Hot Development @ Atlassian Team '24

tl;dr At Atlassian's Team '24 in Barcelona, we turned user feedback into real features on the fly. Our team, split between the conference and dev hubs across the globe, worked almost 24/7 to implement these fresh customer ideas. Attendees loved engaging with us, suggesting and voting on new features, making it a standout experience.

It hasn't been long since we got back from the Team '24 in Barcelona, and wow, what an experience! Probably the largest Atlassian conference in Europe this year. Our team has attended quite a few conferences around the world. This time, however, we didn’t just present our apps - we dove head first into something we call Hot Development. It’s all about turning user feedback into real features on the fly, and it was definitely a great experience we want to share!

Our squad, in total eight people, was split into two. One part went to Team '24, chatting with attendees and soaking up feedback, while another stayed back, ready to code in hackathon mode. With our dev team spread across the EU and Australia, we even had two time zones covered, keeping the momentum going almost 24/7.

At our booth, we got to showcase our products as usual. At the same time, interested people approached us to provide feedback and, most importantly, to tell us what they are missing in our product. This lead to ideas which were turned into feature requests which in turn were forwarded to the dev team to be implemented.

During our time at the booth, we noticed that customers were particularly excited about our Hot Development activity. Many attendees took the opportunity to suggest new features and even vote on their favorites, highlighting what they believed would enhance their experience. This collaborative feedback process felt like a unique addition to our setup as it kept the attendees engaged while visiting our booth.

A new approach

So, what makes Hot Development hot? It’s our way of cranking out proof-of-concept (PoC) features in real-time. As soon as feedback rolled in, our devs in the EU and Australia jumped on it, turning ideas into reality. It’s this hackathon vibe and the feeling that someone is immediately interested in the result that lets us innovate fast, even with the clock ticking.

Keeping everyone in sync was a bit of a juggling act, but at TNG we have a strong track-record of working effectively in a remote team. Of course, we used Atlassian’s tools on our end. 🙂 The time crunch was real, but having teams in different time zones meant we could keep the ball rolling non-stop.

We were aware that, with a new and untested idea like Hot Development, a lot of things could go south. So we came prepared. For example, have you heard of the fear of the blank page? It comes up when you want to write a text, open your text editor, and get stuck because you don’t know how to start. (This definitely didn’t happen when writing this post😉) To encourage attendees to make suggestions, we prepared a few dummy topics on our board. This way, visitors at our booth would not be faced with the fear of the blank page. To reduce our time-to-market or rather our time-to-presentation, we set our usual high standards aside. These include a refinement, a thorough review process, automatic unit, and end-to-end tests. This is justified as we are planning to roll out a PoC for presentation purposes, not a product ready to go into production.

What are our takeaways?

By the end of Team '24, we had two out of three PoCs ready to be presented, more on them later. On a higher level, we think the whole experience had two major outcomes: Showing that we are able to develop fast and showing that it's quite a lot of fun. On that journey, of course, we gathered lots and lots of learnings. Let’s go through them one by one:

• Time - Imagine doing this at a two-day conference. That by itself already isn’t much for development. Even with the accelerators mentioned above, this is still tight. On top of that, the first feature requests came in halfway through the first day. And we only had the chance to get back to the requesters around the middle of the second day. You see that two days of conference effectively burn down to just 24 hours of development time. During that time, one has to focus!

• Refinement - In our routine Scrum sprint, we hold extensive refinement meetings so that everyone is on the same page and we have a clear understanding of the feature requirements. In the Hot Development scenario, on the other hand, a user pitches an idea to one of our team members. They then shape this into a half-baked ticket which goes to the devs. Taking this journey, there is a good chance that the end result and the original idea will differ. At the same time, it is also fun to have this kind of “sprint review on steroids”. Request something today, see how it turned out tomorrow.

• Backing the right horses - Booth visitors were able to bring in their own ideas and vote on existing ideas by other visitors. This was supposed to give us a rough idea which feature is the most interesting to the users. You can imagine that people get really creative with this. The tricky part is to pick a feature which is both interesting to the audience and at the same time feasible in the limited amount of time. This is by no means easy. Looking back, we were lucky to have finished two out of three features. So we backed the right horses. 🙂

• Requests for integrations - Something we observed a lot were requests like: “Your app is great, it should integrate with XYZ!” While it is very important to know what people are actually using and which integration would make their lives easier, it is probably not the kind of requirement best suited to Hot Development. You see, adding another integration has a very obvious outcome while requiring a lot of development effort. For Hot Development, we would rather aim for the opposite.

• Backlog vs Hot Development - A natural question that arises is whether Hot Development accelerates our overall time output. The honest answer is: No. This is because it is great for ideation and innovation but to keep up with our quality standards, much more work is needed. In the end, you just have some PoCs and all the shortcuts taken to speed up development have to be ironed out before going into production.

So, which nice features came out in the end?

Well, we can definitely say that people were most hyped about our AI app Rock your Sprint Review for Jira. It is an app which lets you generate a full presentation out of your Jira issues in no time. Due to our visitors' wonderful ideas, it will soon be possible to archive your generated slides on your linked Confluence. We will also extend the scope of the app so that it will be possible to use the powerful Jira Query Language (JQL) for filtering your input issues. We cannot wait to have this on the Marketplace.

Conclusion

Hot Development @ Team '24 wasn’t just about showing off our stuff; it was a big chance. A chance for our product owners to witness this hyper-accelerated stream of ideas. A chance for our developers to prove that they can function under severe time pressure. And ultimately, a chance for our visitors who had a unique opportunity to sneak feature requests into our backlog. By connecting with users and leveraging our global team setup, we turned feedback into action in record time. We’re pumped to keep building on these ideas and make our apps even better. Attendees were equally enthusiastic when they saw that some suggestions were being implemented within such a short time frame!

We’d love to hear from you! How do you bring user feedback into your dev process? What do you think about Hot Development? Drop your thoughts in the comments!