room at some point you will go insane the environment will permeate on you”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:41:00

“I'm deeply convinced by the fact that we don't need so much topown leadership what we need is a lot of autonomous leaders”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:39:00
#career#culture#environment

Story· 4

Story13:30

The slack-before-Slack that Atlassian sold off (and the market cheered)

Tanguy walks through HipChat/Stride, Atlassian's early team-chat bet that predated Slack but lost the Enterprise Communications market. After years of obsessing over the product, Atlassian exited by selling HipChat and Stride to Slack. The gut-punch: the day the shutdown was announced, Atlassian's stock went up.

  • HipChat was a ~20-person acquisition with real traction, live before Slack existed
  • Slack came out of gaming, grew explosively, and pulled ahead while HipChat was left alone
  • Atlassian eventually sold HipChat and Stride to Slack and exited Enterprise Communications
  • The market rewarded the exit with a rising stock price, which stung the team personally

“it was noticed by the market in that as soon as we did that our stock price went up”

Tanguy Crusson · 18:00

“failure like everyone tells you failure is great because you learn so many things but failure to start with really sucks”

Tanguy Crusson · 18:30
#hipchat#slack#product-failure#atlassian
Story27:00

3,000 signups in two weeks, before a single line of code

For Jira Product Discovery, instead of building first and distributing through Jira, Tanguy tested demand up front. He put an ad in the Jira newsletter and stood up a landing page inviting PMs to join a waitlist. Within two weeks it drew more than 3,000 signups, validating both demand and reach before any code existed.

  • Ran an ad inside the Jira newsletter to a captive audience of PMs already using Jira
  • A pre-code website asked PMs to add their name to join the journey
  • Over 3,000 waitlist signups arrived in about two weeks
  • None of the tactics are revolutionary; it's asking the right question at the right time

“before we wrote a single line of code put an ad inside um J newsletter going hey we've got this thing for product managers coming…”

Tanguy Crusson · 27:00

“we got more than 3,000 signups to that waight list”

Tanguy Crusson · 27:30
#demand-validation#zero-to-one#jira-product-discovery
Story1:09:30

Spending your chips: breaking rules without breaking trust

To move like a startup inside Atlassian, Tanguy had to break established rules without losing the organization's trust. He describes years of accumulated social capital as 'chips' he decided to go all-in on for this bet. Practically, he ran without an engineering manager, did the eng leadership himself, and hired contractors so his team could sidestep rules built for the mature business.

  • Rules were built to support the business at its successful stage, not new bets
  • He staffed principal-level engineers with internal credit who could self-authorize
  • He deliberately had no engineering leader so he could break eng rules himself
  • Contractors weren't bound by rules like mandatory reliability-time allocations

“accumulating chips and those CHS are like Social Capital yeah it's like trust I've built with the founders with the different Business Leaders”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:10:00

“I decided not to have an engineering leader in the team and to do it myself so I was the product leader and the engineering…”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:11:30
#rule-breaking#social-capital#team-building
Story1:49:30

Ranked #4 in the world at free diving, and why you're more gifted than you think

Tanguy shares his claim to fame: ranked #4 worldwide in dynamic no-fins free diving (167m / 550ft), and a dive to 300 feet deep and back in one piece. Teaching weekend courses, he found that people who guess they can hold their breath 30 seconds and reach 5 meters typically manage two to three minutes and 20 meters by the end, thanks to physiological changes when we dive.

  • Ranked #4 worldwide the year he swam 167m (550ft) underwater without fins
  • Dived to about 300 feet deep, roughly a 90-meter descent, and returned safely
  • Beginners guessing 30 seconds and 5 meters often reach 2-3 minutes and 20 meters in a weekend
  • Diving triggers physiological changes that make us far more capable than expected

“I actually went to 300 fet underwater deep came back in one piece”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:50:00

“everyone is much more gifted at it than they think”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:50:30
#free-diving#human-potential#hobbies

Q&A· 1

Q&A1:44:30

The interview question that breaks people out of their script

Tanguy's favorite interview question, also from Scott Farquhar, is to ask a candidate for the name of a person they worked with, then ask what that person would say about them if you called. Candidates struggle to invent an outside perspective on the spot, so they drop the rehearsed version of themselves and briefly become real, revealing authenticity that's otherwise hard to reach.

  • Ask for the name of someone the candidate worked with, then what that person would say
  • People can't easily fabricate another person's view of them on the spot
  • It surfaces caveats like 'I was only leading part of it' or 'maybe don't call them'
  • The moment of authenticity is hard to get to with standard interview questions

“when I call this person after our call what do you think they're going to say about”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:44:30

“it's that part makes people all of a sudden go out of the scripted version they give of themselves and become more real for a…”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:45:30
#hiring#interviewing#questions

Tool· 1

Tool1:42:00

Tanguy's book recommendations: hiring, a refugee's odyssey, and farming

In the lightning round Tanguy recommends three books: a hiring/interviewing book that Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar gave him, the graphic novel Hakim's Odyssey about a Syrian refugee's journey to Europe, and a technical French book (Vivant) on a more sustainable agricultural system that replaces large monoculture with dense, pesticide-free polyculture on small plots.

