Atlassian reposted this
Tanguy Crusson has spent 10+ years at Atlassian, where he's taken several products from zero to one, including HipChat, Statuspage, and most recently, Jira Product Discovery. In this episode, we dive deep into the struggles and lessons of innovating and building new products inside a large company. Tanguy shares candid stories about what's worked, what hasn't, and everything he's learned about successfully building 0 to 1. We cover: 🔸 Why large companies with so many advantages still fail at creating new products 🔸 How to avoid common pitfalls like competitive myopia and premature scaling 🔸 Lessons learned from acquisitions 🔸 Lessons from competing with Slack 🔸 Insights from the success of Jira Product Discovery 🔸 Tactics for protecting your “ugly babies” 🔸 The power of “lighthouse users” 🔸 The importance of having a “why now” 🔸 So much more Listen now 👇 - YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gr9f4D45 - Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gmiuz944 - Apple: https://lnkd.in/gWGAc5ZX Some key takeaways: 1. “Don’t eat your own bullshit.” When launching new products within companies that have already seen some success, it’s easy to assume that your existing playbooks will work again. But what got you here won’t take you there. You need to define, test, and validate your assumptions, because they may very well be wrong—especially when targeting new customer segments. 2. Startups benefit from starving. Starving creates hunger, which drives people to solve problems with resourcefulness and urgency. When exploring new products in a big company with excessive resources, you need to create scarcity to emulate this startup starvation. This generally means operating as a small, scrappy, siloed team. 3. The most likely outcome when launching a new product is failure—even at big companies that appear to have many advantages. It’s important to ground new product launches in this reality so that you can deter the company from over-investing, which ultimately serves to reduce hunger, slow things down, and decrease the chances of success. After all, why invest heavily in something that’s most likely to fail anyway? 4. Success for new products should be measured differently from existing ones, both in terms of metrics and time horizons. In general, new products should be judged by whether the team is answering the right questions at the right pace and whether the team is still excited about the new bet’s potential. It’s a common mistake to judge new products by metrics that a big company is used to, like MAUs or revenue. However, if a team is optimizing for MAUs or revenue before they’ve worked to understand the problem, they will be working on the wrong things. 5. Atlassian uses a four-phase approach to launching new products and deciding whether to invest in them further: Wonder, Explore, Make, Impact
If you liked the episode, check out the product resulting from Tanguy’s vision! https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/product-discovery
The most crucial takeaway here is understanding the importance of cultivating a startup mindset within a large company to drive new product success. Jim Collins refers to the idea of "productive paranoia"—the constant fear that propels strategy adjustments and innovation. When large companies get too comfortable, they often miss out on breakthrough opportunities because they rely on what worked before. By intentionally creating resource constraints, scrappy teams, and a relentless focus on quick learning and adaptability, even the biggest corporations can recapture that startup hunger. This approach not only fosters creativity but also ensures that failures are quick and inexpensive, ultimately increasing the chances of stumbling upon a winning idea. The secret is to treat new ventures with the urgency and scrappiness of a startup, rather than relying on the safety net of existing successes.
As a business owner, I found this episode with Tanguy Crusson incredibly insightful. His experiences at Atlassian, from HipChat to Jira Product Discovery, offer valuable lessons on product innovation within a large company. The discussion on avoiding pitfalls and fostering a startup mentality is particularly relevant. Highly recommend listening for any entrepreneur or business leader! 🎧
Nice job, Tanguy Crusson! HipChat RIP, an amazing and heartbreaking lesson and experience. The HipChat/Stride/Slack days deserve its own case study for product teams.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to sit on your couch in therapy for 2 hours Lenny Rachitsky - being on your podcast has been an amazing experience so far! ❤️
This episode resonated deeply with me. The Wonder-Explore-Make-Impact approach aligns closely with the Explore-Validate-Realise approach (at least the first 3 of the 4 phases) that I introduced at Telstra Labs. You don't need 8-10 phases to develop new products. Keep it simple!
The legend Tanguy Crusson 😀
Great tips on protecting the "ugly baby" 👽 , or just about any idea in the larger organization, Tanguy Crusson! I was wondering, how did you make sure those 10 lighthouse users are the right ones? I do recruit users for tests and interviews, but I imagine "lighthouse" users should have a more careful selection process, screener or smth. What did you look for in such users, could you share svp? And did they share feedback individually, or you had more like a focus group environment?
Great interview guys. Thanks Tanguy Crusson for sharing that product journeys involve being comfortable with ambiguity, failure, and varying growth velocities. It's great to see French leaders finally acknowledge in public that fail rates are just a part of your listening campaign journey as a PM :)
Founder, CareCal
2wWait what is this a new Lenny background!?