Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian

Tanguy Crusson is a long-tenured product leader at Atlassian who has built and shut down several internal zero-to-one bets, including HipChat, Statuspage and Jira Product Discovery. The conversation covers why large companies struggle to incubate new products, the failures and successes behind each bet, and how Atlassian's Point A incubator structure helped Jira Product Discovery succeed.

01Key learnings

• Assume new bets will most likely fail and say so openly, so the wider company doesn't pile on resources and slow the team down.
• Create scarcity and autonomy for new bets so they can move like a startup, shielding them from processes built for mature products.
• Don't assume that what made the core business successful will transfer to a new market; validate the playbook's assumptions early.
• Validate demand before building: a simple waitlist or ad in an existing newsletter can prove interest before any code is written.
• Ignore competitor feature churn and anchor product decisions in watching real customer interviews for the segment you actually serve.
• Give new products a clear 'why now' urgency; without a trigger, great ideas get parked indefinitely.
• Use explicit stage gates (e.g., Wonder, Explore, Make, Impact) with shared vocabulary so stakeholders know what to expect at each step.
• Protect your bet from harming existing customers by limiting exposure to a small Lighthouse Users cohort, growing 10 to 100 to 1,000 before broad release.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.