Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition | Megan Cook (head of product, Jira)

**Megan Cook** (0:00)
What we put into place is something we called Fight Club. We'll probably get in trouble for talking about Fight Club. The first rule is you don't talk about Fight Club. But it's 30 minutes every week, and it's just for myself, my engineering and my design leader, and we get together and we know that we're going in there to have a conflict. I think often when there's difficult conversations or these conflicts come up, you can put them off until they become much bigger, or if somebody is conflict-averse, they can try to avoid having it at all. But by having a specific sort of time in your week for something like that, then you're sort of in that mindset. You know you're going in there to solve a high problem, you know that there's going to be a disagreement and it makes it much better. And I think the relationship we all have is so much better because we get on top of these things early.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:51)
Today, my guest is Megan Cook. Megan is head of product for Jira, which is used by 75% of Fortune 500 companies, 125,000 customers globally, and is by far the most popular project management tool in the world. Megan has been at Atlassian for just under 11 years. Prior to Atlassian, Megan was an analyst, a developer and an agile coach. In our conversation, we discuss what Atlassian has done so right in being able to offer 15 different product lines, which many companies dream of, how they continue to stay ahead of the market in spite of the many competitors in the space, why Megan considers play so essential to building great teams and great products, a bunch of tactical advice for getting buy-in for your ideas, tips for being a successful PM in a remote environment, also great story of failure, and so much more, including surfing tips. With that, I bring you Megan Cook after a short word from our sponsors.
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Megan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Megan Cook** (3:57)
Thanks so much, Lenny. I am a big fan of your podcast and I am excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:02)
I have a lot of things I want to chat about. I've heard about many things that you're extremely good at as a leader, as a product leader. And so I'm just going to poke around a bunch of different areas.
I wanted to start with something that I hear you're just a big advocate of and really good at, which is creating space for play on teams and also just creating a lot of psychological safety, something that you find really important that helps your teams be as successful as they are. Could you just talk about why this is important to you, why creating play and psychological safety are so important to you, and then just how you do this, like maybe an example or two of how you actually apply this on your teams?