Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery)

**Tanguy Crusson** (0:00)
I've been in the product management team at Atlassian for roughly 10 years now. I worked on HipChat and Stride, and more recently, I started Jira Product Discovery.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:09)
Why is it so hard to start new products, go zero to one with the large companies?

**Tanguy Crusson** (0:13)
The company has a tendency to over-invest. Startups have the benefit of starving, and so you need to create scarcity. What we try to do is remind everyone, things are gonna fail, let's not drag the rest of the company into it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:24)
Sounds like one of the biggest lessons is super silo sort of team.

**Tanguy Crusson** (0:27)
I needed the rest of the company to go away, so we could get the autonomy to test the things that we needed, that is not going to scale, that is not going to respect our design guidelines.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:35)
The biggest challenge I think a lot of companies have is just like, it's been six months, no one wants this, we're gonna kill it. How do you protect that?

**Tanguy Crusson** (0:40)
Be very clear about what we're testing, doing that with data, doing that with personal customer stories. Give people a sense of velocity and speed. No one wants to fight with a high-speed train.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:54)
Today, my guest is Tanguy Crusson. This is a really unique and important episode, because we get into something you don't hear much on podcasts like this. The real talk challenges of trying to innovate and build zero to one at a large company like Atlassian. Tanguy has been at Atlassian for over 10 years and has worked on a bunch of internal big bets, some that have worked and some that have not, including products like HipChat, which I was a huge fan of back in the day, also a product called Statuspage, and most recently, Jira Product Discovery, which is one of the fastest growing products in Atlassian history that Tanguy led from idea to launch. We go through each of these stories and Tanguy shares what went wrong, what went right, and everything that he's learned about creating space for innovation within a larger org, including how they structured their internal incubation program called Point A. There's a ton of gold in this episode and a bunch of really interesting stories, which is part of the reason that it went this long. It's the longest episode I've done yet. If you're looking to create change in your organization and foster more innovation, this episode will be worth your time.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Tanguy Crusson.
Tanguy, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Tanguy Crusson** (2:20)
Thank you very much for welcoming me here, Lenny.
I'm actually super proud to be on this podcast. I've been a huge fan. Whenever I get the chance, I listen to you when I drive somewhere, so yeah.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:30)
What we're going to be talking about in this episode is we're going to be talking about building new products and going zero to one within larger companies.
And in particular, the pain and the challenges that come along with that, but also the lessons that you've learned from doing this many times and seeing it done many times. You've seen a lot of this happening at Atlassian. You've been there for over 10 years at this point. And Atlassian has, I don't know, over a dozen different product lines at this point, something like that. And I know a lot of people come to you asking for advice on how to build zero to one within a large company. So let me just start with a general question of just, could you just share a bit about your history of building zero to one and just seeing zero to one happening within Atlassian?

**Tanguy Crusson** (3:14)
Yeah, so like you said, I've been in the product management team at Atlassian for roughly 10 years now. And I've been working mainly on bootstrapping new things. So it was initially adjoined to start the cloud developer ecosystem. So developers can build apps on top of the Atlassian platform and sell them on the Atlassian marketplace. I worked on HipChat and Stride. HipChat was well known Stride, so we were trying to win the enterprise communications market before Slack and Microsoft teams came about. I did lead a business case to invest more in IT operations, got nowhere with it, then we acquired Statuspage, OpsGini, and something I tried to do which didn't quite get off the ground.