Guest host Nick Polce, Business Agility Practice Lead at Accenture, speaks with Natalia Baryshnikova, GM and Head of Product, Enterprise Agility at Atlassian. Natalia discusses her role at Atlassian and her responsibilities in building strategy and products for customers. They talk about the tool Jira Align, originally Agilecraft, which helps companies connect strategy to execution. Natalia emphasizes the importance of bringing more flexibility to businesses to accommodate changing macroeconomic factors, and how enterprise agility can be obtained regardless of the size or structure of the organization. She also discusses the benefits of using Jira Align, including optimizing the flow of work and tracking the triangle of people, money, and work to drive strategic decision making. Natalia reveals that Atlassian is investing in roadmap capabilities, artificial intelligence, and strategic portfolio management to make better tools for executives and to break down data silos.
Guest host Nick Polce, Business Agility Practice Lead at Accenture, speaks with Natalia Baryshnikova, GM and Head of Product, Enterprise Agility at Atlassian. Natalia discusses her role at Atlassian and her responsibilities in building strategy and products for customers. They talk about the tool Jira Align, originally Agilecraft, which helps companies connect strategy to execution. Natalia emphasizes the importance of bringing more flexibility to businesses to accommodate changing macroeconomic factors, and how enterprise agility can be obtained regardless of the size or structure of the organization. She also discusses the benefits of using Jira Align, including optimizing the flow of work and tracking the triangle of people, money, and work to drive strategic decision making. Natalia reveals that Atlassian is investing in roadmap capabilities, artificial intelligence, and strategic portfolio management to make better tools for executives and to break down data silos. You can find out more about how Atlassian and Accenture are helping businesses succeed at scaling enterprise agility by surfing to our home page http://accenture.com/atlassian
Nick Polce: Hello and welcome to Scaling Enterprise Agility, a podcast brought to you by Accenture and Atlassian that's all about how businesses can be more adaptive and responsive to the ever increasing rate of change around us. I'm Nick Polce, your host and Business Agility Lead at Accenture. And it gives me great pleasure to welcome our next guest, Natalia Baryshnikova, GM and Head of Product Enterprise Agility at Atlassian. Welcome Natalia. It's so nice to have you with us today. How are you and how are you enjoying your visit to Australia?
Natalia Baryshikova: Hey Nick, thank you so much for having me here. It's an utter pleasure to be here, and I'm enjoying, the early spring in Sydney. Particularly the jacaranda trees around the city are absolutely gorgeous in their purple bloom. And I just figured out this morning there's apparently a jacaranda viewing trail. That you can go and just see the best bloom around the city. So that's what I'm hoping to do tomorrow morning.
Nick Polce: Awesome. And for those with hay fever, it's beautiful – but also it can be quite painful as well.
Natalia Baryshikova: Yeah, but it's, it's like everything, right? Like you have the pros and you have the cons. So I'm going to focus on the beauty.
Nick Polce: I love that. I love that. So you have a very interesting role title, GM and Head of Product, Enterprise Agility at Atlassian. How do you explain to your relatives, your friends about what you do?
Natalia Baryshikova: I run a business and I'm responsible for all things Enterprise Agility at Atlassian. It includes building the strategy and making sure that we build the right things for our customers. But it's also about really thinking ahead and figuring out what are our customers not asking for that we want to build. So thinking about strategy and how we're philosophically thinking about the market as Atlassian.
What's going to happen three, five, ten years down the road that we need to be prepared for. I also am heavily involved into all aspects of the business, right? And this is why I spend a lot of time with partners with customers, with the entire ecosystem of the enterprise agility and agile community because I care deeply about this space and evolving it in a way that advances impact that, you know, agile practices and enterprise agility have on the world.
Nick Polce: Yeah, lovely, love that. That's a great, great role and I'm sure that keeps you very busy. So obviously, very big remit. Atlassian's a software company at the end of the day. So you're looking at, you know software solutions to problems in conjunction with the broader kind of ways of working changes that unlock enterprise agility. What are some of the, you know, the tools out there that is under your remit for development and continuous improvement?
Natalia Baryshikova: You know, it, it reminded me when when you said Atlassian is a software company, it reminded me of this fairly famous business story when, John F. Kennedy, was visiting, NASA facilities and, you know, you know what I'm going to talk about…
Nick Polce: I know where we're going.
