7 Key Learnings from Summit 2016 to Boost Your Business
We’ve just returned from Atlassian Summit 2016. It was a busy few days; absorbing the latest from team Atlassian, Dave presenting on improving development speed, meeting customers at our booth, and grabbing a selfie with Reese (above), the winner of our Aussie Survival Pack. From how teams approach backlog grooming to our experience as a new vendor, here’s what we learned from Atlassian Summit 2016:
1. Product Managers Want to Inspire Their Team
Whilst having a product plan with time and work estimates is important, it’s far from inspiring. Product Managers want an easy way to motivate their team on a project — a way to communicate their grand vision for the product. Product Managers who came to our booth loved the way Easy Agile Roadmaps could visually portray the path forward to their team.
2. Smart Teams Use Story Maps to Groom Their Backlog
What’s the best way to organize that ever growing to-do list (aka product backlog)? Run a user story mapping session! We were blown away by the amazing agile teams we spoke to at Summit who utilize story maps to efficiently maintain a high quality product backlog. The new and improved UI of Easy Agile User Story Maps helps Product Managers to conduct more efficient and productive story mapping sessions, and groom the backlog faster.
3. The Customer is the Focus of Every Team — No Exceptions
Everybody has customers — even if you work on internal products or a small feature. Great Product Managers make the customer’s perspective the focus of their team. John Walpole is a highly respected Product Manager at Twitter and in his lightning talk we learned how Twitter uses story maps to ensure their teams keep the customer front of mind.
4. Arijea is Changing How Marketplace Vendors Ship Code
In Dave’s talk, Accelerating Add-on Development from Concept to Launch, he shared the way we approach development at Arijea. Many of you had also seen Dave’s AtlasCamp talk, Developing for Cloud and Server Simultaneously. Thank you to the Marketplace vendors who came to our booth to to share stories of how you’ve used Dave’s approach to successfully deliver to Cloud and Server simultaneously.
5. Face-to-Face Conversations are Priceless
Learning and improving from feedback is at the core of our business. And candid face to face conversations with our customers and partners takes it to the next level. Thank you to everyone who came to our booth to say g’day and chat to us. Here’s the Rentouch team who created a video of Easy Agile User Story Maps on the Rentouch Touchscreen TV while at Summit — amazing!
6. Atlassian is More Global Than Ever
Atlassian partners from around the world are taking our products to an increasingly diverse customer base. Exciting new businesses and industries are using Atlassian products to fill unmet needs. It’s truly an exciting time to be a vendor and we love hearing success stories from across the globe.
7. Thanks Summit. We’ll Be Back.
As a new vendor, we were blown away by the support and camaraderie of the Atlassian community. We are excited for European Summit from 1–2 May 2017. Put the date in your calendar and we’ll see you there!
