Atlassian Focus: Key Insights from Customer Roundtables Shaping Enterprise Strategy

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Hi, everyone!

My name is Sam Ugulava and I’m a Principal Product Manager working on Atlassian Focus. I’m joined by Kimberly Preusse, our team’s Lead Researcher. We both work within Enterprise, Strategy & Planning at Atlassian.

Last week, we announced Atlassian Focus is now generally available as part of the Strategy Collection at Team 25'. This was a huge milestone for our team – one we only achieved because of our close collaboration and partnership with our Enterprise customers. Over the last 9 months, we have worked closely with customers in our early access program while sharing early concepts and gathering feedback in 40+ customer roundtables.

On behalf of our entire team, Kim and I want to take a moment to say thank you to our customers and share some concrete examples of how this feedback has helped shape Atlassian Focus.

1. Defining focus area

Today, it’s clear that focus areas represent an organization’s strategic priorities, but nine months ago, we weren’t really sure how to define or communicate this concept. Together, our customers made us see where the lines blurred and helped us articulate the differences between focus areas, work, goals, teams and funds. This clarity directly influenced our go-to-market messaging, in-product onboarding experience, and helped build focus areas into the Atlassian System of Work in a way that aligns to how our Enterprise customers think about strategy.

2. Enhancing flexibility and integration

We have a strong product principle built into Focus: flexibility at the core, governance through configuration. This principle came out of our learnings from Jira Align, but it was validated by our customer roundtable sessions as we learned just how many tools are used across business units and departments within the same organization, let alone at different Enterprises.

We used this knowledge to build seamless experiences between Focus and other Atlassian tools, like Jira and Jira Align (including the specifics levels of Work hierarchy to connect to strategy), but also to help us prioritize building integrations between Focus and 3rd party tools. Customers also helped us prioritize which non-Atlassian apps we should consider first, like Slack and Microsoft Teams, to drive executive engagement. And this feedback continues to influence our roadmap as we consider brining in additional tools to the System of Work.

3. Permissions & governance

As Atlassian has invested more into the Enterprise, Strategy & Planning space, we have quickly learned how important it is to double down on permissions and governance. While we have already introduced user roles for Admins, Editors and Viewers thanks to customer feedback, we have also gathered requirements, use cases, and increased our knowledge on the need for private focus areas and object-level permissions within focus areas. As we continue to invest in this area, our goal will be to balance simplicity with security, ensuring users can collaborate effectively without compromising privacy. We will continue to address the potential for users with permissions to make large-scale changes by mistake, by adding warnings and interfaces that prevent errors.

4. Pairing qualitative and quantitative data for executive reporting

Customers helped us learn how quickly executive data becomes stale. We saw our customers' eyes light up when we showed them Focus' ability to connect strategy to work, goals, positions and funds data, but also heard them when they stressed the importance of pairing that data with context and storytelling to help their organizations make meaningful strategic decisions. We took this feedback and built places for qualitative explanations throughout Focus – in the focus area Summary, About and Update tabs and via smartlinks.

Looking ahead, we are considering features like draft states and approval flows to foster a more collaborative environment. We’re also considering incorporating comments and tags to facilitate richer interactions and shared understanding. We’ll continue to find more places like structured reports and AI to add in qualitative data as we move forward.

5. Fostering Psychological Safety

Our customers also shared feedback on how to create a more psychologically safe environment in our tools. This has been critical as we help leaders increase the visibility and transparency needed to make the best strategic decisions for their organizations. In response to early designs, we adjusted language and the way we highlight off-track items to shift perceptions away from ‘being in trouble’ towards ‘supporting success,' and we’ll continue to consider ways to promote the psychological safety of our users in Focus.

6. Doubling Down on Key Features

Together, we identified several features that offer significant value to our customers, such as views, trend graphs, summary tiles, tables, and smartlinks. These features are addressing common use cases and answering critical questions posed by leadership. We will continue to explore how we can maximize usefulness through key features in Focus. Check out the Loom smartlink in the example focus area update below:

7. Optimizing Tables

While it may seem simple, tables are one of the most complex features we’ve had to build. Why? We have to balance structure with flexibility as we display connected data inside and outside of focus areas. We spent several weeks of customer roundtables showing early designs, iterating, and gathering feedback on the best way to display data. These sessions helped us build an initial set of tables to display default data with custom column widths, the ability to hide / show columns and to search, sort, and filter data. We quickly learned how critical it is to rollup data and added the ability to show / hide hierarchy.

We are working to make our tables even more flexible, so that you can slice and dice strategic data in all the ways that you need it. These improvements will provide our customers with more powerful tools to manage and analyze data effectively.

8. Streamlining Onboarding

After spending weeks iterating on hierarchies and solving for various operating models, we worked closely with our customers to look back and reflect on the stakeholders needed, types of questions to ask leadership, and strategies that helped us land on a validated data set in Focus.

This feedback has helped us streamline onboarding for new customers. Together, we've developed, iterated, and refined a comprehensive Playbook, a Confluence whiteboard template, and an Onboarding Wizard that has helped new customers get up and running in Focus in less than a week. These resources have been designed to provide a seamless introduction to our platform, ensuring users can quickly map out focus areas and get started using the product. A huge thank you to the customers in our roundtable and EAP for your collaboration on these. You can check out these resources for yourself here.

9. Addressing Bugs and UI Experiences

Our roundtables also helped us make huge strides in improving Focus' UI/UX prior to GA. Many thanks to our EAP customers for spotting and reporting these issues directly in-product!

And please, if you find something that looks off, report it here:

Want to help us design the next great feature?

We are so grateful for our customers that invested their time and efforts to help us build Focus. We are incredibly bullish about this space and excited to continue to work closely with our incredible set of Enterprise customers.

At Atlassian, we’re always running research to hear directly from YOU. We conduct a variety of studies (e.g., 60 minute interviews, surveys, etc) on a large range of topics. If you’re interested in participating in customer research, please consider signing up for the Atlassian Research Group here.