Natalia Baryshikova: Yeah, the launch site and,he was asking what people were doing and he asked the janitor, what are you doing? And he said, I'm sending people to the moon. And so, yes, Atlassian is a software company. But I don't think any of the Atlassian leaders or anyone really who works at Atlassian, thinks about ourselves as just a software company, so the mission of Atlassian is to unleash the potential of every team, and I really, really like to think about our impact on the world in that context. Well, NASA that I mentioned is a customer, you know, that sends, you know, missions to Mars and whatnot, and Atlassian powers that impact. So that's all about empowering the impact of others through helping them get there.
And enterprise agility is no different to that. We work with some of the largest customers of Atlassian. Even though we're really welcoming to customers that, you know, may not have the enterprise skill who want to practice enterprise agility because we believe that enterprise agility is not just for the true enterprises. And we see a lot of organizations that have a huge impact on the world that may be on, you know, the smaller side.
But ultimately it's not so much about,you know, what's the size of the organization. It's really how do we help them solve the problem of connecting strategy to execution with our tools such as Jira Align. And that's a problem that's really not exclusive to large enterprises, but it's something that we see a lot of organizations starting to struggle with at a certain size.
And therefore an opportunity to figure this out is a massive one. That I'm really excited to work on, and to make it my life.
Nick Polce: Yeah, awesome. That purpose motive is really important.
Natalia Baryshikova: Absolutely, so I'm that janitor who sends people to the moon.
Love that, love that. You mentioned Jira Align and that obviously is one of your cornerstone products in this enterprise agility space. Can you give the audience a bit of a background and history of the product for those that might be unfamiliar with it?
Natalia Baryshikova: Oh yeah, absolutely. So, Jira Align, was born as Agilecraft. And so it was an acquisition that Atlassian made in year 2019. The context of Jira Align is that it's a solution that really allows you to tie your work. That may have been in Jira software but it may have been in any other work tracking tools that you might have. And then connect that execution that,your teams are working on to strategy. And, it was a fantastic fit for the Atlassian portfolio because Atlassian story is also something about the evolution from just having Jira to then having Confluence to then having many different tools that really allow organizations to unleash the power of their team and, track work and help people understand work and,get better about planning and strategizing that work.
So naturally, Jira Align was a huge fit for the Atlassian portfolio, and that's why many Atlassian customers were very excited to adopt it. I think it still plays the role in the Atlassian portfolio overall of being that kind of umbrella and the, kind of the overview, and the big picture layer.
And I think that it's fair to say that it will continue playing that role.of course, as Atlassian goes, keep adding new tools and capabilities. But to me, the importance of Jira Align in the Atlassian world is to be that layer that helps you connect all the dots,no matter where your work is happening.
Nick Polce: Yep. No, that's fantastic. And, you know, the mission, unlock the power of every team - that applies from development teams all the way up to executive teams. And I suppose Jira Align is that fit, you know, that takes it beyond the team level to the enterprise and executives.
Natalia Baryshikova: Yeah, and it goes both ways, right? One of my favorite customers, from a large bank in the United States, he said it beautifully. He said, you know what, I care about the software developer on day one. Because we often think about strategy as, you know, top down. Or, you know. semi top down. You know, setting off the strategy, setting of the priorities, and then letting the team know and cascading down.
Those are the typical words that you hear when you talk about strategy and the distribution of strategy. However, strategy is also about empowering people and really making them believe in the company mission on day one. Because if you are an engineering software intern on day one, and so you are working on code and you want to know what are you working on and how does it connect to the bigger picture? So who are you sending to the moon?
And it's such a powerful way to frame it. Not to think about, yes, leadership needs to know what's going on within the organization and visibility. But rather say, hey, when a new person joins our team, we want them to be empowered and believe in what we're doing. And we don't just want it to be a kumbaya. We want them to know exactly how what they're doing, that piece of work ties up to the bigger strategy, and why does it matter? And I think that that's a very empowering part of connecting strategy to execution. Something that I've heard from quite a few Aussie customers here in Sydney. I think that that's another layer that makes my job so exciting.
Nick Polce: What are you seeing as the major customer pain points right now for organizations that are pursuing this enterprise agility agenda? And how does a tool like JIRA Align go some way in solving that for them.
