Making big things happen

My time at Atlassian came to a close recently, and I want to commemorate it with a personal account of one chapter I loved. Atlassian is a mammoth company, with 500+ designers and a long list of products many people do not even know about. It takes a lot to initiate new ideas in such an environment, especially when the company is 20+ years old, public, and has a lot to lose with quick changes to massive products that paying customers rely on. But I had a great time and ended up living a counterexample to what most people usually crib about: stagnation, risk aversion, and inability to commit to new ideas.

In September 2025, we were well aware of the impending risks and threats from AI to the software industry, Atlassian being one of the most prominent vendors in the SDLC space. What mattered was understanding what our reaction to this threat was going to be, and I absolutely loved what we did. We formed a small group of product and design folks in our Service Collection. ITSM is the market we serve, a massive market around $30B worldwide. Service Collection is the fastest growing Atlassian suite too. We had to show we could react and respond even in an environment full of uncertainty and a rapid expansion of completely new, disruptive technology. Despite the scale of the products and the size of our teams, the part I enjoyed most was that we created space to break the status quo: forming a small team of high agency folks and giving them time, tools, and encouragement to completely reimagine our experiences.

This is not common. I have worked at Google, heard from folks at Microsoft, and spoken to people across a ton of other SaaS companies. Let me tell you: this is not common at all. Putting money where your mouth is, quite literally. We did. Nine people, I think, across our Service Collection, locked in a room for two weeks. Unlimited tokens. Whiteboards, Diet Coke, and food. We were stoked. And stocked too, lol.

It was a great time. Even today, when I look back at those two weeks with the team we called 🦨 Skunk Works, in homage to Lockheed Martin lore and the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich, I remember how tight we grew as a crew. Product and design worked together, forming quick ideas, prototyping them, and using AI to build AI experiences. Magic. We said no to all other meetings. Nothing else mattered. We had to reimagine our products instead of sitting and complaining. High agency.

The Skunks Rahul Dey, Davil O’Sullivan, Dushyant Sharma, James Bryant, and Premanku Chakraborty got to work 💪

What came out of the best two weeks of design, prototyping, and jamming was three prototypes. We were quite happy with how it all turned out. It felt like Atlassian’s best parts, paired with a departure from all the things that had held our experiences and products back, while going fully AI native too. We started an elaborate roadshow after that, beginning with our Service Collection leadership. Very, very strong response. And some feedback. A series of more presentations followed. The best one was what we did for the M&T leadership, as we called it at Atlassian back then: Anu Bharadwaj, Charlie Sutton, Sherif Mansour, and others.

Exceptional leaders. We received incredible support and feedback. The rooms were buzzing.

Things were falling into place. We finally felt like we were onto something substantial and real. You only really get that confidence once your ideas get underpinning from leaders who are tuned into the external industry and the markets a lot more than you are. Now we had that.

Cut to May 2026. TEAM US happened in Anaheim, Los Angeles, Atlassian’s biannual customer conference. I left Atlassian in April, last month, so I was not there in person to attend it. I would have, if I were still there. My teammates who were there were Emily Henlein, Vivek Iyer, Shamik Sharma, Dushyant Sharma, and Divye Bokdia.

We finally launched the Incident Command Center, the single unified incident management and resolution experience we had envisioned all those months ago, out in the open to the world. I heard it got a resounding reaction from customers in attendance too, with a lot of excitement among them. All builders like us could ask for.

We also announced Incident Prevention Center, the earlier half of the product story for my portfolio in Atlassian Service Collection IT Ops: a unified center to visualize change management and the risks associated with it, so you could launch and deploy all your changes safely, with risk mitigation built in too. Basically, this was the second prototype we had made back in the 🦨 Skunk Works days that materialized as well.

Looking back, I am not at Atlassian anymore. I had my reasons to move on and go back to startups. But one thing I feel incredibly grateful for is the leadership support I received throughout my time there. Leadership must have been under incredible pressure at the time since Atlassian stock was taking an absolute beating; there was pressure to rethink our products and whatnot. They took a bet on us, a small group they entrusted to do something that was not only hard, but also vague and unclear in how we’d approach it. I am glad I got a chance to be part of such a special group.

All thanks to my boss, Emily Henlein; the trust of Charlie Sutton; Shamik Sharma’s visionary commitment to lending valuable product management time; and Vivek Iyer’s thought partnership and mind-meld, which were invaluable. All of this made it happen.

You do not get a boss like Emily often in life. Signing up for large product changes and trusting the team to come up with the right solutions is not easy. She backed us every step of the way: “Hardik, let’s do this. Let me know whatever you need.” And when we were done: “Take time off, this was worth it and we’ve earned it.” All we could ask for, honestly.

A special mention to everyone who took this initial vision to the finish line with countless hours of detailing, fine tuning, scoping, and refining. There was a ton of work left, and the team managed it expertly to get it into the CEO keynote at TEAM US. Monisha Pattanaik, Shahee Hiran, Abhinav Gohain, Krati Gupta, Shivi Sivasubramanian, Ashu Vashishtha, Prashant Chauhan, Erkan Kerti, Beylem Cindoglu, Kunal Maithani, Aishwarya Bhardwaj, Shweta Chaudhri, and many, many more. On the product side: Dushyant Sharma, Prithwish Basu, Ganesh Hegde, Abhinay Sinha, Aditya Mani, and many more. Not to forget the effervescent Ugur Turan and Sandeep Ravichandran, who helped lead this from engineering with real expertise. It took more than a village.

I am so glad we got almost all of the 🦨 Skunk Works work out to customers. It’s rare to go from idea → concepts → prototypes → commitment → announcements in just a few months, but thanks to the incredible Service Collection crew, we saw all of this through.

The 🦨 Skunk Works team and the effort were my highlight at Atlassian. It’s incredibly hard to do big things in big companies. But the Skunks made it happen. And I will forever remember that.