1. Measure Up!
Just before I began working at ChannelNet, Inc they had lost one of their biggest “cash cow” clients and they were adjusting their business model and sales techniques to try and bring in new customers. They had also let go a lot of ineffective programmers, and those that were left joined with the new guns (including me) and decided that it was a good time to update our development methodology to Agile. We had all read a great deal about it and knew that along with the speed increases, it would allow us to be in much greater contact with the client during the development process.  We would have a greater ability to show clients what we were building with each milestone. 

As developers though, we were all pretty new to the process of Agile development. We started by transferring our old bug tracking tasks into Agile tasks. Then we started tracking how many tasks we could get done, both individually and as a team, in any given run. Because we had placed more emphasis on the goal of number of tasks finished as a percentage of the overall task total than we did on priority of importance or size and scope, we ended up getting a lot of small tasks done at the beginning and leaving the bigger tasks until the end. Since these took longer and were more important to the general structure of the project, it was obviously bad to delay them, and we learned from this. We did adjust priorities and the nature of how tasks were assigned, but it was a good example of a new measurable changing the focus of those who know they are being measured.

2. Try us out!
Since you asked for it and since I have a background in user experience, I’ll provide my full feedback on the “Buy” process on Atlassian.com:

First thing I notice is that the 3 tabs at the top that switch between the different options of New, Renew and Upgrade are pretty small and might be missed by current customers looking for the renew/upgrade options. I know you want to provide a quick and easy interface that tailors to new sales because new customers are the ones you really want to impress, but I believe this has to be balanced with ease of use for current customers. (Obviously the conversion rates of someone looking to renew or upgrade are the highest, so it’s best to make the lives of current customers as easy as possible. In addition I would look at adding another step before “Select Product” to largely and prominently ask the simple question, “Are you a new or existing customer?”

Secondly, Atlassian has many products which have recognized, but not necessarily intuitive names and iconography. The “Select Product” page is a little overwhelming and to me it doesn’t really work as an additional sales incentive. I would have likely sold myself on the product(s) I need before I got to this page, and I am not encouraged by this page to take advantage of the synergy of signing up for multiple solutions. I would address this by increasing the size of the colored product descriptions to be even larger than the actual names of the products. This way new users who know they need Code Review or a Project Management solution, or a Wiki solution can find those familiar words easily and then associate them with the name of the product. I would also change the selection screen to a multi-select so that the user is adding each piece they need with a simple checkbox. The lengthier configuration process can happen over the course of the next couple of pages.

The rest of the process is great. The third page asks the simple question, “Hosted or Installed” and the other complexities are only revealed after this selection. Pricing is posted right away and straightforward and only the basics of configuration are required with the signup process. The Addons are now obvious on this step and the completion steps of the order are very standard and easy to follow, “standard” being a very good thing when it comes to typing in a credit card number on the Internet.

3. Skillset
a. I know this will sound like a cheesy interview answer, but I think my ability to hover between ‘technical’ and ‘business’  language is one of my greatest strengths. I was always the best developer on my team when it came to understanding the clients’ business needs and consulting with them on best practices and ideas from an engineering and design perspective. In business school I was definitely the most technically proficient of the people I knew, and I found it paid huge dividends when it came to talking to technical entrepreneurs and engineers who were the people actually building the products their business school friends were trying to help them monetize. I’m able to get my hands dirty with understanding the technical nitty-gritty but more importantly I understand how to extract that knowledge and apply it to the market and bring back customer needs and selling points.

Because I’ve lived in both the technical and business side of the development business I have developed the skills to help bridge the communication gap between the two. I can talk technically with developers and translate their knowledge and ideas to those who are better with the details of sales and the market and vice versa.

b. I’ve worked closely with some DBAs so I know that there are people out there who know a heck of a lot more than I about SQL, but I have worked extensively with SQL and written my fair share of Stored Procedures to pull out the data I needed as a developer. I would feel very comfortable sitting down and joining tables.

c. At the end of the day everyone has coded at least a couple of quick hacks. Sometimes they’ll do the job, but a developer always knows just how bad the hack is and how important it is to the overall system. When it comes to making enterprise level software with thousands of end users that has to be maintained by a large team of developers, I think it is more important to create strong, well documented solutions that were planned in advance to specific business needs. 

That being said, I have been part of a development team that put together code late into the night on a Sunday when a website had to go live on a Monday morning, and while we knew the code we were writing was going to need to be readdressed ASAP, it was stable enough to launch and be updated over the following days. The customer and the management were happy, nothing crashed and the splint code on production got us a working site while we wrote something better in the development environment.

4. Scenario
I would start pulling historical sales data which I would use to analyze customer groups. (Atlassian sells many products at many price points to companies big and small, so there are going to be a number of different “types” of average customer.) At this point I would probably go back to the Marketing Manager, tell them what I had found and try to clarify what kind(s) of customers they were really trying to put a value to with this particular request. Then I would build a model with the important parts of revenue, development costs, retention costs, total marketing spend per conversion, etc. Presumably the Marketing Manager will want to come up with actionable items based on this data so I will talk with them to see what specific data points should be called out in the report. Once I had a good structure of all the pieces that go in to customer “value” I would start pulling the relative sales and cost data to create some average revenue figures for each type of customer and some ballpark numbers for how many of each type of customer we have today and how many we have had in the past.

5. Culture
I watched your videos on the company’s values (who doesn’t love those) and the 5 best reasons to work at Atlassian, and I must say it looks like a fantastic environment for products to thrive in. I am very impressed by companies that are open and communicative, and I was very attracted to the social culture of the company. I think this is important because I am a “Get out of your chair and talk to the people who know best” kind of guy when it comes to problem solving, and this works much better when the company actually promotes relationships and conversation between its employees. I like that you have borrowed Google’s 20% time through FedEx Days. Not only has this lead to great product ideas for Google but it lets employees act upon their ideas without having to get explicit approval.

I also genuinely like the products Atlassian creates. I understand what the tools do and the value they create for the customer and that makes contributing to them and understanding the market in which they sell so much easier.

6. It’s all about you!
When I graduated from Notre Dame undergrad in 2002 I was thrilled to work as a web developer and apply my engineering and analytical skills to make simple, elegant solutions. I loved doing it, and because the Dot Com Bubble had just burst I had the unique opportunity to work on a couple of very small teams which worked very closely with the customer. This gave me the opportunity to do a lot of consulting work, not just building a solution to meet the requirements document, but going more in depth by educating myself about the best in class solutions that their competitors were offering and then educating the client on what we saw as the best solutions for their needs. I had a knack for understanding business needs and working with the client to build new ideas that weren’t just what they thought they needed, but were well researched, market leading solutions.

In 2008 I decided to further my interest for the business side of tech and went back to get my MBA at Notre Dame. I studied entrepreneurship, marketing, management, operations, statistics and finance, always with the goal of applying these skills to my background and passion in web based solutions. I think my combined backgroundmakes me an ideal candidate for a Business Analyst role at Atlassian, and I hope that you will strongly consider me for the position. I know that I would work passionately and thoroughly enjoy creating the best products in the market.