Natalia Baryshikova: I think that leaders of organizations of all sizes - but especially large organizations - they care a lot about what is going on. But just to be able to see and to answer a very simple question that CEOs often ask: What are we doing? What are we working on as a company? It's not that simple. And then you ask the next question. Are we working on the right things? And that's also not easy to answer.
And then, then you ask, well, can we shift gears? Can we work on something else and can we figure out how we deprioritize things and prioritize something else? If we're changing our strategy, how do we make that happen and how do we make that happen quickly? And I believe that those are fairly simple questions. But getting answers to those questions is incredibly challenging and fundamentally I think that empowering teams especially on the leadership level, but also on all levels of the organizations get answers to those questions is the superpower of Jira Align.
And those are real pains when, you know, your CEO doesn't know what the company is working on which it may sound stupid, but it actually happens quite a lot. And so that's a huge pain point, right? Like, how can you steer a giant ship if you don't have any coordinates or any sort of location where you need to go and where you are. You can't.
And so that to me ultimately what the pain points that Jira Align solves are all about.
Nick Polce: And what have you seen as the reaction to that level of visibility and transparency from strategy through to delivery? Because, you know, the tool is a tool at the end of the day and there's a broader, you know, system of work that includes culture and process and all that kind of thing.
Nick Polce: Throwing a tool like Jira Align and getting that visibility. What have you seen as some reactions, you know, caused by that?
Natalia Baryshikova: It's not always easy andI think that you bring up a really, really important point that it's as much about the change of culture, the change of rituals, practices – as it is about tooling. And people often overlook that layer of change. And it always comes back and, you know, hits them right in the back, because the reaction that customers get sometimes when they're trying to roll out something like that is: Hey, do you mean that my work and the progress of my work will be visible to my leadership?
I don't want that. I just want to, you know, yeah, work on something in silo and just, you know, like, leave me alone. Right? But that is fundamentally a very, very challenging problem to solve. Arguably, even more challenging than the technology problem around this. That's why I admire our customers so much because they're solving this fundamentally human problem that cannot be easily solved with technology.
Like, AI is not going to solve that. You know, crypto is not going to solve that. Nothing is going to solve that because we are humans and we haven't evolved that much over thousands and thousands of years.But that also is what makes the problem so fascinating because you can aid pieces of that problem with technology, but fundamentally it's the human part that I think is the hardest, about the change.
Nick Polce: Couldn't agree more. Love that answer. you obviously talk to customers, you know, quite often in your role. What are you seeing as like the major trends or changes in how organizations are pursuing an enterprise agility agenda?
Natalia Baryshikova: One trend that I think has become very, very clear over the past 12 months is that organizations are trying to find their own flavor of safe.
Some folks are completely departing from any frameworks; and then some folks are absolutely hardcore safe, you know, and will always be. But I feel like people really have gotten to a point in time where they really want to invent their own framework sometimes, like for, just for this organization. Or they are demanding more flexibility in terms of how things can get done, with, perhaps support from the tooling.
And I believe that the reason why we're seeing it so much now is because the macroeconomic factors that we all have experienced over the past maybe year and a half have forced organizations to be quicker. Ironically, to be more agile, right? Because if you're trying to change your strategy and quickly convert that into a change in execution and make it fast in the tough conditions of the market – you really, really don't care about what is the framework that you're pursuing.
You have something that arguably may be tactical, but also very strategic because you need to grow that agility muscle and an ability to do it quickly. And if a framework gets in the way of that – well, the framework will go out of the window. And I think that the premise of enterprise agility and I think that the core principles of agility overall are still very much there.
But, I do believe that customers are demanding a whole lot more. In terms of flexibility so that they can go and make that change faster. And that's something that I have not seen before.
Nick Polce: And I imagine the Jira Align product is catering for, you know, those agnostic frameworks or, you know, the bespoke frameworks that are being developed.
Natalia Baryshikova: Yeah, absolutely. And we will double down on this even more because we've always been trying to support our customers and meet them where they're at, right? Because if you're a large,international organization that you will never have all teams. You know…
Nick Polce: …operating the same way.
Natalia Baryshikova: Yeah. Exactly, exactly.
So it's always been…it's always been that. We have a large number of customers that are in the automotive sector, right? So there are organizations out there driving their entire, for example, electric vehicle programs, using Jira Align. And that's like a multi decade program that oftentimes cannot be agiled...