  • A book on a method for hiring, recommended by co-founder Scott Farquhar, on interviewing well
  • Hakim's Odyssey, an illustrated true story of a Syrian refugee moving to Europe
  • Vivant (French, possibly untranslated), on efficient small-plot polyculture without pesticides
  • The farming research is backed by French research center INRIA but little known

“method for hiring is basically a book about how to do the thing that I for a while was really bad at which is try…”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:42:30
#books#hiring#recommendations

Takeaway· 5

Takeaway21:30

Your winning playbook is an unvalidated assumption

Atlassian's bottom-up playbook (devs adopt the tool, then it spreads to the business) was assumed to transfer to team chat. It didn't. Tanguy's lesson: success comes from an 'X,' but X is rarely validated, and teams wrongly assume the same X will keep working. Go back and explain why you actually won, then test whether that reason applies to the next bet.

  • Atlassian won by seeding tools with developers/IT who then evangelized to the business
  • Slack won the same bottom-up motion but with business users who cared about feel and emojis
  • Atlassian underestimated how different a new user segment really is
  • Whatever made you successful is an assumption; find ways to validate it before building on it

“the founders keep telling us like what took us here won't take us there”

Tanguy Crusson · 21:30

“it's very easy for teams when they see”

Tanguy Crusson · 21:30
#assumptions#product-market-fit#segments
Takeaway43:00

Acquisitions are mostly about people, not technology

From integrating Statuspage, Tanguy learned that buying a company to 'go faster' rarely goes as smoothly as expected. Startups hit culture shock as founders lose day-to-day control, teams get split into functional silos, and new processes feel parasitical. The hardest part is the people, not the tech, and mismatched tech stacks create a 'Franken stack' customers don't want.

  • Acquired founders suddenly stop owning decisions they used to make daily
  • Big-company planning horizons (multi-year) clash with a startup's 3-month roadmap
  • One-team startups get fragmented into product/eng/marketing/design silos
  • Treat an acquisition like hiring a team, not just buying a business or product

“Integrations are mostly about people they're not about technology as much”

Tanguy Crusson · 43:00

“we call that the Franken stack otherwise which is you you get one text tack here one text tack there”

Tanguy Crusson · 45:30
#acquisitions#integration#org-design
Takeaway50:00

Great work gets parked without a strong 'why now'

Tanguy pitched an IT-operations bet to every level of Atlassian and got encouragement but no decision for months, then gave up, only for the company to enter that market a year later. His lesson: a big company has endless good opportunities sitting on a shelf, so a business case needs a strong, articulated trigger for why it must happen now versus in a year or two.

  • Everyone was excited but no one said yes or no for months, leaving him in limbo
  • He misread the appetite and sense of urgency around the opportunity
  • Atlassian's abundance of opportunities means good ideas can simply be parked
  • The rationale for urgency must be built into the business case itself

“we need a very strong trigger for why now now to go after it”

Tanguy Crusson · 50:30

“was that I misread the appetite and sense of urgency around that topic”

Tanguy Crusson · 50:00
#why-now#prioritization#business-case
Takeaway1:26:30

Ten customers you know by name beat any research report

Tanguy argues that as products grow, teams start 'hiding behind research' and lose closeness to customers. Instead he puts the whole team, engineers included, in direct contact with about ten named customers over months. Like caring about climate change through one affected person, empathy with specific users drives the team to act, turning engineers into product engineers.

  • Formal research and surveys can become a way of hiding from real customers
  • The whole team meets the same ~10 customers on Zoom and Slack over months
  • Empathy with individuals, not aggregate data, is what makes people want to change the product
  • Any engineer can become a product engineer given the right user context

“what is it it's 10 customers you know by name you know their context you know their problems”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:28:30

“if I know someone that's impacted by climate change it's going to make me relate a lot more strongly to the concept of climate change”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:27:00
#customer-research#empathy#product-teams
Takeaway1:30:30

Build a high-speed train no one wants to get in front of

To protect an early 'ugly baby' product, Tanguy treats internal communication as everything. He posted weekly, bite-sized updates and demos, once even saving features to have something to show during a vacation week, to project constant momentum. Paired with honest data and personal customer stories, this sense of velocity discourages others from trying to stop or slow the bet.

  • Internal comms is the main job when protecting an early, unproven product
  • Weekly tweet-sized updates and demos on Atlassian's Atlas tool drew hundreds of subscribers
  • Three-minute customer snippets beat 30-minute research reports for internal buy-in
  • A visible high-speed train discourages people from getting in its way

“be very clear about what we're testing where we're in testing it doing that with data doing that with personal customer stories”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:31:00

“keeps moving it keeps moving you don't want to get in front of it”

Tanguy Crusson · 1:32:00
#internal-comms#momentum#stakeholders