Atlassian (internal product: Jira Product Discovery)

Tongi joined Atlassian's product management team roughly 10 years before this interview and spent most of his tenure working on bootstrapping new products and navigating the unique challenges of innovation within a large enterprise. After shipping HipChat and Stride to Slack (a painful exit that taught hard lessons about competitive dynamics and unvalidated assumptions), and shepherding the StatusPage acquisition through organizational integration, Tongi found himself with a clear mandate: focus on understanding what actually works when building zero-to-one products inside a successful company.

When Tongi started working on Jira Product Discovery, he saw a clear problem. Product managers were using Jira to track and execute committed work, but there was no dedicated space for the messy, collaborative process of *deciding* what to build—the prioritization debates that involve product, engineering, design, customer success, sales, and leadership. That pre-commitment phase was happening in scattered threads, emails, and meetings. It was inefficient and disconnected from the core work-management system teams already trusted.

Learning from past failures—particularly HipChat's mistake of building atop new platform abstractions while trying to win market share—Tongi took a radically different approach with Product Discovery. Before writing a single line of code, the team ran a validation experiment. They placed an ad in the Jira newsletter saying, "Hey, we've got something coming for product managers," and built a simple landing page: "Product managers, your job is hard. We want to help. Put your name here if you want to join us on the journey."

Within two weeks, they had **3,000+ signups**. That number validated not just the problem but the ability to reach the audience directly through Jira. The team now had permission to build with conviction, grounded in real evidence rather than assumption.

The product lived inside Atlassian's Point A, an internal incubator program designed to give new bets the breathing room they needed. Instead of being judged by the same metrics as mature products (monthly active users, immediate revenue impact), Point A protected these early bets with different success criteria, different timelines, and explicit permission to fail.

Product Discovery shipped to general availability roughly one year before this interview, having spent 2-3 years in incubation. The distribution strategy was built into the DNA of the product: it lived inside Jira and could reach all 300,000+ of Atlassian's customers who were already managing their work there. There was no need for a separate go-to-market campaign or acquisition channel. The product reached its users through the tool they already loved.

This was the opposite of HipChat's strategy, where the team had bet that bottom-up adoption from developers would naturally expand into business teams. With Product Discovery, Tongi and the team directly spoke to and listened to product managers—their core user—and built specifically for their workflow. No assumptions. No trying to boil the ocean.

What worked was **validating before building**. The waitlist converted skepticism into certainty. It proved the problem was real and the audience was reachable. It gave the team data to show leadership and organizational stakeholders that this wasn't a guess.

What worked was **isolation and autonomy**. Point A, the incubator, protected the product from the same metrics and processes that would have choked it in its first two years. New products shouldn't be measured like mature ones. Different stages of life need different rules.

What worked was **leveraging existing distribution thoughtfully**. Instead of trying to build a platform or solve adjacent problems, the team built a tight, focused product for product managers and shipped it where product managers already were: inside Jira. This was a lesson hard-earned from StatusPage's integration struggles and HipChat's over-engineering.

What didn't work in Tongi's *other* bets was **building on unvalidated assumptions**. HipChat assumed that the developer-first adoption playbook would work for enterprise communications. It didn't account for Slack's focus on business users and delightful UX. StatusPage's integration into Atlassian taught that acquisitions are about people and culture, not just product fit—and that rebuilding a successful product mid-flight, while trying to rewrite the platform it runs on, is a recipe for disaster.

Jira Product Discovery is one of Atlassian's fastest-growing products. It launched to general availability about a year before this interview, having proven itself as a meaningful new entry in the product management software category. The product is used by product managers at companies of all sizes—from the startups and small businesses Atlassian serves to enterprises.

For Tongi, it's vindication. His track record at Atlassian had been 50-50 (success to failure), but Product Discovery is a clear win. More importantly, it's a blueprint. It shows that inside a large company, with existing distribution, mature infrastructure, and deep customer relationships, it *is* possible to build something new and make it fly—if you respect the constraints, validate early, protect the team's autonomy, and remember that unvalidated assumptions are the enemy of innovation, no matter how successful your company has been in the past.