Nick Polce: Yeah.
Natalia Baryshikova:...in a way that, you know some of the Agile principles have been built for. And yet, those organizations, they need to operate. They need to build that software muscle skill. They need to be able to pivot quickly. And,those are the types of problems that are demanding more flexibility and support for that.
So that's something that we, of course, are responding to. But also, I would say we're being proactive about it because we started seeing this early. and so, I'm hoping to delight our customers with quite a few changes that will allow them to do more with less.
Nick Polce: Sounds like good product management practices there.
Natalia Baryshikova: Well, we can only hope, yes.
Nick Polce: Excellent. For those listeners out there that are looking at considering a tool like Jira Align, are there any kind of foundational elements that need to be in place to, you know, give it every chance of succeeding in the enterprise?
Natalia Baryshikova: Sometimes when we answer that question, we say, 'Well, you need to make sure that you have enough scale.' And I've been thinking a lot about that answer, and I tend to believe now that it's not as much about the scale at which point you really need to have a dedicated tool for solving that problem. But more so, the evaluation of how challenging is the problem for you right now in terms of not having something that gives you that visibility of work and ability to pivot more quickly and ability to tie the triangle of people, money, and work - so that your team can make better strategic decisions and executing them faster. It's how painful that problem is for you. Regardless of the size of the organization or the structure of the organization, how agile or non agile you are. It's really about how nascent or mature is that problem for your business and how quickly do you need to solve it.
Because if your pain point is kind of like, okay, you know how, well in the US, you know, in hospitals they use this pain scale. They always ask you on a scale from 0 to 10, like what is
Nick Polce: Right, your pain...
Natalia Baryshikova: Yeah, exactly. And so I would ask, if I were a customer, I would ask myself the same question: On a scale from 0 to 10, what is my pain right now about not having connection between strategy and execution? And if it's something like 3 or 4, don't take that painkiller, right? But, if it gets more problematic for you, then you do want to go and explore the tool to help you with that set of problems.
I also find sometimes that people shy away from thinking about this tool set because they don't like the terms enterprise agility or, like, just agility. As much as I love the Agile community, I don't think that, realistically, these are the words that everybody can relate to. So that's why I think that framing that problem is more of a strategy and execution connection problem and I think asking that sort of questions is much better than thinking about like, 'Oh, do I want to be more agile?' Because then I think that you might be solving a different set of problems that are not necessarily the right problems to solve.
Nick Polce: Fantastic. And I'm sure you've seen a lot of implementations during your time as a chief product officer. What are some of the success patterns you've seen to roll out and implement a tool like Jira Align effectively?
Natalia Baryshikova: There are multiple patterns that I have observed in terms of the size of the implementation, the kind of how you implement the order and sequencing of implementation. One thing that is true about every implementation that I have seen is that people have a good understanding of what they're getting themselves into – especially in terms of that culture change that you were talking about.
Oftentimes you see folks looking at the tool and they're like, 'Yeah, I'm just going to roll it out tomorrow.' And the reason why they can't roll it out tomorrow has nothing to do with technology, but more so that. You know and software engineers and their teams, they look at it and like - What, am I supposed to align how I assign my story points?
Nick Polce: Yeah.
Natalia Baryshikova: What?
Yeah.
Natalia Baryshikova: No. And then just throw the laptop out of the window. So things like that. I'm exaggerating, of course, but just understanding the sheer human complexity of that rollout and, understanding the enterprise landscape and how agile your teams are and kind of how do you want to meet different needs.
That is something that I think is a challenge that most innovations that go poorly run into. And for folks that,do it successfully, they're usually very, very serious about this and they have thought that through.not just on a technology level, but,on the level.
Nick Polce: A human level.
Natalia Baryshikova: On the human level, exactly.
It's like, you know, the Leo TolstoyWar and Peace opening that, you know - All happy families are, you know, happy in a similar way, and each happy family is happy in its own way. So I feel like if things go wrong, you know, they can be quite different; but definitely what makes things go right is thinking through that human aspect of the rollout.
Nick Polce: Obviously very important with an investment in any tooling is the value equation. Can you maybe speak to some of the benefits that, you know, your clients are realizing through the tool like Jira Align?
Natalia Baryshikova: I would say that I really like to not answer this question usually because I want customers to hear from other customers, right?
Because, I definitely have a point of view and I'll share it in a moment. But,one thing that we've created,within our enterprise agility business and for our Jira Align customers is actually, a set of customer forums for America, for EMEA, and we're hoping to do something in Asia Pacific very, very soon as well. But,there's nothing more powerful when people ask that question to each other and, you know, having prospects that are considering this challenge to actually talk to a customer and understand what was, you know, good for them and what are some of the challenges that they that they ran into.
The patterns that I have seen over how people think about proof of value, usually are tied – at least early on in their Agile journey – to figuring out what are some of the recurring streams of value within their organizations. And then measuring that end to end journey of creating something and then getting that something into the hands of their customers or into the world.
And then starting to see the patterns of where might we have some roadblocks? Where might we be wasting time? Versus not spending that time onto something that's more meaningful. And,value stream management I think has definitely been a big talk of the town recently.
So, we recently launched a solution for value stream management where we connected Jira Align with the power of Jira software as well as Atlassian Analytics, Atlassian's data visualization tool. And we also provided our point of view, our opinion about: How can you measure those types of things? Your value streams on different levels of the organization, using Jira Align and Jira software data. And then visualizing them, adding your third party tools, if you wish to have that complete picture of –essentially what drives your business within the organization.
How long does it usually take for something that is an idea – that your sales team provides to you in a certain region – to converting it into something that's being built by your development team? And an old way to shipping and even potentially go to market launch across different regions. So that's part of the connection and representation of connection strategy to execution.
And I find that customers who think about, you know, timelines and how long it takes and other success metrics just around the journey, they usually can get an easy way of showing that value, right? And showing like, hey, we are, you know, investing less time into planning because... And therefore, things are happening faster, and,the reason why I like that so much is oftentimes I see people thinking about cost.
You know, and, you know, I talk to customers and like, what about labor costs? And the great thing about thinking about it more from a business value perspective, you can tie it to the revenue as well. Not only to say we're spending less because, you know, 2023 is not a year where you see, for wants to hear that answer, that you're spending less. They also want to hear we're making more.
Nick Polce: That's right. It's doing more with less at the moment, isn't it?
Natalia Baryshikova: Yeah, exactly. More with less, but also, you know. This is the year where CFO started starting, you know, coming to CTOs and saying like, 'Hey man, I gave you money two years ago. What happened?'
Like how did we use this right? And so not having a good answer to that question or not having a good answer to - okay, how are we going to make more money, improve our margin going forward – I think are quite deadly today. And so helping organizations with answering those questions I think is what works really well for making business cases...
Nick Polce: Yeah…
Natalia Baryshikova: ... but also for seeing value and in a way that you can communicate to the rest of the organization.
Nick Polce: I can see, you know, optimizing that flow of work is, you know, a really clear benefit. I imagine there would be some other ones around visualizing the work and seeing duplicate initiatives across an enterprise or wrong sequencing of work leading to inefficiencies. I'm sure there's a lot more to it than just that, you know, flow optimization.
Natalia Baryshikova: For the duplication work in particular, that's actually one of my favorite use cases for applying Atlassian Intelligence in our world. So the AI that Atlassian launched at Team 23 is... Because we do have this unique position, right, as, as an organization where – because we have so much information about, like, all the work that's happening within your organization – we can also help you find things that may be the same. Yes, it is about visualizing and having that transparency, like you said. But it's also so much more that we can do where you don't really have to go out and look for those duplicative pieces of work where we, as Atlassian, can actually suggest to you that, 'Hey, this looks suspicious because they're kind of the same thing.'
Those things are, you know, they're quick to measure and they have immediate impact saying like, 'Hey, those are the things that are duplicative.' I do find though that when people think about measuring value, they rarely... Maybe yet. I think that you're, you're living in the future. I do...
Nick Polce: Okay.
Natalia Baryshikova: Five years down the line, like finding the duplicates of work and like assigning value to those types of things will be more of a trend. I don't think we're there yet. I think right now it's much more about, you know, time and, um..
Nick Polce: The flow efficiency.
Natalia Baryshikova: Yeah, the flow efficiency, the payout. But I do see early signs about, like more philosophical efficiency.,For example, you know, having Jira help you write your stories, right? Because, again, at Atlassian we really know what is working well for organizations in terms of creation of Jira stories. And can we maybe suggest to people who are new to this how to do it well, right? So those types of things I think have a tremendous potential. And in the enterprise agility world again, can we suggest how you might structure your portfolio, right?
So I think that that's part, that's the part that makes me exceptionally excited to,to leverage more of the enterprise, yeah, and the agility AI technologies. But I think that right now, if I were a customer right now, I would probably still recommend to, think about how do you tie this work that's happening into your revenue
Nick Polce: In your role as head of product, you know, you've spoken to how you're interacting with customers a little bit. can you maybe dive into that a little more and importantly, what are customers and partners telling you about, you know, Jira Align?
Natalia Baryshikova: Actually I was meeting with a customer right before this and I met with three customers here in Sydney yesterday. And it always amazes me how much thinking they do about how to run their organizations.
So it kind of goes back to the point about software being really much more than software in this case. It's being the agent of change but if I were to summarize the trends from just the last few weeks what I've heard recently, it is about the need for greater flexibility, which is something that we talked about.
It is about the need to have a greater connection between that triangle of people, money, and work.To drive the strategic decision making and understand it's about layers of change, but also layers of the change impact. It also is about, the need for, organization wide adoption, because I think that enterprise agility, it only works if you have the entire enterprise buy into it. And, it's kind of like the return on investment in such cases is much greater. But so just talking to customers – how can they advance that, and how is it represented in capabilities are always very interesting conversations.
So, for example, visibility and driving that visibility before you can make more change – it's hugely important. And so that of course reflects on how we think about the roadmap and like the growth of the business. So I talked about, you know, being very excited about artificial intelligence and what it can do for our business.
So you'll see in the world ofJIRA Align and more announcements from us soon,you'll also see us investing a lot more into roadmap capabilities to drive that visibility. As well as flexibility and letting organizations do things their way. That may be framework agnostic somewhat if that is what their preference is.
As well as thinking more about like how do we tie financial data as well as the team data into that decision making process and understanding what is going on within the organization. So those are some of the themes that based on the conversations with the customers that we're listening to and hearing very loud and clear.
And so, this most certainly will be driving a lot of our investment, no pun intended, into the near future of Enterprise Agility and Agile Align.
Nick Polce: Is there anything else on the roadmap in the near future that customers could look out for?
Natalia Baryshikova: I kind of named those capabilities, separately – but in general, we're thinking a lot more about this strategic portfolio management capabilities and what does that mean? Because we're seeing that with that increased need of the organizations and people driving work to be able to have strategic conversations with the executives. And, executives needing to have a lot more visibility, and a lot more tools to support their strategic decision making.
I feel like that is the broader area where you will see us investing a lot more. But then again, it's really tied to, arguably, a growing presence and impact of agility as a business concept in what represents the health of the business today. Because, with the growing data set around all things work, and the tool explosion that we have experienced over the past decade, I think it's getting harder and harder for executives to drive companies – which is ironic, right? Because previously we had a problem with not having enough data.
Now you have a lot of data, but it's all siloed. It's all kind of disconnected, and to be able to ask those simple questions and get simple answers is quite a journey. So I feel like us thinking about that executive leader who needs to make decisions and how do we empower them – but also empower teams that are doing the work is something that's very top of mind. And I think you'll see a lot more, kind of investments into that specific persona from our side.
Nick Polce: Is there anything you want to leave the audience with – any passing words of knowledge or wisdom?
Natalia Baryshikova: I would love the audience to know that Nick actually presented me with a toy wombat, right before we started this podcast, which was absolutely fantastic because I believe that this is the best part of Australia. And I'm immensely grateful to come back home with a stuffed animal. That is absolutely adorable. But,thank you for having me. Hopefully this was an interesting conversation.
Nick Polce: No, thank you, Natalia, for giving up some of your time on a very busy whirlwind tour of Australia. It sounds like you're doing, you know, tremendous work in this enterprise agility space and really living that Atlassian purpose of unleashing the power of every team. So, thank you for your time and,safe travels for the rest of your journey. Enjoy the jacaranda trees tomorrow.
Natalia Baryshikova: Yeah, sounds great. Thank you.
Nick Polce: Awesome. Thank you so much.